The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [47]
He awoke to the sound of retching.
Leaning over the side of his hammock, Vaughan saw ink stains of black vomit on the man’s face, clothing and blankets. He sprang out of the hammock and ran into the camp.
“Come, doctor, we have a case of yellow fever,” Vaughan shouted at Dr. Guitéras, the well-known yellow fever expert and professor who had served on the 1879 Yellow Fever Commission.
They did what they could for the fever patient, then quickly set out to find a site for a yellow fever hospital, far from the other sick wards. Their haste was critical in the case of a yellow fever outbreak.
Guitéras and Vaughan rode a handcar up the mountain railroad east of Siboney. The place they chose was more than a hundred feet above sea level along the northern slope of the mountain range overlooking a huge valley and the Sierras beyond. For reasons unknown to them, high ground seemed the best place to treat and prevent the spread of yellow fever. Tents and supplies were set up immediately, and before nightfall, there were already three patients in the new hospital.
General Shafter wrote to Washington, “There are now three cases of yellow fever at Siboney, in Michigan regiment, and if it gets started no one knows where it will stop.” That number grew to thirty the next day, then hundreds. By the end of the epidemic, close to fourteen hundred cases would be seen in the makeshift hospital overlooking a valley of royal palm trees and mountain peaks; the village of Siboney would be evacuated and burned to the ground.
The epidemic presented another problem: American soldiers could not return home until the fever could be contained. Instead they waited, like men anticipating execution, as yellow jack moved through the troops. One all-black regiment was ordered to Siboney to care for the fever patients; by the time they left, they had lost one-third of their men. Yellow fever quarantine camps had been set up in New England to accommodate returning soldiers, but a handful of senators from that area called the war department with objections. It was decided to keep the soldiers in Cuba until they could be certain yellow fever could be controlled. Even letters out of Santiago had to be thoroughly fumigated in the U.S. before delivery.
In what would be known as the “Round Robin” letter, General W. R. Shafter and Colonel Theodore Roosevelt devised a plan to write a letter signed by the officers under Shafter’s command that would be leaked to the press to force public opinion. Public pressure would surely drive McKinley to bring his troops home rather than leave them to the ravages of yellow fever. Although typhoid and dysentery had been far more damaging to the troops, the officers feared the onset of the fever season would be disastrous for the already sickly troops. “All of us are certain,” wrote Roosevelt, “that as soon as the authorities at Washington fully appreciate the condition of the army, we shall be sent home. If we are kept here it will in all human possibility mean an appalling disaster, for the surgeons here estimate that over half the army, if kept here during the sickly season, will die.”
Roosevelt’s letter as well as the Round Robin letter signed by Roosevelt and Shafter’s other officers were given to a reporter from the Associated Press. The plan worked beautifully, and the next day, the New York Times headlines blared: “War Department Spurred to Activity by News from Santiago: Col. Roosevelt Declares 90 Per Cent of the Army Is Incapacitated and That Men Will Die Like Sheep If Left in Cuba.”
The situation had been gravely misrepresented from the beginning. Shafter had neglected to give accurate reports to Surgeon General George Sternberg and Secretary of War Russell Alger. Most likely, Shafter was fearful of news of sick soldiers spreading to the Spanish; but he also