The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [6]
The 1878 yellow fever epidemic, the worst in history, started with the rains in West Africa. February, the wet season, arrived, the mosquitoes hatched, the monkeys grew ill, the loggers stared up at the silent tree canopy. This time, the ships moored off the coast would not carry slaves across the Atlantic; they would carry ivory, gold, copper, salt—and mosquitoes.
But this year would be different for two reasons: Nature had afforded the virus with the perfect environment. An El Niño cycle turned the American South that winter into a tropical region with warm temperatures and rainfall 150 percent above normal. Insects, usually deterred by the winter freeze, proliferated. The significance of the weather phenomenon meant nothing to nineteenth-century observers, but 100 years later, scientists would link El Niño to most major outbreaks of yellow fever. As southerners cut hyacinth blooms in January and waded through waterlogged streets, they complained about the number of mosquitoes beginning to swarm.
American progress was the virus’s other ally. A great influx of immigrants—Irish, German, eastern European—had been migrating south since the Civil War. Just like the white Europeans descending upon Nigeria and other parts of West Africa, they served as fuel for a fever fire, a fresh source of nonimmune blood for the virus.
Transportation had paved the way for these immigrants. Trains connected every corner of America for the first time—east to west, north to south. And paddleboats and steamers snaked their way north from the Gulf of Mexico up the Mississippi River. At the center of this web sat a city 400 miles inland from the Gulf, ready to take its place as one of the largest, most successful cities in the South.
Memphis, Tennessee, was poised for greatness in 1878. By the end of that year, it would suffer losses greater than the Chicago fire, San Francisco earthquake and Johnstown flood combined. The devastation to the Mississippi Valley would cost over $350 million by today’s standards. And the U.S. government would create the National Board of Health, which would report: “To no other great nation of the earth is yellow fever so calamitous as to the United States of America.”
As the southwest monsoon pelted the Niger Delta in February 1878, hatching mosquito eggs and giving birth to a virus, people on the other side of the world could not have known what awaited them. In Memphis, Tennessee, their attention was turned not toward disease or death, but just the opposite: a carnival.
PART TWO
Memphis, 1878
And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death.
He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one
dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their
revel.
—EDGAR ALLAN POE, “The Masque of the Red Death”
CHAPTER 1
Carnival
The bell sounded.
A servant wearing a white jacket, with all the trimmings of formality, stood outside the door, a gilded envelope in his gloved hand. It was the most coveted invitation of the year.
The envelope was exquisite, large and square, with golden calligraphy. Inside, it took the shape of a scroll on powder-blue parchment with a regal crown framing the top where CARNIVAL: MEMPHIS MARDI GRAS was engraved. Fanning out of an Egyptian pyramid, the secret order of the Memphi and Ulks invited you and your household to attend his pageants March 4 and 5, 1878.
Over 10,000 people would answer this invitation to Memphis including, one year, the president of the United States. As many as 40,000 revelers would stand shoulder to shoulder along the downtown streets of Memphis. Harper’s would reserve front-page coverage, sending their best illustrator. The glitter and glamour of the event was known across the country, and it was widely whispered that New Orleans had sent scouts to Memphis to study the