Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [66]
The St. Louis fire became famous around the world. It wouldn’t be displaced in the public consciousness till the great fire in Chicago two decades later. It led to the formation of professional fire departments in cities across America, and it inspired ordinances throughout the river valley requiring all new buildings to be constructed of brick or stone. St. Louis itself passed the first such ordinance, and the city began its transformation into the monstrous hulk of sooty red brick that it had become by the end of the century.
Even the most gracious and beautiful towns on the river, one writer observed, showed “to much the greatest advantage at a distance.” No traveler enjoyed the experience of a river town close up. They were notoriously squalid. They had no indoor plumbing; people simply emptied their night soil into the alleys and waited for a rainstorm or a flood to wash it away. In summer the stench and the swarms of flies were unendurable, and it was said that you couldn’t walk a few feet down any block without treading on the putrid corpse of a dog or a pig half buried in the mud of the unpaved streets.
The concept of public health was still in embryo. Most communities on the river had nothing more than a few ordinances concerning cleanliness, and these were usually about the selling of tainted food. But even these were useless, because the origin of food contamination was almost always unknown. In the 1810s and 1820s, a mysterious illness killed thousands of people in the central valley (one of those who died was Abraham Lincoln’s mother): it was known by a variety of vivid names, including the shakes, the slows, and puke fever. But it was most often called the milk sick, because it was believed to be caused by tainted cow’s milk. People blamed the taint on the bite of a (nonexistent) insect known as the milk-sick fly; another theory was that the cows were poisoning themselves by licking the dew off the meadow grasses (everybody knew that dew was poisonous). In fact, the cows were being poisoned by eating white snakeroot, which grew abundantly in the meadows of the central valley. Although this was discovered independently several times, decades passed before farmers learned to weed out white snakeroot from their pasturage—and in the meantime, they were still selling the milk to the river merchants, who were carrying it as far downriver from the areas of known infection as they could before putting it up for resale.
That was another source of resentment between the river and the towns: the river traffic scattered diseases everywhere just as casually as it dispersed counterfeit money. All the conditions of the valley—the squalor and overcrowding of the towns, the absence of basic sanitation, the ignorance of fundamental principles of medicine (particularly antisepsis), and, most of all, the free movement up and down the river of the steamboats—made the river the perfect environment for the rapid spread of disease. The Unitarian minister Theodore Clapp wrote in his memoirs that in his thirty-five years in the river valley, he lived through twenty major epidemics.
The outbreaks came in great recurring waves: smallpox, diphtheria, measles, mumps, influenza, malaria, typhus. Several other diseases showed up only once, killed thousands of people, and disappeared without a trace—some leaving names behind, but no real clue as to what they were. People were reported to have died of dew poisoning, ground itch, woods fever, dog fever, locked bowels, the summer complaint, and congestion of the brain.
These epidemics were the ceaseless subject of conversation everywhere on the river—particularly in the hot weather, when outbreaks tended to be at their worst. The talk was always of what towns were afflicted with something new and terrifying, and of where there were sudden quarantines, and of which were enforced by armed committees.