Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [67]
At Cairo, the old established firm of Fever & Ague is still settling up its unfinished business; that Creole grave-digger, Yellow Jack—his hand at the mattock and spade has not lost its cunning; while Don Saturninus Typhus, taking his constitutional with Death, Calvin Edson and three undertakers, in the morass, snuffs up the mephitic breeze with zest.
Calvin Edson was a kind of performance artist, a man with a mysterious wasting disease who toured the country as the Living Skeleton. That made him a natural associate for this sinister crew: fever and ague (usually seen together), typhus (“Don” because it was believed to have originated in Spain; “Saturninus” because infected people were known for their air of sluggish gloom), and, perhaps the most ominous figure of all, “Yellow Jack.”
Yellow jack is what the river people called yellow fever. It was consistently the most dreaded disease in the valley. It was endemic in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico—which is why Melville described it as “Creole”—and it tended to ebb and flow up the river valley according to how hot and wet the summers were and how far north the mosquitoes that carried it were hatching. People didn’t know that yellow jack was connected to the mosquitoes (that wouldn’t be established until the twentieth century), but they did somehow sense it. In many towns, there were pioneering public health campaigns to drain all stagnant ponds and pools during yellow fever outbreaks. Their reasoning was faulty, since they believed that night mist from the pools was the cause of the disease, but the impulse was right, because the mosquitoes were breeding in the standing water. There was also a widespread custom of warding off yellow jack by taking a big jolt of rye whiskey just before bedtime. This was sometimes called a mosquito dose because it was thought, or hoped, to prevent mosquito bites.
The other epidemics came and went, disappeared and then roared back after decades of quiescence out of some forgotten river pesthole; new diseases like cholera burst out of nowhere and panicked the entire river valley; yellow jack remained. People never failed to regard it with dread. Of all the plagues that visited them, Theodore Clapp wrote, “there is none more shocking and repulsive to the beholder.” He cataloged the signs of yellow jack at its peak: not only its unmistakable black vomit from blood in the lungs, but “profuse hemorrhages from the mouth, nose, ears, eyes, and even the toes; the eyes prominent, glistening, yellow, and staring; the face discolored with orange color and dusky red.” Then there was the sight of a yellow jack corpse, which Clapp grew to know intimately. The expression on the face was “sad, sullen, and perturbed”; the skin was “dark, mottled, livid, swollen, and stained with blood and black vomit”; and even after death “the veins of the face and whole body become distended, and look as if they were going to burst.”
The river people would fly flags to warn off other boats during epidemics: red was a general announcement of a quarantine, yellow meant yellow jack. Sometimes a steamboat would come around a bend and find that the town ahead was flying yellow flags from every church steeple and rooftop and sheets of yellow were fluttering from the warehouse windows along the now-deserted levee. In the boat cities, everyone was constantly scrutinizing strangers for the telltale early signs—the yellow skin and eyes, the hint of a nosebleed or a drop of red brimming from an eyelid. Every encounter was a tense standoff when Old Yellow Jack was abroad on the river.
Nobody had heard of cholera in North America before 1832, when there was an outbreak in Montreal. It was a terrifying plague even for a population used to plagues: extraordinarily contagious, it had a high fatality rate and progressed through the body with stunning rapidity. People in perfect health at noon could be torn apart by convulsive and violent diarrhea