Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [68]
Cholera is transmitted by the fluids expelled by an infected person and can be contracted from clothes, sheets, raw foods, and drinking water. None of this was known until much later—but, as with yellow jack, people did obscurely sense the connections. It can be seen in this urgent public health warning posted at the height of the outbreak:
BE TEMPERATE IN EATING AND DRINKING! Avoid Raw Vegetables and Unripe Fruit! Abstain from COLD WATER, when heated, and above all from Ardent Spirits, and if habit have rendered them indispensable, take much less than usual. SLEEP AND CLOTHE WARM! DO NOT SIT OR SLEEP IN A DRAUGHT OF AIR! AVOID GETTING WET!
By late spring, the epidemic had spread down the East Coast and was beginning to show up in the American interior. There was a particularly bad outbreak among Irish immigrants crossing the Great Lakes on packet steamboats bound for Indiana and Ohio. A few weeks later, some of those same steamboats were requisitioned by the federal government for a military convoy: thirteen hundred troops were on their way to Illinois to put down a fierce resistance movement that had sprung up among the Native American nations along the Mississippi. (The fighting became known, after the resistance leader, as the Black Hawk War.) Conditions on board were suffocatingly close and casually filthy. The steamboats hadn’t been cleaned since the cholera outbreak—nobody had a clue that this mattered. By the time the convoy crossed into Lake Michigan, there was a full-blown epidemic.
The military commanders of the convoy understood the rudiments of quarantine. They ordered the pilots to keep the boats in the deep waters, and when they came into port, there were armed guards posted to make sure the soldiers remained belowdecks. But the boats also had to make frequent stops to refuel at the wood yards along the Lake Michigan shore. Every time the boats got anywhere near the beaches, the soldiers began jumping overboard. Once they were on land, it was only a few steps until they were hidden within the dense forests that grew down to the shoreline. Few of them were ever recaptured. Meanwhile, the death toll was rising on board, and the bodies weren’t being quarantined; they were simply thrown into the lake, and they were washing up onto the beaches all the rest of that summer.
By the time the convoy reached Fort Dearborn, on the western shore of Lake Michigan, the expeditionary force had been obliterated. Of the thirteen hundred troops, only two hundred were still fit for combat. The rest were sick or had died or jumped ship. The surviving force was kept in quarantine and never saw any action in the Black Hawk War. The commanders’ one consolation was that they had prevented the epidemic from reaching the river valley.
The rest of that summer, there were no reports of outbreaks anywhere in the western Great Lakes. In fact the cholera was simply out of sight; it had been carried inland by the deserters and by the infected corpses washed ashore. But the new cases were still confined to remote and isolated fishing communities deep in the wilderness country. Whole villages could be wiped out and it would be months before the outside world even noticed.
Then that autumn, cholera erupted down the length of the Mississippi. In the first few weeks of the outbreak, tens of thousands of people died—orders of magnitude greater than the casualties of the Black Hawk War. Quarantines were set up, and sometimes violently enforced, all the way to the delta. But they were useless. At the first signs of infection, people bolted. Thousands scattered from St. Louis when the epidemic reached it; many of them were already infected, and the ones who fled up the Missouri brought cholera into the Great Plains. (The following year, it spread beyond the Rockies and into the Pacific Northwest.) Those escaping downriver carried it to New Orleans. Within days, the city had turned into a ghost town. All