Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [69]
The epidemic rapidly overwhelmed New Orleans’s frail infrastructure of public health. Hospitals were packed; one hospital was found abandoned by its staff, with every bed occupied by a bloated and putrid corpse. (By order of the mayor, the bodies were carried out to a yard next to the hospital grounds and burned.) The scenes at the cemeteries were chaotic. People were simply bringing in their dead and leaving them without ceremony, uncoffined, to await disposal. “Words cannot describe my sensations,” Clapp wrote, “when I first beheld the awful sight of carts driven to the graveyard, and there upturned, and their contents discharged as so many loads of lumber or offal, without a single mark of mourning or respect.” At one cemetery he found that the bodies were being stacked up in layers, “like corded wood.” Periodically, whenever there were around a hundred bodies in the pile, a work crew would shovel them into a trench and cover them over with dirt, and start a new pile.
The city officials of New Orleans did have an emergency plan to halt the epidemic: it was to attempt to purify the atmosphere of its poisonous vapors. To accomplish this task, they positioned big barrels of tar and pitch on the street corners and set them ablaze. They also ordered the military to fire off cannon around the city at steady intervals—this would, they believed, disperse the worst of the river fog (which was thought to be particularly deadly). The sparks from the burning barrels set off major fires throughout the city; the noise of the cannon, Clapp observed, was so nerve-shattering that he suspected many people were dying of sheer fright.
Clapp himself wandered the streets nightly, visiting hospitals and sick houses. By then the epidemic had spread to every quarter of the city: the shanty districts were the hardest hit, as ever, but soon even the richest mansion districts were in mourning. “Many persons,” Clapp wrote, “of fortune and popularity, died in their beds without aid, unnoticed and unknown, and lay there for days unburied. In almost every house might be seen the sick, the dying, and the dead, in the same room.” Meanwhile, the city had taken on a hellish splendor at night. The skyline was silhouetted by the endless flickerings of the artillery fire, and from every direction came thunderings and rumblings as though from dozens of battlegrounds. The barrels of tar were burning at the intersections; along the levee, so many phalanxes of barrels were on fire that the river and the low-hanging clouds were lit up bright as day. The glare of the fires flooded the endless rows of windows along the streets. Within, Clapp wrote, “could be seen persons struggling in death, and rigid, blackened corpses, awaiting the arrival of some cart or hearse, as soon as dawn appeared, to transport them to their final resting place.”
It might have been the end of the world—except, of course, that it wasn’t. It was just another epidemic. As the bodies went on accumulating through the nightmarish days of that autumn and winter, the living had no choice but to resume their business. The river traffic kept arriving. The big ships came in daily from the Balize. Gradually, unobtrusively, the cemeteries caught up with the backlog of corpses. And then in the spring everyone was suddenly worried about outbreaks of measles along the Gulf Coast, and by the next summer Old Yellow Jack was on the move again.
The terror receded, but it never went away. Cholera remained endemic on the river and flared up again spectacularly several more times. New Orleans saw an even worse outbreak in 1853, and another in 1866. But by then they were taken as normal, part of the expected routine of