Fever In the Valley

THE OVERLOOK

By Tom Clavin

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          Though politics is dominating the headlines, there have also been increasing reports of West Nile virus, bird flu, the persistence of Covid, and flare-ups of other contagious diseases. And there is the concern that we’re not prepared for another pandemic. It seems like the perfect time to write about an outbreak that claimed its first of many residents of Memphis – the ground zero of a virulent epidemic -- 146 years ago this week.

There were comparatively few cases of yellow fever during the Civil War. Peacetime brought a boom of trade as improved rail service and shipping allowed people and goods — as well as disease — to travel easily. By 1878, conditions were ripe for a powerful epidemic of yellow fever in the Mississippi Valley.

The beginning of the year hinted at trouble because yellow fever cases were high in the Caribbean, Cuba especially. There, thousands of refugees fled the island after the end of a war of independence from Spain. Many came to New Orleans. On April 26, President Rutherford B. Hayes signed the Quarantine Act of 1878 into law, giving the Marine Hospital Service responsibility to stop disease from coming ashore via sailors from ships.

Attempting to stop the disease from entering New Orleans, a quarantine station on the Mississippi River south of the city inspected incoming ships. The Emily B. Souder arrived there in late May. One ill sailor, diagnosed with malaria, was removed from the ship. The ship was fumigated and cleared to dock in New Orleans. The night the ship docked, a crew member fell sick and died; another died four days later. When the Souder left to return to Havana, another ship, the Charles B. Woods, arrived. Within six weeks every member of the families of the ship’s captain and engineer had contracted yellow fever. They recovered, but a four-year-old girl living in the same neighborhood died in July — the first official fatality from yellow fever recorded that year in New Orleans.

The news that yellow fever had again hit New Orleans drove one-fifth of the city's population to evacuate, leaving streets and businesses barren. "Only our mosquitoes keep up the hum of industry," reported The New Orleans Picayune. Physicians who cared for victims watched helplessly as their patients died. Treatments with bloodlettings, carbolic acid, and doses of quinine proved useless. The state board of health declared an epidemic on August 10, after 431 reported cases and 118 deaths.

But the epidemic was not contained to New Orleans. On July 27, a towboat dropped two crew members with yellow fever in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Another infected crew member died on the boat that night. In August, 100 cases of yellow fever were reported in Grenada, Mississippi, about 100 miles south of Memphis.

In response to the spreading epidemic, the mayor of Memphis on July 28 ha imposed a quarantine, which blocked railroad lines. Local businessmen threatened a lawsuit unless the city released a train of goods from New Orleans. City leaders allowed the shipments to enter. In early August, a steamboat crew member who had avoided the quarantine died in a Memphis hospital. On August 13, a local resident, Kate Bionda, who operated a food stand near the riverfront, died from yellow fever.

As in New Orleans, Memphis residents fled when they heard the news, an estimated 25,000 to 27,000 out of 47,000, traveling to rural areas or north and east away from the river. While some places accommodated them, others established "shotgun barricades," with armed men ensuring that no one would enter their towns. The disease would travel with fleeing refugees as far away as Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio.

Those who remained in Memphis relied on volunteers from religious organizations to tend to the sick. There were plenty of them, with an average of 200 people dying per day. Many of the city’s doctors died too. The madam of a local brothel, Annie Cook, helped out by converting her place of business to a hospital, where she nursed the stricken. She died from the disease in September. By the end of the year, more than 5,000 were confirmed dead in Memphis.

The entire Mississippi Valley experienced 120,000 cases of yellow fever, with 20,000 deaths.

In New Orleans, the city's Medical and Surgical Association argued for improved drainage and sanitary measures to quell future yellow fever outbreaks. Such efforts, though they were undertaken to eliminate germs, helped to remove the breeding grounds for mosquitoes, and New Orleans never again experienced the scope of the 1878 epidemic.

The $15 million in losses caused by the epidemic bankrupted the city of Memphis. A silver lining to this tragedy was the federal government convened a commission to investigate the outbreak and established the National Board of Health in 1879. In a report to Congress shortly before the national agency was created, John Woodworth, the Marine Hospital Service surgeon general, emphasized the gravity of the situation: "Yellow fever should be dealt with as an enemy which imperils life and cripples commerce and industry. To no other great nation of the earth is yellow fever so calamitous as to the United States of America."

That wasn’t quite true, but conditions improved considerably, and in the U.S. yellow fever outbreaks became few and far between.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The trade paperback edition of The Last Outlaws is being released next week. Please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com to purchase a copy.