The Time SF Tried to Deny it Had the Bubonic Plague
In 1900, San Francisco was a city clawing its way into the 20th century—booming with industry, dripping in gold rush mythos, and proudly believing it had left the unsanitary chaos of its rougher past behind. The streets bustled with cable cars, merchants, and swagger. But underfoot, in the forgotten crawlspaces of waterfront warehouses and the damp floorboards of crowded boarding houses, something ancient had hitched a ride. The Black Death—the same bacterium that decimated Europe in the 1300s—had arrived on a rat-infested steamer from Hong Kong.
No one wanted to believe it. Least of all Governor Henry Gage, who saw the plague not as a public health threat, but as a potential PR disaster for the state’s image and its economy. When the first case was confirmed in March 1900—a Chinese immigrant named Wong Chut King found dead in a lodging house in Chinatown—Gage immediately went to war, not against the disease, but against the doctors diagnosing it (Risse, 2012). He accused federal health officials of concocting the plague to punish California for being independent. He refused to publish reports. He leaned hard into denial.
Meanwhile, in the city’s dense and poorly ventilated Chinatown, fear was settling in. Not the fear of plague, initially—but of the white officials who showed up with axes and gas canisters. Barbed wire fences were thrown up. Armed guards patrolled the perimeter. Chinese residents—already demonized under the Chinese Exclusion Act—were detained, forcibly examined, and their homes fumigated with corrosive chemicals. White San Franciscans who happened to live or work in the same neighborhood were quietly let out through the back (Shah, 2001).
The doctor at the center of the federal response was Joseph J. Kinyoun, head of the Marine Hospital Service in San Francisco. A germ-theory believer and bacteriology enthusiast, he confirmed the presence of Yersinia pestis, the plague bacterium, in tissue samples from the first victim (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2013). But thanks to Gage’s opposition and newspapers eager to downplay the “Chinese disease” for the sake of commerce, Kinyoun found himself cast as a villain. A satirical editorial in The San Francisco Chronicle dubbed him “Kinyoun Khan,” painting him as an authoritarian menace. The governor even tried to have him criminally charged for “scaring the public.”
But the plague didn’t care about spin. Between 1900 and 1904, over 100 people died—almost all of them in Chinatown. Rats were a known vector by then, but no one had the stomach to say out loud what that really meant: the disease could easily spread across class and race lines. For years, it didn’t—thanks largely to the efforts of the Chinatown community itself. The Chinese Six Companies, a coalition of merchants and leaders, sued the city for constitutional violations, and won. Public pressure eventually forced the city to ease the most egregious forms of quarantine, though the stigma lingered. Vaccination efforts, initially proposed by health authorities, failed after they prioritized untested and painful treatments—administered disproportionately to Chinese residents (Shah, 2001).
The tide began to turn in 1902, when Governor Gage left office and was replaced by Dr. George Pardee, a physician who believed in science more than spin. Pardee quietly coordinated with federal health officials while telling the public what they wanted to hear. The new public health campaign, led by Dr. Rupert Blue, focused not on mass fumigation or forced quarantines, but on rat control and sanitation. Posters went up. Rats were trapped, tracked, dissected. Streets were cleaned. Boarding houses were inspected for filth, not just foreigners.
By 1904, the plague was declared under control. In total, 119 people had died, nearly all of them in the same few square blocks of Chinatown (CDC, 2013). But the silence that followed wasn’t just relief—it was embarrassment. San Francisco’s elite worked hard to bury the story, and it remained a strange, almost forgotten footnote in the city’s history.
Until 1907, when the plague came back.
That second outbreak—bigger, more widespread, and less deniable—would hit all over the city, including white, affluent neighborhoods. This time, the city acted fast, rat-proofing homes and launching one of the first modern public health campaigns in American history. It was a belated admission that diseases, like ideas, don’t respect borders or class distinctions.
Today, the 1900 San Francisco plague outbreak feels strangely resonant. The politics of denial, the scapegoating of immigrant communities, the tug-of-war between public health and commerce—it all echoes. But so does something else: the quiet resistance of communities that took care of themselves when no one else would. Chinatown’s leaders sued, spoke out, organized. Public health workers like Kinyoun and Rupert Blue kept doing their jobs under political fire. And eventually, the truth outlived the lie.
History loves to remember San Francisco’s weird: its emperors and earthquakes, its acid tests and beatniks. But there was also the time it caught the plague, and instead of owning it, tried to pretend it was someone else’s problem. It wasn’t. It never is.
References
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2013). San Francisco plague outbreak 1900–1904. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/plague/history/sanfrancisco/index.html
Risse, G. B. (2012). Plague, fear, and politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Shah, N. (2001). Contagious divides: Epidemics and race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. University of California Press.
Wikimedia Commons. (1900). Chinatown quarantine, San Francisco. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SF_Chinatown_quarantine_1900.jpg
National Institutes of Health. (n.d.). Joseph James Kinyoun, M.D. Retrieved from https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/nih-almanac/joseph-james-kinyoun-md
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