Calhoun County, Texas Epidemics

The yellow hand of death - 1854
Bright as a quarantine flag, the dread name "yellow fever" flashed twice in Corpus Christi's history. It struck in 1854 and again in 1867, both times decimating the town and leaving it dressed in black.
       Sailors called it yellow jack. It was a viral, often fatal, disease that caused vomiting and jaundice and destroyed the liver. In Mexico, they called it "vomito." People thought it came from swamp vapors because it thrived in low, tropical areas.
       Corpus Christi in 1854 was a new town, incorporated two years before. One hot July day, a Mexican vessel loaded with fresh fruit docked at the wharf. The vessel's arrival was an occasion in the monotony of life in a small town. The ship stayed a week; people came to buy lemons, limes, bananas and pineapples, a real treat then.
       The ship brought something besides fruit. It brought the "vomito." The entire town became a fever ward. Those stricken were easy to spot. They had red eyes, yellow skin, they coughed and retched a lot, and their vomit was black.
       Smoke hung over the city; clothes and bedding of those who died were burned and burning tar buckets, thought to prevent the spread of the disease, hung in front of homes.
       But nothing worked. Yellow jack claimed victims in every home. Whole families were wiped out. Children were left with both parents dead. It ended with the first frost, but it had claimed, some believe, one out of every three of the town's 700 inhabitants.
       Two years after the end of the Civil War, in 1867, the fever struck Indianola, Galveston and New Orleans. A Galveston woman wrote afterwards, "The oleanders were sickeningly sweet and a terrible depression hung over the city. . . . The moaning of the sick, the weeping for the dead and dying, the haggard faces of those well enough to nurse, are living memories of that awful time." Sam Houston's widow, Margaret, nursed the sick until she came down with the fever herself; she died two days later.
       Horrible things happened in those times. Merchants would write letters to other towns denying there was an outbreak of fever, even when it had become an epidemic; they didn't want it to hurt business. Ships would dock at infected ports and captains would take on passengers, ignoring the danger that they could spread this deadly peril.
       Corpus Christi had a policy of "non-intercourse" with infected ports when yellow fever broke out. The town was virtually sealed off. The city's precautions required a change of mail carriers 30 miles from town and the mail itself was "smoked" for an hour before it could be delivered.
       But the "Carpetbag" government didn't follow the procedures in 1867. A traveler on horseback, a Mr. Snyder, came from the infected town of Indianola. He was sick when he arrived and he died two days later. He was the first victim in Corpus Christi in the epidemic. The fever spread rapidly. Shops were closed and the streets deserted, except for feral dogs scavenging for food. The town's three doctors fell victim to the fever; a visiting physician at King Ranch was pressed into helping. The majority of the city council died (the city went for a year without a local government).
       When yellow fever first erupted in Corpus Christi, San Patricio officials placed armed deputies at the ferry crossings to stop travelers. According to the "History of San Patricio," by Keith Guthrie, a pest house was set up across Chiltipin Creek from Sinton; food was left on the porch for the patients to retrieve.
       The Corpus Christi Advertiser printed an "extra" on Aug. 17. Editor William Maltby wrote that scarcely a house in the city had escaped the disease, including his own. His wife and sister were both dead and, as he compiled a list of casualties, he was ill with the disease himself. Bodies were buried quickly to prevent the spread of infection. Lumber that had arrived to build a new Presbyterian church was used to make coffins. The epidemic ended that fall. No one knows how many died, perhaps as many as 300 out of a city of 1,000.
       Three decades later, after the Spanish-American War, a team in Havana headed by Dr. Walter Reed discovered that yellow fever was transmitted by the bite of a female mosquito (the male, we are told, does not bite). This deadly mosquito was described as pretty, with silver markings shaped like a lyre on her back. Dr. Reed's discovery, along with improved mosquito control, helped to eradicate what a Brownsville newspaper, The Ranchero, called "the single greatest evil on this earth."
       There was one positive result of the 1867 epidemic. The Army established a quarantine station on Padre Island; ships from infected ports were held under the bright yellow quarantine flag for 21 days. A young doctor, 23 years old, was put in charge. He was transferred two years later, but he eventually returned to build the city's first hospital. His name was Arthur Spohn.
Wednesday 15-Jul-1998
Viewpoints
Sub. by Barb Ziegenmeyer

Town was stricken in killer summer of 1867
Part I of II
A man named Snyder rode in on horseback from Indianola, crossed the reef road, and got a room at Ziegler's Hotel at Chaparral and Lawrence. He died two days later, on July 3, 1867. This man's death was the worst kind of news. He had arrived from a place where yellow fever was in full fury.
For a month, Corpus Christi had been hearing about the yellow fever outbreak in the neighboring port city of Indianola. A family of refugees had arrived from Vera Cruz, where the "negro vomito" had been keeping gravediggers busy.

Indianola was soon stricken, then Galveston. Sick people showed the classic symptoms: raging fever, red eyes, headaches, and the black vomit caused by internal bleeding. In the last stages, faces turned yellow and eyes lost the ability to focus.

People didn't have a clue about what caused yellow fever or where it came from. They thought it came from a noxious vapor in the air. For years, people at White Point talked of seeing a yellow fog drift across Nueces Bay, just before the fever began to claim its victims. People knew it came during the sultry months of the summer, and departed soon after the first refreshing cold snap.

But they had no idea that the virus was transmitted from one person to another by mosquitos. They did know that Yankee soldiers and others from the North, as well as newly arrived immigrants from Europe, were the least immune to the fever. They didn't know that a simple thing like window screens would have done them a world of good.

Three weeks after the Indianola traveler's death, Corpus Christi was full of sick, helpless people. Those who had the fever, and hadn't died, expected to. On July 26, 1867, Helen Chapman wrote in her diary: "Almost everyone in town sick . . . Mr. Mitchell died at noon . . . all of us weak and miserable . . . Sickness increasing . . . Three deaths today . . . The weather hot and sultry."

The Corpus Christi Advertiser noted that, "The cloud burst upon us - a disease of the most virulent and malignant character - and soon death after death occurred among the best and most valuable citizens." The town looked deserted, the streets empty, like two years before in the final days of the Civil War.

Around the city, wisps of smoke rose from tar buckets filled with smoldering charcoal, to fumigate the air. But the tar buckets didn't slow the spread of the fever. Parents lost children, children lost parents, and in some cases entire families fell sick and died.

Many people fled the city to escape the pestilence. The luckier ones went to the Curry Settlement on Padre Island, where the fever never reached. Others went to White Point across Nueces Bay, where the fever followed them. D.C. Rachal used lumber on his new house at White Point to make coffins. Among the 14 people who died at White Point were four members of the White family, from which White Point got its name.

To prevent the spread of the horrors at Corpus Christi, San Patricio County posted armed deputies at the ferry crossings at Nuecestown and San Patricio. The deputies were told to use force to stop anyone from crossing from Corpus Christi.

As the death toll climbed, the ornate, polished wood coffins were used up. Dressed lumber stacked on the bluff to build a new Presbyterian church was diverted to make plain wooden box coffins. The Rev. Claude Jaillet, summoned from San Diego after the deaths of several priests in Corpus Christi, on his way into town saw a long line of wagons carrying the dead in makeshift coffins.

This is the first of two columns on Corpus Christi's yellow fever outbreak in 1867. Part two will appear next Wednesday.

Town divided between the sick and the dead
Part II of II
After a man named Snyder brought the yellow fever from Indianola to Corpus Christi, on the first day of July, 1867, the pestilence raged through the town. A majority of the City Council came down with the fever and the duties of government were taken over by the county commissioners.
The town's three doctors worked until they were exhausted. They must have despaired over the lack of their ability to effectively treat the disease. But they tried every means.

Dr. Eli Merriman had the victims soak their feet and legs in a tub filled with ashes and hot water, then they were rolled in layers of heavy blankets to sweat out the fever.

Dr. Merriman and the town's two other doctors contracted the fever and died. The Advertiser noted: "Our local physicians used all their skill and ability to check the disease, laboring day and night, until they fell victims and died - martyrs to the cause of humanity."

On Aug. 14, William Maltby, editor of the Advertiser, described the calamity. "There is scarcely a house in the city that has escaped either sickness or death of some of its inmates. Our pen is inadequate to the task of describing the distress that now prevails among us." Only the week before, Maltby's 21-year-old wife, Mary Grace (Swift) died, along with Maltby's sister. In the Aug. 14 edition, he listed the names of the victims. His death toll numbered 106, but the spread of the fever was undaunted and the heat of August unabated.

In the town's misery, people all worked side by side caring for the sick. Former Confederates and Unionists put aside bitter differences. When Helen Chapman, a fierce Unionist, came down with the fever, she was visited and comforted by Maltby, a die-hard Confederate.

In late August, one of the heroes of the epidemic came down with the fever. Father John Gonnard, a Catholic priest from France, had been tireless in his ministrations to the sick, working day and night with hardly a pause to rest. When he caught the fever, two black men in town - Chandler Johnson and Joe Whitlock - stayed by him and nursed him until he died. He was mourned by the entire city.

Corpus Christi in 1867 had a new local chapter of the Howard Association. These were organizations of volunteers named for British philanthropist John Howard. The local "Howards" built a pest house at the corner of Antelope and Carancahua. It was maintained by a black man named Dan Johnson. Those stricken by the fever who had no family or means were taken to the town's pest house, where they could get well on their own or die.

A man who worked on John Anderson's boat "Flour Bluff" came down with the fever and was taken to the pest house. Andy Anderson, a boy at the time, took some clothes to the sick man.

"When I reached him," Anderson said later, "he lay on the floor in the center of the room. He yelled, 'You little fool. What are you doing here? Can't you see all those people died of yellow fever?' He referred to seven or eight corpses in the room. 'Well,' I told him, 'We have it at home, so what difference does it make?' The man later recovered."

Those who contracted the fever and lived would be immune for life. John "Red" Dunn sweated out the fever sandwiched between two sick cousins.

"When I felt myself coming down with it," he said later, "I threw myself down between two cousins I was nursing and threw my arms across them to keep the cover on them. I nearly burned up with the fever. My breath burned my face. I went crazy. I crawled across the room, struck my head on a table hard enough to make it bleed. That let the hot blood out, and I think it saved my life." From then on, he said he was impervious to yellow fever.

At the end of August and in the first week of September, cold fronts brought relief for the heat wave and the epidemic. No new cases were reported and the death toll began to drop. The fever died out.

Many accounts of the 1867 epidemic estimated that 300 of the town's 1,000 inhabitants died, a number that was no doubt exaggerated. The usual number, even in severe outbreaks, was 1 in 10, a decimation. Joseph Almond, a carpenter and cabinet-maker, kept a diary and meticulously recorded each day's deaths during the epidemic. When it was over, by the middle of September, Almond's tally was 135 people who had died of the "negro vomito."

As with the city's epidemic in 1854, deliverance, when it came, came from the north. It escaped notice that the arrival of cold weather and the departure of yellow fever just happen to coincide with the disappearance of the mosquito. It would be another three decades before that connection was discovered.

This is the second of two columns on Corpus Christi's yellow fever outbreak in 1867.