Summer 1873 and the first cases

Any visitor to Shreveport in the summer of 1873 would have seen a vibrant and prosperous river port town with a dense population of commercial and residential activity concentrated near what is today known to locals simply as “the riverfront.” The city’s population swelled in just mere decades after its founding in the 1830s, and Shreveport provided an important nexus between the commercial traffic entering Louisiana at the port of New Orleans and the Texas Trail. The Red River was ground-zero for this remarkable economic growth.

On Aug. 20, 1873, three strangers showed up at the Market Street Infirmary with serious symptoms but were turned away and not treated for whatever reason. The next day, all were dead. The local news reported the names of the first three victims as Frank Nally, age unknown; James Lewis, age 16; and the third victim simply as “unknown.” The city was quite reluctant to call the cause Yellow Fever since these were seemingly isolated cases. However, by Aug. 22, four more people were dead of the same illness, and the death toll continued to climb. Over the coming days and weeks, as more and more people fell ill and died, the city could no longer deny the obvious presence of “Yellow Jack.”

It provides an interesting perspective to consider that in 1873, little was known about the cause of yellow fever, even though it was a frequent visitor nearly every summer on record to many cities of the United States. Medical experts of the era believed it was person-to-person transmittable, not understanding that the virus requires a third vector – the mosquito. It is carried from person to person through the mosquito population feeding on humans; hence, its prevalence in the summer and early fall months. A University of Kentucky medical student named Augustine Booth came to Shreveport to study the outbreak and produced an interesting map showing areas of known infection, significant landmarks, and interestingly, he also noted areas of “stagnant water.” Although Booth did not fully understand the implications of this observation, he nevertheless documented something quite important for future medical science.

In Shreveport in 1873, local officials attributed the cause of the fever to a variety of unusual events. There was a steamboat named the Ruby that was carrying a load of cattle and sank in the river near downtown, drowning all the cattle aboard. The carcasses remained to rot at the riverfront and contributed to what many were already describing as “the miasma,” or bad air. A circus had recently arrived in town as well, and some locals were quick to attribute the illness to either the circus animals, the circus performers, or both.

The Daily Shreveport Times, in publication since the previous year of 1872, provided a daily death record and offered frequent commentary on the condition of the city, especially during the early days of the outbreak. In the beginning, there was a general denial, considering the sobering economic consequences of publicly naming yellow fever. By Sept. 1, neither city officials nor the main news source could deny that yellow fever had struck Shreveport. However, these sources still mitigated it by denying that the fever existed at epidemic proportions.

At the same time, volunteer forces were organizing into a massive compassionate response to the very real human crisis. The next installment of this series will examine the significant role of the Howard Association in Shreveport’s care and recovery, an organization named for the British philanthropist and social justice pioneer John Howard.