Amazing tale of smallpox hero too good to be true
A lockdownfree life is somewhere in the distant future, and impatience for a coronavirus vaccine is growing — making this the perfect time to revisit the story of the frontiersman who claimed to have personally inoculated more than 20,000 Californians against smallpox in the early 19th century.
If he had actually done this, James Pattie would qualify as one of the state’s greatest heroes. Unfortunately he didn’t, but he does deserve credit for being one of the West’s greatest storytellers.
Pattie’s adventures as related in his 1831 autobiography, “The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie,” are remarkable, and quite a few of them actually happened.
James Ohio Pattie was born, not in Ohio but in Kentucky, around 1803. In 1825, he joined his father and other men on a trapping and trading expedition in the West.
In February 1828, the party of eight entered Mexican California, without passports or permission. By order of Alta California Gov. Jose Echeandia, the men were disarmed and imprisoned in San Diego on suspicion of being spies for Spain.
Pattie’s story now begins to read like a dimestore novel. Echeandia is alternately a mustachetwirling villain, threatening to kill Pattie, refusing to let him see his dying father and smashing him over the head with the flat of his sword, and an oily, smirking hypocrite.
Pattie’s sadistic jailers gloat that he will be burned alive. Pattie detests the “vile” Mexicans and the “still viler” Echeandia and dreams of getting just one rifle shot at the governor. But his spirits are raised by a kindly sergeant and his beautiful sister, who weeps with him over his father’s death and arranges for him to briefly be released from prison so he can attend the funeral.
In December 1828, just when it appears Pattie may rot in jail forever, a smallpox epidemic breaks out in Northern California and heads his way. Fortunately for Pattie, it turns out that his late father had some dried smallpox vaccine, which he used two years earlier to inoculate copper miners. Some of the vaccine is still left, and Echeandia offers to free Pattie if he will vaccinate “all the people on the coast.”
Pattie refuses unless his companions are freed as well. Enraged, Echeandia again threatens to kill Pattie, but after a priest dies of the disease he becomes desperate and agrees.
On Jan, 18, 1829, Pattie kicks off a vaccination marathon to top all marathons. First, he vaccinates everyone in San Diego. Then, having by undescribed means “procured a sufficient quantity of the vaccine matter to answer my purpose,” he heads north up the chain of missions, pueblos and presidios, inoculating thousands of Indians as he goes. He vaccinates 2,500 people at Los Angeles, 2,600 at Mission Santa Barbara, 3,904 at Mission San Luis Obispo, and so on.
He then heads to San Francisco’s Mission Dolores, where he informs one Father John Cabortes that he has vaccinated 22,000 people and presents a receipt so he can be paid for his services. When Cabortes asks Pattie what he thinks he should be paid, Pattie says he will let the father decide.
While Cabortes thinks it over, Pattie heads north to the Russian colony at Bodega Bay. Here he outdoes himself, vaccinating 1,500
people in three days.
When Pattie returns to San Francisco, Father Cabortes agrees to give him 500 cows and 500 mules and land to pasture them — but on condition that he becomes a Catholic and a citizen of Mexico. Dumbstruck with rage, Pattie tells Cabortes that before he would “be adopted into the society of such a band of murderers and robbers, as I deemed were to be found along this coast, for the pitiful amount of one thousand head of cattle, I would suffer death.”
After Cabortes throws him out, Pattie makes his way to Monterey and has more picaresque adventures, including taking part on both sides of a minor civil war. He then sails to Mexico, where he files an unsuccessful claim with President Anastasio Bustamante for damages.
Eventually he makes his way back to the U.S. The last record of Pattie is found in a Kentucky tax document in 1833; he may have died in a cholera epidemic at that time.
What makes Pattie’s “Personal Narrative” so fascinating and unique is that although it is riddled with errors, exaggerations, distortions and lies, it is still in many ways an accurate account of Pattie’s adventures in the early West.
As Richard Batman demonstrates in his meticulous study, “James Pattie’s West: The Dream and the Reality,”
Pattie’s tale is by no means an outright fabrication, as some early critics charged. Rather, it is a complex mixture of fact and fable. And it is so compellingly told that it has become part of the mythology of the West.
However, some parts of Pattie’s story are more untruthful than others — and his great vaccination tale falls emphatically into the madeup category. The next Portals will explain why. Gary Kamiya is the author of the bestselling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle.com/portals. For more features from 150 years of The Chronicle’s archives, go to sfchronicle.com/vault. Email: metro@ sfchronicle.com