A California epidemic spawned man’s tall tales
In early 1828, a trapper named James Ohio Pattie and seven other armed men entered Mexican California without passports or permission. On orders of Alta California Gov. Jose Echeandia, they were imprisoned in San Diego on suspicion of being spies for Spain.
At this point, according to Pattie, one of the greatest feats in the history of California was about to unfold, featuring him in a starring role.
The 22yearold Pattie, his father and other men had started their Western odyssey in June 1825, crossing the Missouri River. In a memoir he published in 1831, “The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie,” he described extraordinary adventures on a journey that took him through presentday Nebraska and
Kansas on the way to Santa Fe, and then through what is now southern Arizona to San Diego.
Many of the stories Pattie relates in his book sound too amazing to be true — and that’s because they are. As Richard Batman writes in “James Pattie’s West: The Dream and the Reality,” Pattie was a supreme storyteller who mingled true stories with exaggerations, distortions and outright lies. His account of his adventures in the West is a classic case of wish fulfillment.
The real Pattie was a retiring young man who made virtually no impression on anyone who met him; the Pattie presented in
the “Personal Narrative” is a heroic man of action. “It was out of this conflict between the man he was and the man he wished to be that the ‘Personal Narrative’ came,” Batman writes.
It’s in this context that the outlandish story Pattie told about what he did in California must be understood.
As related in the previous Portals, Pattie’s story went like this:
Pattie was still in jail in late 1828 when a smallpox epidemic broke out in Northern California. As it spread south, Echeandia became alarmed. Learning that Pattie had some dried smallpox vaccine, Echeandia demanded that he vaccinate people in the area.
Pattie refused unless he and his companions were freed. Echeandia finally agreed, and in February 1829, Pattie began an epic vaccination campaign.
Over the next few months he traveled north, stopping at every mission, presidio and pueblo along the coast and vaccinating everyone he found. When he had finished at the Russian settlement at Fort Ross, he had vaccinated more than 22,000 people.
It’s one of the most astonishing singlehanded public health crusades of all time. Unfortunately, it never happened.
There are several reasons why Pattie’s story doesn’t hold up. There was indeed an epidemic in the California missions in 182728, but it was probably measles, not smallpox. In 1971, UCSF researcher Rosemary Valle reviewed mission death records and found a number of mentions of measles, but none of smallpox.
A leading authority, Robert H. Jackson, states that the first smallpox epidemic in Alta California did not occur until 183738. It’s thought to have originated at Fort Ross, and it decimated the North Bay Indians.
But even if the epidemic of 182728 was smallpox, Pattie’s story doesn’t make sense. He claimed to have vaccinated 18,962 people at 14 missions, but there were only 12,851 people living at those missions at the time.
Equally absurd is the speed with which Pattie claimed to work. For example, Pattie says he vaccinated 1,500 people in three days at Fort Ross, or 500 a day. To do this, working for an implausible 16 hours a day, he would have to have vaccinated more than one person every two minutes.
Pattie also gets basic facts wrong. The 182728 epidemic broke out not in the north, as he claimed, but in the south, meaning that by the time he said he was vaccinating people in San Diego, the disease would have long passed.
And Pattie makes it appear that Echeandia desperately came to him because he was the only person in California who understood vaccination, which is patently false: Spanish and Mexican authorities had known about smallpox vaccination since soon after Edward Jenner invented it in 1797. A Russian ship had brought smallpox vaccine to Monterey in 1821, and a surgeon aboard had carried out precautionary vaccinations of 40 people.
Then there is the problem of the vaccine. Pattie claims he initially used dried vaccine that his father had carried with him. While dried vaccine could be effective, the notion that it would still be viable after years of being carried around in a pocket or pouch, exposed to the Southwestern heat, is dubious at best. And Pattie never says where he obtained more vaccine or how he transported it.
Could Pattie have carried out a smallscale vaccination program and lied about its scope? That’s also highly unlikely. Why would Echeandia have chosen him to do it? As Batman notes, there were many people in
California who were far more qualified to perform vaccinations than Pattie.
Batman concludes that Pattie’s vaccination tale is one of “the least likely stories in the ‘Personal Narrative’ — which, considering how many tall tales that book contains, makes it a veritable howler.”
Batman writes that Pattie made up the whole epic tale to aggrandize himself. “Behind all the heroics, there is again the story of a man who made little impact.”
Yet in a certain sense, Pattie succeeded: His “Personal Narrative” is a classic of Western literature. Almost 200 years after he vanished from view in 1833, possibly the victim of a cholera epidemic in Kentucky, the little man with the big stories lives on.
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