San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Fast-moving cholera a 19th-century scourge
Watching the selfless volunteers currently working to distribute food and care for the neighbors (during the COVID-19 pandemic), we were reminded of Katherine Browne Jaques.
Some time ago, we encountered an article printed in the San Antonio Express News, July 12, 1930, that told the story of William Budd Jaques and his wife, Katherine Browne Jaques. Both William and Katherine were Republic of Texas legends who lived in San Antonio. Their infant daughter Adellia Josephine was buried in San Fernando Church (now Cathedral).
In rereading the article, we were struck by Katherine Jaques’ selflessly heroic actions in helping victims of cholera in San Antonio. In 1849, with a population of fewer than 3,500, San Antonio was devastated. The article states: “The cholera lasted three months, but in that time, it carried off nearly a fifth of the population of the little town.” In 1866, cholera again visited San Antonio. Again, Katherine worked tirelessly with the sick. Unfortunately, she contracted the disease and died in 1866.
San Antonio in its long history has seen adversity and heroes continue to come forward.
Do you have any information regarding the 1849 cholera epidemic?
It was the most serious of three major 19th-century cholera epidemics here, after one in 1834 and before the last in 1866. The first was not well documented though consequential enough to require a reorganization of government. The third claimed 292 lives, leading to some public health improvements and in 1869 to the founding of the city’s first hospital by the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word.
Cholera 1849 was the worst of the three, averaging 25 case fatalities a day at its peak during May 1849 and killing an estimated total of 500 in six weeks. The bacterial infection, spread by contaminated food or water, was known as the Blue Plague, for the startling, dark-purple skin developed by its victims, severely dehydrated by acute vomiting and diarrhea and wracked with painful cramping.
The disease made its way here during what’s known as the
Third Great Cholera pandemic, with the Vibrio cholerae bacterium spreading from Asia to Europe to North America between 1846 and 1860. It’s believed that cholera came to the United
States this time with Irish immigrants and spread through waterways such as the Mississippi and Ohio river systems. Crosscountry travel related to the California Gold Rush also may have hastened its transmission westward.
Texas cities, including San Antonio, fell victim to epidemics, says G.F. Pyle in a 1969 study, “Diffusion of Cholera in the United States in the 19th Century,” because they were “raw frontier towns with inadequate sanitation (and often) supported large Army populations.” Among the soldiers posted here in 1848 was Gen. William J. Worth — Fort Worth’s namesake — serving briefly as commander of the Department of Texas before he died of cholera May 7, 1849.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the disease “can spread rapidly in areas with inadequate treatment of sewage and drinking water,” which describes San Antonio in the mid-19th century, while the tortuous, slow-moving San Antonio River and the acequias (irrigation canals) still were used for drinking, cooking and bathing as well as for trash dumping. Shallow-dug private wells were another source of infection, especially if sited too close to areas used for waste disposal. A traveler bringing the disease could infect a whole city by using a poorly situated privy.
Within a few days of cholera’s April 1849 arrival in San Antonio, the city’s streets went from “crowded with people and full of life” to “deserted (and) silent as the grave,” according to the French priest Emmanuel Domenech in his memoir, “Missionary Adventures in Texas and Mexico: A Personal Narrative of Six Years’ Sojourn in Those Regions.” Ordained in 1848 in San Antonio, he may have been the first priest ordained in Texas, and with the cholera epidemic, he experienced a baptism by fire.
“Calls were incessant,” Domenech remembered, “I saw nothing but agony and death and burials. I hardly had time to take my ordinary meals.” The young priest was “constantly employed in dispensing remedies, as well as in consoling and praying for the dying. In short, I was occupied with body and soul at the same time.”
The remedy he was dispensing, recommended by a local doctor, was a mixture of camphorated alcohol, pepper, laudanum and cologne. There wasn’t much else to offer; prescriptions included slices of peyote (the psychoactive cactus), copper amulets worn around the neck, applications of mercury-based compounds, electric shocks, tobacco smoke and cold baths. People believed that the illness came from a miasma (bad air) that settled at night, so they stayed in their homes or, if they could, made for higher ground. Katherine Jaques, who could have retreated to the family ranch, closed her boarding house and stayed to nurse the sick.
Domenech recalled that a third of San Antonio’s population fled the city, to Boerne or Bandera, or, if less affluent, camped out alone in the woods, where some died alone in audible agony. Along the streets, the only traffic were the rumbling oxcarts that took the dead to be buried. When the supply of coffins ran out, corpses were strapped to dried ox hides and dragged through the streets to the cemetery, where many were buried in shallow, unmarked graves.
The epidemic receded — probably because almost everyone who was susceptible to developing symptoms either had done so or had left town and because the disease moved so fast, sometimes showing its symptoms and killing in a single day. Changes in weather may also have had an effect on the water, the prime carrier of the disease.
Starting with the first municipal waterworks in 1877, San Antonio moved away from using open sources of untreated water to artesian wells. The last cholera scare here was in 1892.