The Eighty Days of Yellow Fever

In the summer of eighteen seventy-three, a ship carrying yellow fever arrived in the port of New Orleans. The disease spread northward along the river routes, as it often did, following the paths of commerce into the interior. By late summer it had reached Shreveport.

What followed was among the deadliest local epidemics in American history. Over the course of eighty days, Shreveport lost seven hundred fifty-nine citizens to yellow fever. Counting those who died in the following months as the disease ran its course, the total death toll reached approximately twelve hundred.

In a city of roughly four thousand, that meant one in four people were dead before the epidemic ended. Those who could flee did. Those who could not stayed and waited.

Into that emptying city walked a small number of people who had not fled. Five Roman Catholic priests remained at their posts, visiting the sick in homes and in makeshift hospitals, administering last rites to the dying. Two religious sisters remained as well.

All seven of them died of yellow fever before the autumn was over. They had known what the risk was and they stayed anyway. The Catholic Church later opened a cause for their beatification, a process that recognizes heroic virtue in the face of death.

The epidemic forced Shreveport to reckon with its own dependence on the river. The same waterways that had made the city possible, the same currents that carried cotton and commerce, also carried disease. The Red River had given Shreveport everything.

In the summer of eighteen seventy-three it took a quarter of the city back.