Early 20th century outbreaks of plague on West Coast?

In the last years of the 19th century and the first few of the 20th, there were a couple of short-lived bubonic plague outbreaks in India and coastal China, and infected rats managed to reach San Francisco's Chinatown by way of an Australian steamer only a couple years before the 1906 earthquake. Since sanitation and cramped living conditions were terrible in the Chinatown, infection spread rapidly, and the city authorities turned a blind eye due to xenophobia and racist sentiment against the Chinese. However, a few determined health officials managed to rally public support for a sanitation campaign just as infection started to hit the white population of the city, thus halting its spread before it was too late. As a result, only a few hundred people died before things were brought under control.

However, this window of opportunity was extremely limited, and I was wondering if the right amount of delayed action from city sanitation and health authorities would be enough to cause a limited epidemic on the West Coast. Efforts at controlling the plague at the time were limited because the connection between plague and fleas was not entirely understood, though they did know it had something to do with infected rats.
 
More importantly, the aetiology of plague was different. You cannot reproduce the Black Death, and given the relatively spread-out settlements of pre-WWII California, any outbreak would remain largely confined to cities. The authorities understood well how to limit contagion, and the late nineteenth century still had a much more robust understanding of public health measures than we do. I don't see this being more than a blip on the historical landscape, similar to the Hamburg cholera outbreak of 1892. Of course it will dominate the local political sphere and may have long-term knock-on effects. It may be for slum clearances what The Jungle was for food processing.
 
Top