In 1896, the Excelsior Homestead was only partially mapped. Russia Avenue was the southernmost boundary on the Sanborn Perris maps; beyond that, the largely undeveloped land lay far beyond the municipal pale. With few or no structures such as schools, churches, or homes, there was little to insure. There were dairies of course, almost 60 of them, but in those days, dairies were so improvised and ramshackle that insuring them was perhaps beside the point. What mattered to the dairymen, latter-day versions of the bóaire, an Irish term meaning “cow lord”, was the wealth their cows created because of the milk they gave.
The Excelsior Homestead was the place of the cows, Ait na Bo, a shifting and uncertain territory, hard to map, and difficult to regulate. Back then, the Excelsior would have looked like a prairie in the wet springtime, and the hooves of the cattle cratered the place, looking for something to eat other than brewery slops, which they were accustomed to being fed. There wasn’t too much space for the cattle to wander; the dairymen needed to get their cows back, as Sunnyside historian Amy O’Hair pointed out to me in a recent conversation, so that they could be fed and milked.
“These were urban dairies, remember,” O’Hair said. “They weren’t riding after their cows on horseback, like they had done on the Ranchos.”
Nicholas Hansen’s dairy, the California dairy, was located at the intersection of Amazon and Vienna Avenue, across from John Linehan’s dairy, the Green Valley Dairy, also on Vienna Avenue. Although spacious by today’s reckoning, there were still opportunities for Hanson and Linehan to have neighborly chats, perhaps over the fences that bordered their properties, where they may have found time to discuss topics pertinent to urban dairying, such as which breed of cattle was best suited for the scrubby grass land of the Excelsior or how to prevent milk fever, or even comparing notes on the best way to evade inspection by Milk Inspector James Dockery, then hot on the trail of all impure milk.
The Excelsior, a great place to conspire because of its remote location, was also the perfect place to spread zoonotic diseases, like tuberculosis. Opportunities abounded for the bacteria in the hinterlands of the Excelsior, no matter how open the place was. A cow, infected with the bacteria, could easily infect a dairyman, leaning against its flank in a milking shed, or a child, if that child drank its milk.
As we’ve spent the last year learning, the Victorian fear of unclean miasmas has some basis in truth: the viral load of the Delta variant of COVID-19 lingers in the air with the power to infect the pulmonary system of other human beings and so does tuberculosis, specifically Mycobacterium bovis (Bovine Tuberculosis) a strain discovered by the American epidemiologist Theobold Smith between 1896-98, four years after the tubercle bacillus had been first identified by the German epidemiologist Robert Koch. During the drive to regulate dairies in San Francisco, there were contemporaneous debates over the exact pathogenicity of M bovis and its connnection to pulmonary tuberculosis. Koch, who vacillated on this last point (he doubted the connection) developed tuberculin in 1890, and while it didn’t cure human tuberculosis (he had claimed it would), it did, and still does, detect the presence of the bacilli.
That year, in Stockton, California, C. A. Ruggles, President of the State Board of Health and Dr. Orvis, a veterinarian, administered the first tuberculin test in California to a herd of cows at the state insane asylum, determining that out of 11 cows, eight were afflicted with the disease. One calf was found to be “literally filled with” the large, very disgusting granulomas characteristic of M. bovis, which develop as a defense against the invading bacteria. The sick cows were quickly killed. “These tests are said to be the first in the state,” reported the SF Chronicle, promising that more tests would be done.
And it was so. Relieved to have something- anything!- to control the incidence of the pathogen, and the intransigence of the bóaire, Koch’s failed cure was put to good use to regulate the health of the city’s cows, who lived wherever a plot of land could be staked out. Actual pasturage was negotiable; historian Khaled Bloom estimated that a total of 4,324 cows were kept in the city’s 106 known dairies in 1880, many of which were located in the middle of the city. Four thousand cows, a number that came from the 1880 federal agricultural census, was likely an undercount, something Bloom acknowledges, and a fact lamented in 1888 by Richard G. Sneath, owner of the Jersey Farm Dairy in San Bruno. He claimed there were as many as 7,000 to 8,000 cows in the county of San Francisco. Sneath called these places “filthy” and complained that they were controlled by “foreigners” who fed their cows on brewery slops.
These slop-fed cattle produced more than 22,000 gallons of milk from the city dairies in Cow Hollow, Corona Heights and along the Mission and San Bruno roads, from urban “milk dealers” like Hansen and Linehan, whose dairies were about hour away from downtown San Francisco on horseback. Milk inspections had started the year before, enraging the dealers, but at Dockery hadn’t visited the dairies themselves. Hansen and Linehan may have felt protected from Dockery’s intrusions by the remoteness of their dairies. But things were about to change. Had Hansen or Linehan read the San Francisco Chronicle on the morning of January 4, 1896, they may have realized that new round of inspections was about to descend on their dairies.
“Hundreds of Cows Must Be Killed” ran a story in the SF Call, advising city residents of the decision taken by the Board of Health to apply the tuberculin test throughout the county. At least 300 cows in the city and county were said to be afflicted. The board, who had been “quietly gathering information” on feral dairymen and their diseased cattle-Linehan, a known scofflaw, was probably at the top of this list – assured the public that everything was under control. Rules and regulations were being formulated to govern the actions of Board of Health inspectors Dockery, Meat Inspector Ben Davis and Dr. Creely, who had been hired that week as the Board’s veterinary surgeon. It took more than three months for the plan to be put into action.
On April 17th, the Board of Health’s Great Cow Cull of 1896 began. That day, Creely, Dockery, and Davis arrived at the San Francisco Almshouse to test the cows who provided the inmates with milk. Politics may have dictated the Almshouse as the first stop in the Cow Cull: Philip L. Weaver, the superintendent, was on his way out after James H. Budd, the newly elected Democratic Governor, took office a year earlier. Budd had political favors to pay back after his election, and the Almshouse was a gift he intended to give to his friend Edward “Ned” Reddy, a “close friend” of the governor, and brother to former State Senator Patrick Reddy, both born into an immigrant Irish family from County Carlow.
Mayor Sutro defended the beleagured superintendent, charging Governor Budd, and the governor’s men on the Board of Health with shutting Sutro out of the ensuing investigation into the health issues afflicting the almshouse. Weaver, an “overbearing man who gave himself airs”, according to a former Almshouse doctor, had spent his year prior to the inspection simultaneously fending off calls for his removal and begging the city for money to feed the Almshouse cattle, as well as his inmates, an awful state of affairs brought about for the simplest of reasons. There was no money in the city’s treasury, it having been exhausted after unrestrained election spending.
As Weaver explained in a letter sent to Mayor Sutro on April 26, 1895, “Our cattle and horses are hungry and we have no feed. We have three days’ stock of flour on hand and no more will be delivered on your contract when that is gone, and 900 people crying for bread.”
Dr. Fitzgibbon from the Board of Health candidly admitted that Weaver’s tenure was at an end, simply because of the patronage politics and the ruthlessness of the Democratic machine.
“It has practically been decided…to make the change and give the place to Mr. Reddy, whose brother secured Governor Budd’s promise to that effect. We have nothing to say about Mr. Weaver’s management of the institution, which I believe to have been excellent, but things have shaped them that way, and unless something is brought up to change the present condition of affairs the change will be made.”
Hence the inspection: although it was in line with official policy and reflected real anxieties over public health, it was also politically expedient. The Chronicle called the inspection a “hecatomb.” They weren’t wrong about the sacrificial aspect of it: the victims were all unwilling. The cows, who suffered, were sacrificed to public welfare; the resentful superintendent saw his career killed, and the city’s dairymen saw their financial well-being offered up for a still-shaky theory that M bovis killed children, a hypothesis that was being debated in academic conferences, far from the rural fields of the Excelsior District, where all that the dairy men understood was that they were going to lose a lot of money.
On the evening of April 15, the hecatomb commenced. Testing cows with tuberculin was a lengthy and arduous process. It took Creely, Dockery and Creely’s nephew, Andrew Harrigan, three full days to test 34 cows. After securing the cows in the barn- partly to ensure none of them were let loose by Weaver- the men took the cow’s temperatures on the hour for eight hours. On Thursday morning, a sample of milk was taken for the city bacteriologist Mr. Spencer to inspect, and 2 centimeters of tuberculin was injected into the neck of each cow. There was another eight-hour wait, to see if there was a rise in temperature, which was a sign that the cow was infected. If the temperature had risen above 104, the cow’s fate was decided.
Meat Inspector Davis, who had clashed with Creely before, declared that there was a simpler way to tell if a cow was consumptive.
“Before they used tuberculin,” Davis said, “I would just run a cow on a jump (line) for about thirty yards, and if she coughed, why, I would just hit her on the head with an ax. It never failed, and I will guarantee a man to pay him the value of his cow every time I kill one under that test and no consumption is found.” It was a quicker way of doing the work, he opined, but since the government had stepped in, the old way of doing things had to change.
The old way of killing cows hadn’t changed. Humane methods of dispatch depended on the slaughterer’s skill with a gun, or an axe. The cows, after having needles stuck in their necks and thermometers thrust up their bums, were in no mood to play nice with the health officials. On the first day of the inspection, Davis got kicked and Creely had to jump down a drain hole to escape the bovine wrath of the cows.
The three-day inspection was over by 4 pm on Friday April 17th. 31 cows were declared unfit. The next day, on a windy and sunny Saturday afternoon, the cows were led outside to the pasture.
For four grim and bloody hours, each cow was dispatched. Creely, a humane man, who was described by the Chronicle as “the Ko-Ko of the occasion” (the Mikado had opened the year before) killed the first cow with an axe. It was not a clean kill. The cow kicked as it died, almost striking the face of an Almshouse attendant. After that, Creely insisted that a single shot to the head was the most humane method.
The next cow, old and white, understood what was afoot and ran around the yard in a panic. After calming the animal with some alfalfa, Creely drew a police revolver “borrowed so long ago from the police department that he imagines it’s his own,” the Chronicle reported snidely. (The editors of the Chronicle plainly despised Edward Creely, and never missed an opportunity to throw a jibe his way.) Creely took aim, and fired. The shot went wide of the mark, causing the cow to panic, and run. Creely followed her with the drawn gun, trying to find his mark as the chaotically moving target dashed back and forth. Wheeling around with the loaded gun in his hand, which prompted his colleagues scatter, Creely shot the cow point blank through the brain. This went on until he ran out of ammunition. Then he used an axe. In this terrible way, the cows were slaughtered, the men and the grass splashed with blood and the carcasses of the cows dissected then and there in the gruesome pasture.
The lungs of the cows were displayed to the journalists from the Call and the Chronicle as proof of the necessity of the slaughter. “The little white patches and protruding buttons told their own story,” reported the Call, which also mentioned the financial toll the sacrifice had taken from the Almshouse. In all, it would cost $1,200 to replace the dead cows. The 70 to 80 gallons of milk they provided daily for the inmates needed to be sourced elsewhere.
Superintendent Weaver fretted over this and other things, too, namely his regret that inspections hadn’t happened sooner. His regret was probably real, although he was also in mourning for his career. According to the SF Call, the inspection came about because of a tip from a disgruntled ex-inmate, who’d been evicted by Weaver on the grounds that he was fit enough to work. Weaver blamed the poor condition of the cows on another Almshouse employee who hadn’t bought the bran feed Weaver had told him to, though with what money is unclear. In any case, the superintendent’s protestations were in vain. He was relieved of his position as superintendent by the Board of Health the next month and formally replaced by Reddy. Weaver argued his case until the year he died, in 1902.
So much was sacrificed that day- a man’s career, as well as the cow’s lives. The elderly white cow running for her life at the end of a rope in the city of St. Francis was no longer a symbol of wealth and prosperity, but instead a symbol of disease, city corruption, and death. Her destruction should have assured the good fortune of her executioner, Dr. Creely. But “politics” does often creep toward an uncertain end, and there is certainly nothing new about unscrupulous or morally weak individuals seeking personal gain in newly created political environments. The cow lords, while on the defense, still had power.
Instead of seeing the Board of Health as a tool to fight disease, Creely may also have seen it as a new platform to burnish his reputation, and strengthen his influence. The glanders controversy four years earlier had shown him that without status and influence, telling the truth could create the kind of trouble that brought men like Philip Weaver down. Public health and the truth mattered to Edward Creely, but he was aware, crucially, of its often high cost: community censure and opprobrium from those on the wrong side of reform. Navigating the entrenched influence of the milk dealers was a tricky business, as Creely’s next inspection at Nicholas Hansen’s dairy–his last–would show.
Elizabeth Creely 