American Experience

Watch a preview of Plague at the Golden Gate.

On May 28, 1900, San Francisco policemen formed a perimeter around Chinatown, and set about building an eight-foot high wall around the district using cement blocks and barbed wire. Officials diagnosed bubonic plague in the neighborhood and wanted to quarantine the nearly 20,000 residents. As tensions flared, an influential group of merchants known as the Chinese Six Companies sprang into action.

Ng Poon Chew was a writer, a publisher and an advocate for Chinese American civil rights. He established the first Chinese language daily newspaper in America, the Chung Sai Yat Po. This newspaper was a vital resource for the Chinese community during the plague outbreak in San Francisco.

As rumor spread of bubonic plague in San Francisco, newspapers couldn't agree if it was a nationwide threat or a plot to destroy the economy. Sound familiar?

Follow the gripping story of the race against time to save San Francisco and the nation from an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1900.

Dr. Joseph Kinyoun created the Hygienic Laboratory, the nation’s first federal laboratory of medical bacteriology which later became the National Institutes of Health.

In 1900, the first case of bubonic plague to ever be confirmed in North America was diagnosed in San Francisco.
Scientists did not understand how the disease was transmitted but had long theorized that rats played a role.

In 1901, Rupert Blue launched a public health campaign that ended a deadly bubonic plague outbreak in San Francisco.

Flood in the Desert explores the 1928 collapse of the St. Francis Dam and its aftermath, the second deadliest disaster in California history.

In 1922, to meet the growing water needs of Los Angeles, William Mulholland began building the St. Francis Dam to create a reservoir for the Los Angeles–Owens River aqueduct.

Explore the 1928 dam collapse, the second deadliest disaster in California history.

The Native inhabitants—the Paiute people of the Owens Valley territory in what is now the State of California built sophisticated irrigation canals to channel water runoff from the Sierra Nevada Mountains.