On March 6, 1900, a police surgeon examining a body found in the basement of San Francisco's Globe Hotel suspected bubonic plague. Samples went to the federal quarantine station on Angel Island, commanded since 1899 by Joseph Kinyoun; by March 11, animal inoculation and bacteriological study of the tissue had confirmed it.
California's governor, Henry Gage, treated the diagnosis as something he was free to overrule. Secretary of State John Hay had passed on a complaint from the Chinese minister that the city had quarantined Chinatown without cause, and asked for the facts. On June 13, 1900, Gage telegraphed back a numbered list. The first finding was that there had been only eleven suspected cases among 35,000 Chinese, 15,000 of them quarantined. The eleventh settled the matter: he firmly believed no case of bubonic plague had at any time existed within the borders of the state. The twelfth argued that even if the cases were genuine plague, the quarantine discriminated against the Chinese.
The diagnosis did not change because a governor rejected it. Plague kept turning up through 1901 and 1902, and laboratory after laboratory kept confirming it. In February 1901, a federal commission, Simon Flexner, Frederick Novy, and Lewellys Barker, investigated the outbreak and reported finding plague beyond question. Investigators in Chicago, Boston, New York, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Ann Arbor, working independently from material shipped out of San Francisco, reached the same conclusion on their own; separately, a laboratory accident in Ann Arbor gave a culture handler plague himself, from a sample shipped out of California. None of these laboratories had anything to gain by agreeing with each other. They just kept examining the evidence and getting the same answer.
Gage was not nominated for a second term and left office on January 6, 1903. On February 2 that year, his successor, Governor George Pardee, joined San Francisco's mayor, its health officer, a federal surgeon, and the city's leading merchants in signing a joint statement acknowledging that bubonic plague had existed in Chinatown. Within months, city, state, and federal health officers agreed to a joint campaign to exterminate rats, clean the streets, remove garbage, and report every case, and for the first time carried it out without the obstruction of the years before. By the time the federal plague laboratory closed on April 13, 1905, the outbreak a governor had called fiction had produced 121 cases and 113 deaths.
A governor can refuse a diagnosis, but he cannot stop other laboratories from repeating it. Once the sample reaches a second laboratory, a third, a seventh city, the bacillus does not care whose signature is missing from the report. Gage was wrong the day he sent that telegram, and it took nearly three years for California's own government to say so.