Duel with the Devil (4 page)

But who?

C
OME BACK SOON
,
Elias Ring wrote to his wife in the first days of October.
I miss you
.

It was a hopeless request: The city was still far too dangerous. Yellow fever deaths were marching up even the formerly safe environs of Greenwich Street; William Laight had interrupted his weather log’s tally of deaths to ominously note by one entry: “
Cassie, our neighbor.” A
laborer a few houses farther up came next, and then a cart driver. By October 7, 1799, when a
tenant died at a boardinghouse on 189 Greenwich, the inhabitants of 208 could feel death closing in. Hiding inside and peering out the window hardly brought any comfort: Pigeons with strange gangrenous sores had started appearing on the city streets.

“
In this pestilential period,” one local paper mused grimly, “scarcely a species of animal escapes a portion of evil.”

Doctors scrambled to find a treatment. The eminent David
Hosack confidently presented a sweating cure; and then, as his patients died writhing in perspiration, he quietly withdrew it. Then again, he could hardly compete with the cure promoted by the most popular physician in the country, Elisha Perkins. The inventor of “metallic tractors”—three-inch alloy rods that could “
draw off the noxious electrical fluid that lay at the root of suffering”—Dr. Perkins had moved into the city and promptly set up shop over on John Street. Perkins had sold thousand of metal tractors, and his customers for the magic rods included George Washington; now Manhattanites would be blessed by this same doctor’s genius.

“
Having obtained from various experiments satisfactory evidence that the Yellow Fever is within control,” Dr. Perkins advertised, “it is his intention, if he finds suitable encouragement, to continue his residence in this city.” Alas, he found neither. Within weeks, he
was bundled into a winding sheet and sent back to Connecticut, as lifeless as his wonder-working chunks of metal.

Nothing seemed to work.

“
To pour buckets of cold water on the head of a man … Three years ago this experiment was the vogue!!!” complained Noah Webster. “Copious bleeding has had its day. But [now] mercury seems to be the favorite.… Where one patient survives its effect, ten proved fatal.”

The only real relief, in this as in every other outbreak for the past century, would come from the heavens. “
First frost,” noted William Laight in his logbook on October 18, 1799. Those two simple words held a vast sense of relief; for now, as the fall leaves turned bright, the fever surely would end. Word spread out into the countryside, and within a week the city’s residents had begun to reappear, hale and rested from their months away. “
General movement back,” Laight dutifully wrote down in his logbook.

The summer’s refugees discovered a city that was now rather the worse for wear. Merchants found their cellars smashed into, and trunks of merchandise opened and stolen.
An abandoned flock of sheep, their owner likely dead, milled around by New Street. In front of the Tontine Coffee House,
two cannons were simply dropped on the ground, perhaps by a fleeing homeowner unable to blast the miasma out of his backyard.

But there were hopeful signs, too. Full columns of notices in the newspaper ran under the heading
RETURNS
. Mr. Fontbonne posted his yearly announcement of trees for sale for fall planting—
PEACHES, PLUMBS, GREEN GAGES
&
C
.—and John Street burbled with the sound of girls being sent back to Mr. Reed’s tutorials in
English and geography. The city swelled back to life; soon the autumn harvest poured into the market squares, and Long Island cod landed heavily on the docks.

The frosty morning air also hinted at the coming winter. After a summer of
gouging dying families on the price of coffins and nails,
speculators were now buying up local supplies of wood and sticking
residents for an extortionate six dollars a cord. Back at the boardinghouse, Richard Croucher prepared for the winter fabric buying season, while Elma, ailing some days but not others, often remained curled up in her bed on the second floor. Drops of laudanum helped with her pain, though not enough—“
I should not be afraid to drink it full,” she’d tease after taking a few ineffectual drops from the medicine vial. Levi looked in on Elma when he could, but he was putting in long hours at his brother’s work sites, knowing the building season would soon slow.

The humbler folk of the city were already stopping work to celebrate the season. The end of the pestilence had come just in time for the city’s Irish immigrants to indulge in
their peculiar love of Halloween. Living down by the muddy docks, they’d been hit worst of all by the fever. Toasting loudly and singing lilting airs, they gathered that evening to roast nuts and apples over open fires, and drank whiskey in the graveyard as the autumn night of All Hallow’s Eve closed over them and their fellow Manhattanites.

They had survived.

T
HE CITY
’
S RECOVERY WAS FAST
—
A LITTLE TOO FAST, SOME
worried.

“
But a few days ago our city was covered with sack-cloth and ashes,” wrote one
New-York Mercantile Advertiser
correspondent. “Scarcely a carriage was to be seen but the black and dismal hearse; nothing was to be heard in habitations but the expiring groans of victims, and the lamentations of surviving friends. Thank God the scene has changed; business and bustle, joy and gladness have taken place of Death and his sickly band of diseases.” But now, he fretted, youth with “their bottles, their billiards, and their brothels” were roaming the streets. Where, he demanded, was “he who convinces giddy youth that wisdom does not consist in the thickness of his pudding neck-cloth, the breadth of his whiskers, or the spindle straw size of his rat tail queue?” And what better way to save the young men of the city from such foolishness, the correspondent wondered, than by occupying them with an intellectual puzzle?

“
I therefore humbly hint,” he proposed, “that a certain premium be offered, say a hundred guineas, to any one who shall produce the best solution to any philosophical or mathematical problem.”

In fact, some of Manhattan’s greatest minds had already spent the previous year grappling with a deadly serious puzzle: what to do about the city’s foul and brackish water. Potable water was supplied by just one well, the Tea-Water Pump, a couple of blocks north of the site being considered for a new city hall. Some residents made
pilgrimages there, like a thirsty urban herd to an oasis: The proprietors would let you fill up a large barrel for threepence. Everyone else waited for the
Tea-Water Men, a small army of deliverymen who carted massive wooden 140-gallon hogshead casks around the city, selling water by the bucket to subscribing households.

But everyone knew the stuff was terrible.

“
They pretend their water is pure and nice; it is no such thing,” one of Noah Webster’s correspondents charged. The local pond not far from the well, known as the Collect, had become “a very sink and common sewer”—a frothing brew of effluence from tanneries and furnaces. “Dead dogs, cats, etc, [are] thrown in daily,” one resident grumbled, “and no doubt, many buckets from that quarter of town.” As to what was in those buckets, another proclaimed, it was “all of leaking, scrapings, scourings, p——s——gs, & ——gs, for a great distance around.”

Schemes for clean running water had been bubbling up for as long as most residents could remember; after
a plan to pipe Manhattan with hollowed-out logs was proposed in 1774, a well was even dug and a crude steam engine erected before British invaders interrupted the project. Its engineer, the ingenious Irish émigré Christopher Colles, was held at bayonet point by British troops but managed to escape through the tall grass of Trinity Church’s graveyard; returning after the war, he found occupying troops had cruelly wrecked his work. It proved to be the only project that the hapless genius had ever come close to seeing through.

“
Had I been brought up a hatter,” he sighed, “people would have come into the world without heads.”

After the great fever in 1798, the
calls for a solution had grown louder. “
The health of a city,” warned physician Joseph Browne, “depends more on its water, than on all the rest of its eatables and drinkables together.” Browne’s own ambitious proposal for driving yellow fever out of Manhattan was to pipe in clean water from miles away, via an elaborate series of dams and reservoirs by the Harlem River. If the scale of Browne’s idea was a bit grand, the basic notion
behind it was entirely sensible, and in the spring of 1799 the state assembly passed a bill to charter a corporation that would provide the city with clean water.

Dubbed the Manhattan Company, its board of thirteen local worthies had
received five proposal bids in short order; nearly all came from recognized contractors and inventors, men already well-known to the committee members. But the first to arrive bore a return address that led back to a boardinghouse, of all places. It read:
208 Greenwich Street
.

Behind the archaic dress and the careful
thee
and
thou
of his manner, Elias Ring possessed the restless mind of a modern inventor. The young patriarch had mulled the mechanics of water for years since
operating a mill upstate. Along with tending the boardinghouse with his wife, Elias had painstakingly designed and built a patent model of his own contrivance, and for the past two years had
run an ad in Philadelphia and New York newspapers for this grand invention:

But the city to be watered by his inventions, he now realized, was his own. And unlike the rather fanciful proposals of Joseph
Browne to bring in water from Harlem, Elias made an astoundingly practical proposition: The supply they needed, he claimed, was the much-abused and fouled waters of the meadows nearby.

“
The Collect has been unjustly stigmatized with the name of a filthy stagnated pond,” Ring began, “but the Collect proceeds from a collection of springs. [It] is rendered in some measure filthy by throwing dead carcases into it.” The solution was simply to fill in clay over the more putrid banks and erect a high fence to bar tanneries and butchers from using the Collect anymore. Refilled with sweet new water by its springs, and pumped out by a steam engine, “the Collect will supply a daily sufficient quantity of water for the consumption of the City.” It could be done, he estimated, for
the pleasingly round sum of $100,000.

That some of that windfall might come to him had been his dream back in the spring. But it had not quite turned out the way he imagined.

A
T THE
boardinghouse, Richard Croucher could be seen returning from his final evening rounds, having bothered the local householders to buy stockings. There was far worse work to be had than his: Staggering along some of those
same rounds were the milk merchants. It wasn’t even
good
milk that they were selling—it always
stank of Long Island meadow garlic—but New Yorkers drank it anyway, and so the merchants barged over from Brooklyn and made deliveries with two heavy pails hung over their shoulders by a rod. Everyone on these streets had their own burden, but for Croucher it was this peculiar one: Something about him kept the occasional prospect from buying his fabric. It was hard to say
what
was
off-putting about his sales manner. Yet he doggedly made his rounds, never entirely giving up.

Levi Weeks, lounging at the boardinghouse between carpentry jobs, was not so easily discouraged, either.

Do you wish to
accompany me to my brother’s?
he asked Hope.

It wasn’t far—Ezra Weeks kept his contracting business and
lumberyard just eight blocks away, over
on the corner of Greenwich and Harrison—but Levi was making a social call, not reporting to work.

Hope was taken aback; then she demurred. It had been some time since Levi had shown her much in the way of attention, and besides, she really couldn’t go today. And even if she could—well, answering to the handsome young carpenter’s first request for an outing was perhaps unwise.

Elma, passing through the room, felt no such restraint.

“
Why don’t you ask me?” she asked pointedly.

“I know,” Levi replied, “that you would not go if I did.”

He was right, of course: Elma did not go to Ezra’s with him. She never would, these days. She was always claiming illness, and she’d turn moody about it, then strangely weak—almost glassy-eyed. But whenever he was home from his work at Ezra’s job sites,
Levi still took pains to attend to her, even nudging the other boarders and family aside:
You will not attend to her as carefully as I will
, he’d insist.