Tall tales of a California epidemic: How one man did not vaccinate thousands of people

The 22-year-old Pattie, his father and other men had started their Western odyssey in June 1825, crossing the Missouri River. In a memoir he published in 1831, “The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie,” he described extraordinary adventures on a journey that took him through present-day Nebraska and Kansas on the way to Santa Fe, and then through what is now southern Arizona to San Diego.

Many of the stories Pattie relates in his book sound too amazing to be true — and that’s because they are. As Richard Batman writes in “James Pattie’s West: The Dream and the Reality,” Pattie was a supreme storyteller who mingled true stories with exaggerations, distortions and outright lies. His account of his adventures in the West is a classic case of wish fulfillment.

The real Pattie was a retiring young man who made virtually no impression on anyone who met him; the Pattie presented in the “Personal Narrative” is a heroic man of action. “It was out of this conflict between the man he was and the man he wished to be that the ‘Personal Narrative’ came,” Batman writes.

It’s in this context that the outlandish story Pattie told about what he did in California must be understood.

As related inthe previous Portals,Pattie’s story went like this:

Pattie was still in jail in late 1828 when a smallpox epidemic broke out in Northern California. As it spread south, Echeandia became alarmed. Learning that Pattie had some dried smallpox vaccine, Echeandia demanded that he vaccinate people in the area.

Pattie refused unless he and his companions were freed. Echeandia finally agreed, and in February 1829, Pattie began an epic vaccination campaign.

Over the next few months he traveled north, stopping at every mission, presidio and pueblo along the coast and vaccinating everyone he found. When he had finished at the Russian settlement at Fort Ross, he had vaccinated more than 22,000 people.

It’s one of the most astonishing single-handed public health crusades of all time. Unfortunately, it never happened.

There are several reasons why Pattie’s story doesn’t hold up. There was indeed an epidemic in the California missions in 1827-28, but it was probably measles, not smallpox. In 1971, UCSF researcher Rosemary Valle reviewed mission death records and found a number of mentions of measles, but none of smallpox.

A leading authority, Robert H. Jackson, states that the first smallpox epidemic in Alta California did not occur until 1837-38. It’s thought to have originated at Fort Ross, and it decimated the North Bay Indians.

But even if the epidemic of 1827-28 was smallpox, Pattie’s story doesn’t make sense. He claimed to have vaccinated 18,962 people at 14 missions, but there were only 12,851 people living at those missions at the time.

Equally absurd is the speed with which Pattie claimed to work. For example, Pattie says he vaccinated 1,500 people in three days at Fort Ross, or 500 a day. To do this, working for an implausible 16 hours a day, he would have to have vaccinated more than one person every two minutes.

Pattie also gets basic facts wrong. The 1827-28 epidemic broke out not in the north, as he claimed, but in the south, meaning that by the time he said he was vaccinating people in San Diego, the disease would have long passed.

和小馅饼看起来Echeandia desperately came to him because he was the only person in California who understood vaccination, which is patently false: Spanish and Mexican authorities had known about smallpox vaccination since soon after Edward Jenner invented it in 1797. A Russian ship had brought smallpox vaccine to Monterey in 1821, and a surgeon aboard had carried out precautionary vaccinations of 40 people.

Then there is the problem of the vaccine. Pattie claims he initially used dried vaccine that his father had carried with him. While dried vaccine could be effective, the notion that it would still be viable after years of being carried around in a pocket or pouch, exposed to the Southwestern heat, is dubious at best. And Pattie never says where he obtained more vaccine or how he transported it.

Could Pattie have carried out a small-scale vaccination program and lied about its scope? That’s also highly unlikely. Why would Echeandia have chosen him to do it? As Batman notes, there were many people in California who were far more qualified to perform vaccinations than Pattie.

Batman concludes that Pattie’s vaccination tale is one of “the least likely stories in the ‘Personal Narrative’ — which, considering how many tall tales that book contains, makes it a veritable howler.

Batman writes that Pattie made up the whole epic tale to aggrandize himself. “Behind all the heroics, there is again the story of a man who made little impact.”

Yet in a certain sense, Pattie succeeded: His “Personal Narrative” is a classic of Western literature. Almost 200 years after he vanished from view in 1833, possibly the victim of a cholera epidemic in Kentucky, the little man with the big stories lives on.