although all the women at the Brown Ark carried the diphtheria tragedies with them for the rest of their lives, on Mrs. Lake there was an immediate and peculiar impact. She began to insist that Ti Wong had brought the disease from Chinatown, even though Meredith Penny had obviously arrived from Santa Cruz already ill, even though there’d been no other reported cases in San Francisco and a deadly plague in Santa Cruz.
Not that it mattered, Mrs. Lake was quick to assert. No one was blaming anyone. But. Still. Lizzie thought Mrs. Lake was suffering from not having saved anybody with an emergency tracheotomy. Miss Stevens was handling herself better.
There was another factor contributing to Mrs. Lake’s imbalance. An unrelenting series of plagues is always bound to carry a biblical portent. But San Francisco had already been hearing for some time that Armageddon was coming.
One afternoon back in October, when Lizzie had been eating a lunch at the Brown Ark, by invitation of course, she’d brought up the rumors of the appearance in Nevada of an Indian Messiah. He was reported to be preaching of the coming of a new world, a world without white people, which was even now floating in the heavens, drifting eastward from the Pacific toward the plains. When the new world landed, the whites would be destroyed, while all the dead Indians and herds of dead buffalo would be resurrected. The Messiah asked His followers only to be honest, peaceable, and chaste. He was said to perform miracles. This was all, in Lizzie’s mind, very Christian, which made it hard to dismiss.
Miss Stevens had responded to Lizzie by telling the table how, in August of 1872, the Indians in Lake County had begun to perform the Misha Dance, prompted by the appearance of a monstrous fish in Blue Lakes. They’d feared the end of the world was at hand, Miss Stevens said. Her tone of voice was amused, as if these fears had, in fact, been demonstrably mistaken.
The real subject of this conversation was Mrs. Maria B. Woodworth. Mrs. Woodworth was an evangelist, called on by God in spite of her sex. She’d arrived in Oakland after a triumphant tour of the Midwest, set up a tent, and begun a series of revivals. Here are just a few of the things people said about her:
“Genuine, old-fashioned Methodist religion” (Dr. Lewis Kern).
“I like it the best of anything I ever saw in the way of a religious meeting” (I. H. Ellis).
“The same low order which characterized the African Voodoo, and the Indian Medicine Man” (Charles Wendt, Unitarian pastor).
“Mental debauchery” (Tribune editorial).
Mrs. Woodworth’s technique was charismatic to the point of mesmerism. Her followers fell often into ecstatic trances, during which they lay as if dead. These trances could last for hours or days, until those who experienced them came to at last, weeping and seeing angels.
Oakland doctors wrote letters to the papers, expressing concern about the effects of undiluted religion upon the weak-minded. Lizzie had read an article about one Albertson Smith, who, after attending one evening, was convinced he could fly. He leapt from the upper deck of the Oakland ferry, crashed onto the dock, and was taken into police custody.
But Mrs. Lake had actually gone to one of the winter meetings, and brought back a cautiously neutral report. The audience had by then swelled from an initial twenty-three Doom Sealers, as her followers were known, to several thousand. “It was all brimstone and the fiery pit,” she’d told Miss Stevens, Lizzie, and Nell. “Babies were crying. Women were screaming. Half the crowd was singing one hymn, the other half another. People of every color there, and all treated exactly alike. Outside, the wind, howling and snapping at the tent. I couldn’t hear Mrs. Woodworth at all, I could only just see her, standing at the altar with her arms raised in the air and bodies all around her feet. There must have been twenty of them or more, stiff and lifeless as logs.
“Then, just when I was wishing I hadn’t come, just when I was thinking something cynical and worldly, I noticed my hands beginning to shake. They were all atingle, dancing around at the end of my arms, and I couldn’t control them. And then it was my legs and I slid to the floor as gently as if I were swimming through water. One of the men cupped his hands through the air above me, as if he saw the water, too, and I were being baptized. ‘Now you’ll see something beautiful,’ he said. Then everything went black except for one light I thought was a star, but it turned out to be the top of the tent.” She offered to take Lizzie along next time. “You’ll see that she has a power not easily explained,” Mrs. Lake said.
But Lizzie thought it didn’t sound quite the place for Episcopalians. She was joined in this sentiment by the bishop, who, in November, had issued a general instruction to stay away from women who preached. “Much good can be done by women in a quiet way,” he’d said. “There is no need to make a public parade out of praying for the sick.”
Privately Nell and Lizzie agreed that Mrs. Lake was among the more susceptible of God’s creations and had never had a cynical or worldly thought in her life. “I’d like to see anyone try to make me see angels,” said Nell, and Lizzie would have liked to see this, too.
Then Christmas had come and gone, and it was late January when Mrs. Woodworth had her vision. She’d seen a mountain of water rise out of the Pacific and fall on the three cities of Alameda, Oakland, and San Francisco. She’d pleaded with God, asking Him to spare the cities if ten righteous men could be found within them. His answer was that all the righteous should move immediately inland. His judgment on the unrighteous would take the form of a tidal wave.
This vision was shared by several of Mrs. Woodworth’s followers, who added their own details. The wave would hit on April 14, 1890, just after Easter. Chicago would be simultaneously destroyed, and also Milwaukee. Europe would be plunged into war. The Doom Sealers petitioned the governor, asking him to read the Book of Jonah, set aside a day for prayer, and remove all prisoners, monies, and securities in the San Francisco area to high ground. They published pamphlets. They quit their jobs, sold their homes and belongings, and left the city.
This was the context in which Mrs. Lake had her pupils praying at all hours, searching their souls for hidden sins as if it were an Easter egg hunt. They were studying the Dark Ages, and she played a dreadful game of tag for which she’d enlisted Ti Wong. She told him to walk up and down the aisles of the room, touching the students—boys and girls both!—at random on the shoulder. Everyone he touched was to go stand at the back of the room. When the game was over, a quarter of the class remained in their seats. The others were dead. It was an aid to understanding the great plagues of Europe. Mrs. Lake claimed she’d asked Ti Wong to participate because the plague came first from China.
Such a cruel lesson, so poorly timed, so unlike gentle Mrs. Lake. The game had given Minna Graham nightmares; she’d been one of the last children touched. In her dreams, a great black bird circled her head and landed on her shoulder. She heard the rustle of its feathers in her ear and awoke crying, saying that it was pecking at her eyes. All the girls in the room with her were in a state. Mrs. Lake was sent off to the spa in Pope Valley to take the waters until she was herself again.