of 1878 that raged along the Mississippi River Valley and the Asiatic cholera epidemic of 1892, which hit New York City with particular ferocity. Sanitary cordons, or quarantine, were the primary response to yellow fever, to block the progress of disease believed to be conveyed not only on boats and foot traffic but also now by railroad. Instituting quarantines, however, meant Federal intervention into what was widely held to be state police powers and met resistance in the southeastern United States where the issue of yellow fever, and its impact on trade, were most critical. Advocates of a National Board of Health, including Army Surgeon John Shaw Billings, were spurred to action by the insufficient funding allotted to the Quarantine Act of 1878. Over the following four years, Hamilton would press Billings at every turn, in a protracted, ultimately successful effort to regain authorities and recognition of MHS as the central Federal public health agency. When Billings began publishing MHS's Bulletin under the Board's auspices, Hamilton countered by persuading Congress to fund new Marine Hospitals in locations like Sitka, Alaska, to strengthen collaboration with the Revenue Cutter Service (predecessor to the United States Coast Guard). The Board distributed grants-in-aid to state and territorial health departments for what were called "inland quarantines" but had a mixed record in regulating the uses to which grants were put and made political enemies when it attempted to quell yellow fever by means of a quarantine station on Ship Island, near New Orleans. While the Board struggled with clumsy administrative mechanisms, Hamilton demonstrated how MHS's relationships with customs inspectors and the Revenue Cutter Service enabled a quick and effective quarantine response to smallpox aboard a Mississippi River steamboat at Fort Benton, Montana Territory (May 1882), and how MHS blocked yellow fever in Mexico from entry into Brownsville, Texas by means of a sanitary cordon hastily assembled around the region. Congress recognized Hamilton's leadership and in 1882 and 1883 awarded MHS a $100,000 fund for investigating epidemics, monies that had been slated for the Board. When Billings and his colleagues attempted to revive the idea of a National Board as a new Bureau of Health within the Department of the Interior, Hamilton announced that during August 1887 MHS had established a Hygienic Laboratory (predecessor to the National Institutes of Health), where Dr. Joseph J. Kinyoun and his staff were applying the new science of bacteriology to