The Tragic Cost of Playing in the Seattle Clay
A makeshift fort at the edge of the city became a tomb when a riverbank collapsed, claiming the life of a young boy.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A most unhappy accident occurred yesterday at noon. Four little boys, all about the age of nine years, were engaged playing in the sand bank that borders Eleventh street in the vicinity of I and J streets. The boys had for some days been digging into the hill for the purpose of building a cave or playroom. Shortly after twelve o'clock yesterday the boys mentioned, Ralph Lots, Frank Wing, Willie Millar and Frank Parks, stopped at the place on their way to school and while there the earth above them suddenly caved in and completely buried two of the boys, Lots and Wing. Young Parks and Miller seemed to have seen it coming and sprang away. Parks wholly escaped while Miller was partially buried. Their screams brought Alexander McCready followed by several others to the rescue, and the work of digging the boys out was a matter of but a few moments. The body of Lots was found doubled forward, evidently crushed by the earth. Life was extinct. Young Wing was taken out unconscious and he is not expected to recover. Drs. Calhoun and Miller, who were called, worked for an hour in their efforts to develop a sign of life in the other, but without avail. He is the son of John H. Lots.
“The boys had for some days been digging into the hill for the purpose of building a cave or playroom.”
This tragedy speaks to a time when Seattle was a raw landscape of hills and exposed earth, long before the massive regrading projects smoothed the city. It serves as a haunting reminder that while the city's topography has been engineered for safety, the inherent danger of unstable hillsides—a constant in Seattle's history—persists in our modern era of landslides and construction hazards.
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