A Deadly Commute: The Perilous Rails of Tacoma
A group of railway laborers, hoping for a joyride around the city, encountered a tragic and fatal end when an engine struck their buggy near the wharf.
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 number of laborers down from the force yesterday had some money. Yesterday, a party of eight started out to take a ride around the city—four in a carriage, two in a buggy, and two riding. The little procession started quite merrily from the vicinity of the hotel and continued to go until under the shadows of the trestles at the foot of Pacific Avenue near the wharf. There, the horse in the buggy halted as it was crossing the track, and an engine, making a quick run to the bunkers, came out from under the hill and struck the buggy. The horse was thrown to the right, the buggy smashed, and the occupants thrown forward—one of them on the track, where the train passed over him, leaving a dead and mangled body; the other was badly, but not dangerously, injured. Mr. Hunsaker, of the Boss Hotel, was notified and immediately went to the scene of the wreck, had the body of the more unfortunate man conveyed to Undertaker Mosher's rooms, and the injured man was taken to the hotel, the merry procession of an hour before sorrowfully escorting them back. The name of the deceased was Gust Breolesa. He came from Minneapolis to work on the Cascade division. He was a single man, 28 years of age; came from Malmo, Sweden, six years ago, and has a brother in Kansas City. The name of the injured man is Gust Carlson.
“The merry procession of an hour before sorrowfully escorting them back.”
This tragedy speaks to the precarious lives of transient railroad workers in 1887, whose safety was often secondary to the rapid expansion of infrastructure. Today, Tacoma's waterfront is no longer a site of such raw industrial peril, but the tension between rapid urban development and worker safety remains a hauntingly familiar feature of the Pacific Northwest's labor history.
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