The Unlucky Wagoner of Tacoma Avenue
A local delivery worker endures a harrowing accident on an unfinished street, leaving him battered but back to business by the following day.
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.
C. North, agent here for the Puget Sound Ice Company of Seattle, was limping about the streets yesterday with bandages about his head and stating the appearance generally of a man who had fallen out of a balloon. Trying to turn his ice wagon at a point on Tacoma Avenue on Monday, where the grade is not completed, the wheels moved up, the wagon went over, North falling before one of the wheels and being dragged down the hill under it, with his face to the ground, scarring it badly. Though badly disfigured, he was about town yesterday doing business as best he could with one eye bandaged up, wearing one boot and one slipper, and leaning on a cane.
“Stating the appearance generally of a man who had fallen out of a balloon.”
In 1887, Seattle was a rough-hewn boomtown where unfinished infrastructure—like the grading of streets—was a constant physical hazard to workers. The story captures the brutal, precarious nature of Gilded Age labor, where a man crushed by his own wagon was expected to be 'doing business as best he could' the very next day, a stark reminder of the lack of worker protections in the city's early history.
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