Blood on the Waterfront: A Bloody July 4th in LaConner
A quiet holiday celebration in the Skagit County mill town turned violent when a local businessman was stabbed in a saloon dispute.
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.
Yesterday afternoon, a reporter of the Post-Intelligencer met Sheriff L. L. Andrews, of Skagit County, and inquired of him the particulars surrounding the very serious cutting scrape which took place at that city on the morning of July 4th. Mr. Andrews said, 'The scrape took place in a saloon at three o'clock in the morning. Frank Benn, the wounded man, is a highly respected citizen of LaConner and one of the owners of the sawmill at that place. One story is that he came to LaConner to spend the Fourth; that owing to the noise about the place he either did not go to bed or had gotten up. At any rate, he was in the barroom at three o'clock when a man named Miller and another man named Sam Thompson got into a fight, and Mr. Benn stepped in to separate the men when Thompson stabbed him. Another story is to the effect that Miller was a friend of Benn's, and when Benn saw that Thompson was getting the best of Miller, he jumped in and commenced pounding Thompson, whereupon the latter stabbed him. Mr. Benn was stabbed through the lungs in the region of the heart, and the doctors say he has one chance in ten to recover. The prisoner was placed under bond for his appearance before the grand jury; being unable to furnish bonds, I brought him to Seattle and placed him in the King County jail for safe-keeping.'
“The doctors say he has one chance in ten to recover.”
LaConner remains a picturesque destination, but in 1887, the frontier saloon culture frequently erupted in violence that required the state to intervene. Much like today, the legal system and the jail in Seattle served as the central point for managing crises from the growing surrounding towns.
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