The Saloon Under Siege in Gilman
While the rest of Seattle was preoccupied with the celebrity visit of John L. Sullivan, a proprietor in the coal-mining town of Gilman was fighting a nightly war to keep his doors open.
Thomas Rowley, proprietor of the Bellevue House at Gilman, is practically in a state of siege. He has to defend himself night and day against a small body of men who are trying to drive him from the town by violence and intimidation. Rowley has incurred the enmity of the remnant of the union men by selling to everybody alike, union and non-union. Two or three nights a week, a gang comes to the house and sends a volley of stones through the windows. Rowley immediately jumps up and blazes away through the window with a Winchester in all directions. Whenever the fight begins, all the guests of the house take to cover. Rowley always goes well-heeled and has a regular arsenal; he has a row of revolvers on the shelf behind the bar and guns in a room at the rear end of the saloon. The union and non-union men are constantly fighting. A favorite amusement of the former is knocking a man down and four or five kicking him for a while. On Christmas day there were two or three fights, and one man came up to another with a rake which had the teeth broken off short, dug it into the back of his head and dragged it forward over his dome of thought, dragging out the hair in a long furrow. One man came up to another and smashed him on the head with a six-shooter, splitting his ear open.
“Whenever the fight begins all the guests of the house take to cover. I was usually in bed at the time, and would gather up the mattress on each side to ward off any rocks or bullets in case the mob should aim high.”
The violent labor tensions in Gilman (now modern-day Issaquah) reveal the brutal friction that defined the early Washington coal industry. Today's Seattle struggles with the 'housing and labor' conflict, but the 1892 frontier reality of literal gunfights over the patronage of a saloon highlights how deeply labor organizing and management resistance were once intertwined with daily survival.
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