The Steamship Captain Who Defied the Union with a Revolver and a Hot-Water Hose
When labor organizers boarded the schooner 'Maid of Oregon' to enforce a non-union purge, the sixty-five-year-old captain met them with a weapon in one hand and a blast of steam in the other.
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.
The steam schooner Maid of Oregon came in from Edison yesterday with 80,000 feet of lumber and went to the Oregon Improvement Company's slip at the foot of Jackson street to discharge. Captain B. Grounds took the first men he met on the wharf and started them to work at unloading her. In a few minutes one of the officers of the Longshoremen's Union went to him and told him he must discharge three of the firemen because they were non-union men. This the captain refused to do and thereupon the two men were called off the boat and an attempt was made by a crowd of longshoremen on the wharf to prevent the others from working. But Captain Grounds went aboard and in a few seconds faced the crowd with a revolver in one hand and the nozzle of a hot-water hose in the other, and soon put the whole gang to flight. The longshoremen called a policeman to have the captain arrested for drawing a weapon, but when he explained the situation the officer refused to arrest him. Captain Grounds is an old man, 65 years of age or upward, but he is noted on the coast for his grit. He says he has been running boats longer than any other captain on the Northern coast, and he never allowed any body of men to run his vessel and never would.
“He never allowed any body of men to run his vessel and never would.”
This 1892 clash on the Seattle waterfront highlights the deep-seated tension between labor's push for collective security and the individualistic defiance of business owners—a struggle that has defined the region's docks for over a century. Even today, the Port of Seattle remains a site where the balance between union labor and management power is constantly negotiated through strikes, pickets, and economic maneuvering.
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