A Near-Death Fall at the Mount Si Hotel
While working on a hotel construction project in Snoqualmie, a man miraculously survives a thirty-four-foot plunge after a scaffold gives way.
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.
While 'Bill Nye' and A. F. Kinsey were working on the Mount Si hotel at Snoqualmie last Thursday, the scaffold gave way and Kinsey was thrown headfirst to the ground, thirty-four feet below. 'Bill Nye' escaped by catching hold of the gutter. Kinsey was rescued from a pile of boards which had fallen on him, and upon soon recovering the use of his faculties, said to his friend, 'Where the dickens did you light?' No bones were broken and he only suffered a few bruises.
“Where the dickens did you light?”
Construction safety and labor standards were notoriously lax in the 1890s, often leaving workers to rely on sheer luck to survive daily hazards. Today, while workplace regulations are far more robust, the physical risks of building in Washington’s rugged terrain remain a constant concern for tradespeople.
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