The Great Whatcom Railroad Brawl
Construction crews for two rival railroads face off in a pitched battle over a trestle crossing, turning a civil dispute into a physical struggle on the tracks.
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.
There was a lively fight for a crossing at New Whatcom yesterday morning between the forces of the Great Northern and the Bellingham Bay & Eastern railroads. The section gangs on the former road were gathered on the scene and had a bloodless battle with the construction forces of the latter. Peace was finally arranged and the forces were drawn off.
The Bellingham Bay & Eastern road is designed to cross the Great Northern overhead a short distance north of the northern limits of Fairhaven and to run over a high trestle to the bunkers which are now being built for the Blue Canyon coal mine. The Great Northern demanded that the trestle should cross both its main and side track with one bent. The Bellingham Bay & Eastern people wanted to cross with only a sixteen-foot bent, which would involve the erection of timbering between the Great Northern main and side tracks.
A. G. Scurfield, assistant engineer of the Great Northern, reported that when the construction forces began building the trestle, he and his men pulled the timbers down. Later, J. J. Donovan, the chief engineer of the rival road, arrived with fifty men and a posse of police and deputy sheriffs. Scurfield recounted: 'When they started to move a piece of timber we would sit on it or hold it down with any tools we could get hold of. The police and deputies were there ostensibly to keep the peace, but they really helped the other party by getting in our way and arresting two of our men.' Eventually, a reinforcement gang arrived from the junction, and after an hours-long standoff, Donovan agreed to the Great Northern's demands for a thirty-foot span.
“When they started to move a piece of timber we would sit on it or hold it down with any tools we could get hold of.”
This territorial railroad spat over right-of-way and infrastructure echoes the modern, often fraught, struggle for urban rail corridors and freight access that still dictates development patterns in the Pacific Northwest today.
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