The Tragic Awakening at the St. Charles Hotel
A man awakes to find his roommate dead from a suspected morphine overdose, revealing the dark side of a local sailor's life.
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.
When J. Beart awakened in his room at the St. Charles hotel, at the corner of Railroad Avenue and Jackson Street, he found his chum, Louis Flemming, a steamboat fireman, lying lifeless in an adjacent bed. Flemming had engaged the room the previous night, and when Beart arrived later, he noticed his companion was breathing heavily but assumed he was intoxicated. The following morning, Flemming was dead. A box labeled 'Poison—Morphine' was discovered discarded on the street outside the hotel window. Flemming, a member of the Pacific Coast Marine Firemen's Union, had previously attempted suicide in November by cutting his throat. The coroner took the body to Bunney & Stewart's undertaking rooms, and his funeral was held under the auspices of his union.
“Beart demurred, but he supposed from the manner in which Flemming made the proposition that he had been a habitual user of the drug.”
Railroad Avenue (modern Alaskan Way) and Jackson Street were the heart of the bustling, rough-and-tumble waterfront in 1892. This incident captures the high rate of substance dependency among maritime workers in the era, a stark reminder of the often-unseen human toll of the city's early industrial boom.
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