South Seattle Laborer Stabbed Over a Nickel
A brickmaker at Lohse's brick yard was attacked by a vagrant after refusing to hand over money for transit.
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.
O. B. Million, an employee at Lohse's brick yard in South Seattle, was stabbed four times yesterday noon, once directly over the heart, by a tramp to whom he refused to give money. Million was returning to work from dinner when a tall, clean-shaven, coarsely dressed man stopped him and asked for a nickel to ride into the city. As he made the request, he cut a chew of tobacco from a plug with an ordinary pocket knife. Million looked at him and said: 'You are strong enough to walk into the city.' The stranger immediately sprang at Million and dealt several blows before his victim could protect himself. I. H. Thornton saw the affair from a distance and came running to Million's aid, but the tramp escaped on a passing freight train. Million was not aware he had been stabbed until he felt blood trickling down his chest. Upon opening his shirt, a cut three inches long and down to the bone was revealed, along with slashes to his nose and ear. Police suspect the assailant is a man recently released from the city jail for vagrancy.
“You are strong enough to walk into the city.”
This violent encounter at a South Seattle brickyard captures the period's intense friction between the city's established working class and the transient population left behind by the economic uncertainty of the 1890s. The 'tramp' panic was a common theme in Seattle's late 19th-century press, often used to justify harsher policing of unhoused people—a tension that persists in modern debates over public space and poverty.
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