A Scuffle on the Tide Flats
A local officer tracks stolen goods to a Chinese laundry on the Seattle waterfront, leading to a desperate hand-to-hand struggle.
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 house of William Morrell, a motorman on Denny's Third Street electric line, at 2100 Fountain Street, Lake Union district, was burglarized Tuesday night. Yesterday about 1 o'clock, Officer Sam Corbett arrested Frank Anderson and Edward A. Walters on suspicion. The capture was accompanied by a hand-to-hand encounter, in which the officer received a hard punch under the right eye. The house had been burglarized while Mr. Morrell was at a lodge meeting and his wife was at church. Mrs. Morrell returned and surprised a burglar at her trunk; he fled, but kept a gold watch. Officer Corbett, acting on a tip, tracked the suspects to Lung Lee's laundry on the tide flats, reached by rotten boards. He found Anderson trying to sell the stolen watch to the proprietor. During the arrest, the men struggled near the edge of a track trestle over the bay. Anderson was subdued and the watch was recovered nearby.
“Anderson went to the planking and Corbett on top, but as they went down the desperado threw the watch over his head toward the south side of the track trestle, where the water was dirty but deep.”
This incident highlights the precarious nature of Seattle's early shoreline, where tide flats were the site of both intensive industrial labor and high-stakes criminal scuffles. The 'Whitechapel' district mentioned has long since been filled in to create the industrial topography of modern SoDo.
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