Fire Scare at South Eighth and Dearborn
A fire in a small stand caused a panic among nearby residents, who mistook a white man’s warning for a police raid.
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.
A fire in L. C. Pinyan’s fruit and tobacco stand, at the corner of South Eighth and Dearborn streets, this morning at 1:30 o’clock, caused a wild commotion among the Chinese people who live in the adjoining house. For thirty minutes, they were running around in great confusion. To add to the excitement, they mistook a warning for a police raid and came at W. J. Murphy with boards and flat irons. Murphy was going home when he noticed flames coming from the roof of a small two-story frame house that stood about two feet distant from a building occupied by Sam Lee as a laundry. Murphy knocked on the door to notify the inmates, and in a minute, all was chaos inside. When the door opened, three men with boards and flatirons appeared and advanced on him. Murphy, not prepared for such a reception, yelled, 'Your shanty is on fire.' The cry went through the room like a cannon blast, and every man had business outdoors. Once the flames bit the corner of their building, the way one of them prayed for Chief Hunt to save it was as amusing to the chief as it was serious to them. The fire was extinguished quickly, and the damage was minor.
“For thirty minutes, the Mongolians were running around in the same manner that fowls do when their heads have been chopped off.”
This incident highlights the pervasive climate of fear in 1893 Seattle, where the city’s Chinese residents lived under the constant, justified anxiety of anti-Asian violence and police harassment. The 'South Eighth and Dearborn' intersection was part of a historic district where migrant communities were frequently targeted by such raids, a grim reality of late 19th-century Seattle that echoes in the ongoing struggle against systemic exclusion.
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