The Waterfront War of 1891
A two-hour standoff between striking sailors and city officials paralyzes Port Townsend, leading to arrests and a near-riot.
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.
Port Townsend, August 12—This city was at the mercy of a riotous crowd of union sailors for two hours this morning. About thirty union seamen, headed by Paddy McGlynn, came down from Seattle today and joined the seventy seamen who inaugurated the trouble last night. As fast as the police would make an arrest the seamen would rescue the prisoner. This was kept up for two hours until Sheriff Richard Delanty appeared and selected twenty-five special deputies. Shots were fired indiscriminately in the lower end of town by police and sailors. Paddy McGlynn and William Furlong were identified as the ringleaders who incited the seamen to violence, openly threatening to burn the city and kill F. A. Bartlett, F. L. Macondray, and Louis Rothschild, the latter two being agents of the Shipowners' Association. Shortly after 10 o'clock, Delanty's deputies began to stop the riot. An attempt to arrest a seaman who was slugging every man in his path led to a chase under the wharves where shots were fired. Marshal Wiese eventually brought the man out, and a mob of sailors briefly rescued him from custody. Meanwhile, Delanty raided the union headquarters and arrested McCarthy, Edwards, McGlynn, and Furlong. This action terrorized the crowd, who dispersed to their union boarding house. Warrants were sworn out and the officers experienced no further trouble.
“Paddy McGlynn and William Furlong were the two ringleaders who incited the seamen to violence; they defied the officers and openly threatened to burn the city.”
This violent clash highlights the intense labor conflicts that defined Seattle and Port Townsend's waterfront in the late 19th century. Today, those same docks are centers of tourism and global logistics, but the underlying tension over the control of labor versus capital remains a perennial theme in the Pacific Northwest.
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