The Tragic End of the Steamboat Annie Faxon
A boiler explosion on the Snake River kills eight passengers and crew, leaving only wreckage in its wake.
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 Snake River steamer Annie Faxon was blown up this morning at 8 o'clock, sixteen miles south of Lewiston and four miles below Almota. The explosion killed seven men and one woman, and injured six more. The dead include Thomas and John McClure, passengers from Portland; Mrs. C.J. Taylor, wife of the purser; George Pearson, a waiter; and William Kern, a deckhand. The boat was just pulling off after stopping to unload wood at Waite’s Bar when the boiler burst with a terrible crash. The vessel was torn to pieces, its deck scattered over the water, and the hull sank to the bottom. Captain Baughman, who was in the pilot house, was thrown toward the shore by the force of the blast. The steamer belonged to the Union Pacific Railroad Company. The exact cause of the explosion will never be known as the engineer was killed in the blast.
“The boat was just in the act of pulling off when the boiler burst with a terrible crash, and 10,000 slivers was all that remained of the Annie Faxon.”
This catastrophe occurred on the Snake River, a vital artery for inland transit before the dominance of rail and road. While boiler explosions were a common, terrifying hazard of 19th-century maritime travel, today’s water-based disasters are rarely tied to industrial failure, reflecting the massive shift in safety oversight since the 1890s.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.