The Lonely End of Samuel Kane
A morning discovery on Seattle's tide flats reveals the tragic final hours of an iron moulder.
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.
Samuel Kane, an iron moulder, aged 33 years, was drowned in the bay near the Grant street crossing yesterday morning between 6 and 7 o'clock. Kane came to Seattle from Portland on Monday night with friends. On Tuesday, after consuming too much alcohol, he was locked in his room at the Garfield House to sleep it off. He apparently managed to escape in the early morning hours, stopping at Tommy Jones' saloon on the ground floor at 5:00 a.m. to express remorse for his intoxication. By 7:30 a.m., his body was spotted floating in the water by workers at the electric light plant. Coroner Horton recovered a flask of whisky and a hotel key from his pockets. He was identified later that afternoon by his friend, William Smith.
“The body was in the water in the same position that a person assumes when walking up hill, the head being partly out of the water.”
The 'tide flats' of the 1890s, where workers like Kane lived and labored, have been almost entirely reclaimed or paved over to create the industrial infrastructure of modern SODO. While the city's relationship to alcohol and waterfront isolation has shifted, the precarity of laborers living in boarding houses remains a hauntingly familiar theme in Seattle's history.
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