The Underground Opium Pipeline
A bold smuggling operation involving pack animals and stages ends in a Spokane arrest.
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 box containing 134 pounds of contraband opium was confiscated in the office of the Northern Pacific Express Company by a deputy marshal. Today, a young man giving the name of John Paul called for the package and was placed under arrest. He admitted his guilt, was taken before a United States Commissioner, and held on $4,000 bonds. Paul says he bought the opium in Victoria, sent it east to Lumsden station on the Canadian Pacific, brought it south to Loomis, Washington, on pack animals, shipped it by stage to Coulee City, and thence expressed it by rail to Spokane. He was on his way to San Francisco. It is believed that a large traffic in opium is carried on in this city.
“Paul says he bought the opium in Victoria, sent it east to Lumsden station... brought it south to Loomis, Washington, on pack animals.”
While the moral panic surrounding opium in the 1890s was heavily racialized and linked to the exclusion of Chinese laborers, the logistics of these 'underground' supply chains often utilized the same infrastructure—stages, rail, and express lines—that defined the region's economic growth. Today, the geography of drug interdiction remains a cornerstone of federal law enforcement in Washington, though the focus has shifted from the commodities of the 19th-century trade to the synthetic crises of the modern era.
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