Blood in the Newcastle Mines
A violent, years-long boundary dispute between neighboring miners at the Newcastle coal fields spills into the open when a man is ambushed and hurled down a steep bank.
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.
D. McMilin, who was working near Newcastle, was assaulted while on a job for the coal company. As he was leaving at 6:00 p.m. with a scoop of coal, he was ambushed by C. Guye and his party. McMilin recounted: 'They jumped out from behind some brush, and Guye, who was in the lead, hit me with a club. I grabbed the club and wrestled with him, throwing him down twenty feet down the bank among the rocks. They continued to strike at me with their canes; I managed to take one and beat him with my own fist. No one interfered.' Guye, however, claims the land in question and asserted that McMilin and his crew had been trespassing on his claim for months. The dispute, which the miners' union officially denied any part in, highlights the long-standing tension over land ownership and mining rights in the Newcastle area.
“I grabbed the club and wrestled with him, throwing him down twenty feet down the bank among the rocks. They continued to strike at me with their canes.”
This 1888 account of a violent boundary dispute in Newcastle highlights the brutal nature of early industrial land conflicts in King County. While the physical brawls over property lines have largely moved to the courtroom, the intense competition for land and resources remains a defining, often volatile, aspect of life in the Greater Seattle region.
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