A Runaway Grocery Team Crashes on Second Avenue
A panicked grocery wagon, fleeing down the steep slopes of Pine Street, ends in a tragic collision with a cable car, killing the horses and scattering goods.
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 excitement over the shooting of Deputy Marshal Marshall had hardly died out on the streets yesterday afternoon when the crowd was drawn away by a runaway which resulted in a collision of a wagon with a cable car and in the death of two horses. The team of J. W. Kahle, the grocer, made a bolt about 5 o'clock down Second Street from Stewart and plunged down the steep hill at such speed that they ran into a cable car going up the hill at the corner of Pine Street, smashing the wagon and the front coat of the dummy and scattering eggs and groceries on all sides. Then they dashed on down Second Street as far as the Olympic Hall, in front of which they came in collision with a telephone pole. One of them ran against the pole and was killed, while the other tangled himself up with it and broke a leg trying to extricate himself, so that he, too, had to be killed.
“They dashed on down Second Street... smashing the wagon and the front coat of the dummy and scattering eggs and groceries on all sides.”
This incident captures the peril of early Seattle's topography, where horse-drawn transit frequently battled steep grades like Pine Street before modern braking and street safety were established. Today, that same corner at 2nd and Pine is the heart of a dense, pedestrian-oriented shopping district, light-years away from the danger of runaway teams.
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