A Miraculous Escape from the Josephine Explosion
A local woman and her children avoided tragedy on the doomed steamer by a mere thirty minutes.
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.
Mrs. Hastie, of Skagit River, mother of Mrs. Baltz of this city, had a narrow escape from disaster on the unfortunate steamer Josephine. She had been here on a visit for several days, and had spent all her last season's earnings in personal and household articles, which she intended taking home on the boat the trip the explosion occurred. These articles were all on board, and were all lost, and Mrs. Hastie and three children would also have been on board had not the steamer gone half an hour sooner than she supposed it would. They would have been in the cabin, of course, had they caught the boat, and the chances are that all would have lost their lives.
“The chances are that all would have lost their lives.”
Steamboat travel on the Puget Sound was the lifeline of early Seattle, but it came with immense danger, as evidenced by the boiler explosion that destroyed the Josephine. Today, ferry safety is a routine expectation, though this story serves as a reminder of how quickly the city's connection to the water could turn deadly in the 19th century.
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