A Seven-Ton Crushing on Mill Street
A laborer’s insistence on helping a heavy team leads to a gruesome injury in the heart of 1876 Seattle.
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.
Last evening, while Mr. H. Butler was transporting, on a truck drawn by six horses, a large coil of wire rope weighing nearly 7 tons, the truck got mired in the sawdust on Mill St. A man named Baldwin went out to assist the teamsters in extricating it and took hold of the spokes of the wheels, though repeatedly told he could be of no assistance. As the truck moved ahead, he fell down and his arm was caught under the wheel, which passed over it the entire length, from the hand to the shoulder, crushing it in a frightful manner. He was taken to Morrill's drug store, where his arm was set by Dr. Weed. It was found that his arm was broken above the elbow and below it, and there was a compound fracture of the bones of the hand.
“A man named Baldwin went out to assist the teamsters... though repeatedly told he could be of no assistance.”
This accident happened on what we now know as Yesler Way, Seattle's historic industrial backbone. While the dangerous 'sawdust' streets of the 1870s have long been paved over, the precariousness of manual labor and the physical toll of building the city's infrastructure remains a constant, recurring theme in Seattle's history.
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