Blood on the Docks
A dockworker defending his ship from a drunken interloper sparks a brutal, unresolved question about city services.
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.
While the barkentine Katie Flickinger was shifting her position at the new dock yesterday morning, a man considerably under the influence of liquor interfered with the work of the sailors by shouting and holding the ropes. Several of them remonstrated with him, and angered by this, he drew a knife and made a vicious assault upon the mate of the Flickinger who was superintending the work. In self defense, that gentleman struck his assailant on the head with a small crowbar, cutting him pretty badly. The miserable man was allowed to lie on the dock bleeding profusely until evening, when he was removed to the city jail. No one blames the mate for his action, but it does seem a shame that there is no place in the city to which the man could have been removed.
“It does seem a shame that there is no place in the city to which the man could have been removed.”
This incident highlights a perennial gap in Seattle's infrastructure: the lack of emergency services for those in the throes of substance-related crisis. Even in 1883, the paper recognized that leaving a bleeding man on a public dock until evening—because there was nowhere else to put him—was a failure of the city's civic duty.
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