A Near-Fatal Trestle Accident Sparks Anti-Chinese Sentiment
A worker fell from the Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad trestle into the bay, drawing attention to the precarious labor conditions and rising xenophobia of 1877 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.
Regarding the down train from Renton, it contained a squad of Chinese laborers who had been discharged from the Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad. Arriving at the depot, they gathered their luggage and, hanging it upon poles, started for the city. At this juncture, one of the party discovered he had forgotten something, and turning suddenly around, one end of his heavily loaded pole came in contact with a fellow laborer, knocking him off the trestle work into the bay. The tide was in at the time, and the man sank out of sight instantly. Great confusion ensued among his brethren; there was hurrying to and fro, screams and cries for help, but no effort was made to rescue the unfortunate. When the confusion had reached its height, and the drowning man had bobbed up to the surface for the last time, an attache of the company appeared on the scene with a rope which was frantically grasped by the man and he was hauled ashore.
“In political economy it is estimated that such a laboring man is worth $1,500 to the State... but as the Chinese habitually send their earnings out of the country it will be difficult to determine how much credit is due to the young men who came to the rescue.”
This 1877 account captures the brutal intersection of industrial expansion and the virulent anti-Chinese sentiment that would ultimately lead to the Chinese expulsion riots in Seattle just a few years later. The reporter’s cold editorialization about the 'value' of a laborer versus the 'draining' of local wealth remains a haunting echo of modern nativist rhetoric.
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