The Town's Growing Pains
A wave of petty crime in Aberdeen leads to the arrest of five men, highlighting the social tensions of a city suddenly flooded with transient workers.
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 weeding out of the 'hobo' and bum element of Seattle and Tacoma has caused this class to seek new fields. The smaller neighboring cities are thus afflicted with this itinerant class of leaches who, rather than turn a finger to earn an honest mouthful of food, resort to all devices to gain a livelihood. Aberdeen has not been excepted, and during the past two weeks an unusually large number of tough characters have arrived here. On Friday afternoon, a party of five characters crossed the Wishkah bridge, where they carried off a rubber coat belonging to S. J. White and attempted to loot the Crumniev building. Later, boots were taken from Eichner Bros.' shoe store, and six bolts of cloth, valued at $110, were taken from Gus Leese's tailoring establishment. About 10 o'clock, the group went to Pratsch's lodging house, where one of them pocketed the owner's gold-rimmed spectacles. The police were notified, and the five men were arrested. Upon being searched, the spectacles were found, but there was no trace of the other stolen goods. Police Judge Keyes fined four of them $5 each for vagrancy; the fifth, on whom the glasses were found, was given thirty days for petty larceny.
“The smaller neighboring cities are thus afflicted with this itinerant class of leaches who, rather than turn a finger to earn an honest mouthful of food, resort to all devices to gain a livelihood.”
In 1891, the newspaper described a transient labor force moving through Washington in terms that would be echoed by economic anxieties over a century later. The 'hobo' label was a common way for 19th-century authorities to justify policing the poor and itinerant laborers who arrived to build the region's mills.
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