Tragedy on the Puyallup River
A young man from Tacoma drowns while bathing his feet, leaving behind only a letter from his mother.
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.
Within twenty feet of where his companion lay asleep on the river bank, Frank Secombe, 24 years old, was drowned yesterday afternoon about 2 o'clock near the Northern Pacific railway bridge of the Puyallup River at Sumner. Secombe, together with his companion, Charles Prue, started from Tacoma yesterday with the intention of tramping to Eastern Washington. When they reached the river, Prue lay down for a nap, and his companion walked to the river edge to bathe his feet. When Prue woke up his friend was missing. A search found the young man's body lodged against some driftwood in a turn of the river. Prue did not know Secombe intimately, and whether the man has living relatives or not is unknown. A letter believed to be from his mother in Minneapolis was found in his pocket, but no address was given. How the young man happened to fall into the river is a mystery. A. F. Eastman, secretary of the Tacoma Steel company, reported to the coroner that he is a cousin of the drowned man, and that he will take charge of the remains.
“How the young man happened to fall into the river is a mystery.”
The Puyallup River remains a site of both industrial utility and tragic accidents for those living on its margins. This story captures the vulnerability of transient laborers in early 20th-century Washington, a theme that persists as modern Tacoma struggles with the high cost of living and the precarity of its unhoused population.
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