The Tragedy of the Wood Shed
A miner's attempt to hunt a weasel in Northport leads to a catastrophic explosion that leveled his cabin.
John Carlson, a Northport miner, saw a weasel in his woodshed Saturday. He sent a rifle ball after the little animal, but the bullet entered two boxes of giant powder and the explosion that followed wiped the cabin off the face of the earth. Carlson miraculously escaped death, though he was badly hurt.
“The explosion that followed wiped the cabin off the face of the earth.”
Handling volatile explosives like dynamite (or 'giant powder') was a routine, if deadly, hazard for 19th-century miners in the Inland Northwest. Today, this incident serves as a grim reminder of the high-stakes, unregulated frontier living that defined early industrial Washington.
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