A Tragic Warning in the Slate Creek Woods
A logger is killed by a falling tree, fulfilling a premonition voiced by his son just moments before.
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.
Mr. Andrew Erskine and his son, aged 17 years, were occupying a tent near a white pine tree on Slate creek. On Saturday evening, just before going to bed, the son asked the father if he was not afraid the tree would fall on them? The father said he was not, and both turned in for the night. About twenty minutes after, the son heard the tree crack, and forthwith he sprang up and rushed out. The tree fell across their tent, and in its fall drove a crosscut saw, which was hanging teeth down over Mr. Erskine, completely through the head of that unfortunate man. He was buried the next day by the miners. Mr. Erskine was a brother-in-law of Mrs. Mulvaney, of this city, whose husband was drowned near Goodell's last spring, and he left a wife and five young children in Rock Island county, Illinois.
“The son asked the father if he was not afraid the tree would fall on them? The father said he was not.”
Fatalities in the woods were a common and brutal aspect of life in the Pacific Northwest during the late 19th-century timber boom. The detail of the crosscut saw adds a harrowing, specifically industrial quality to this frontier tragedy.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.