Smallpox Outbreak Spreads Through North Sound Logging Camps
As cases of smallpox multiply in Snohomish and Great Northern railroad camps, residents demand that the city quarantine travelers arriving from the north.
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It is asserted on good authority that there are several cases of smallpox at Snohomish, and a house of ill-fame and two lodging houses are quarantined. The afflicted persons are cared for at the pest house. The statement that the disease had been stamped out in the Great Northern camps is now contradicted; it is declared by well-informed persons that a large number of men are sick. On Wednesday night a logger died of smallpox at a camp a little above Snohomish, causing a stampede of his seventeen companions, who caught the first train for Seattle. Many persons advocate quarantining Snohomish against railroad and logging camps, but no steps have yet been taken, and exposed persons are permitted to enter the town and continue their journey to Seattle. On last night's Lake Shore train more than 150 loggers and railroad men from Snohomish county came to Seattle, and it would be strange indeed if none of them had been exposed to infection.
“It would be strange indeed if none of them had been exposed to infection.”
The tension between public health safety and the mobility of the regional workforce is a timeless civic dilemma. The fear that unquarantined laborers from Snohomish County logging camps might introduce infection into Seattle eerily mirrors modern anxieties about disease transmission during transit and industrial operations.
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