A Deadly Christmas Eve Dispute in Willapa
A drunken argument over railroad work ended in a shooting at a gravel pit, leaving a respected foreman dead and his killer in jail.
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.
Andrew Gordon, who shot and killed Foreman William Kelly of the Y. & P. C. Railroad Company on Christmas Eve, was brought to South Bend on Sunday and taken to the Oysterville jail. At 9 o'clock on Christmas Eve, Kelly, Gordon, and a man named Murphy were engaged in a drunken carousal in a shanty at Billy's gravel pit near Willapa. They got into an altercation over the comparative merits of work done on the two ends of a recently completed railroad. Kelly called Gordon a vile name; Gordon drew a revolver and shot Kelly in the right eye, killing him instantly, wounded Dennis Collins in the shoulder, and attempted to fire on Murphy, who escaped. Gordon surrendered voluntarily to E. M. Lilly. Kelly, 50, was a highly respected man with a prominent family in San Francisco, while Gordon is a blacksmith with a family in Winfield, Kansas.
“They got into an altercation over the comparative merits of the work done on the two ends of railroad just completed.”
This incident highlights the precarious lives of laborers in the Pacific Northwest's early industrial expansion. Alcohol-fueled violence in isolated work camps was a common, tragic facet of railroad construction in the 1890s.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.