Thomas Dolan Tried Soap and Knives to Escape Jail
A desperate inmate’s attempt to saw through the county jail's steel bars with repurposed table knives ends in a dark cell.
The story, cleaned up
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After four days in a dark cell with a diet of bread and water, Thomas Dolan, who attempted to break out of the county jail last Wednesday morning, confessed to Jailer Munroe. Dolan explained that he noticed two Chinamen had been brought in for smoking opium, and one had two old-fashioned knives. Dolan secreted them in his bunk and, using yellow soap to mask his progress, attempted to saw through the bars. He initially succeeded in cutting the bars to the cage, but found the outside window bars too hard to breach. Dolan was ultimately caught and placed in solitary confinement. He was originally sentenced to jail after a drunken episode involving stolen trousers, but he felt the judge acted without authority and hoped to flee to Boston by jumping a freight train at Black River Junction.
“It was slow work and the chances of getting caught made it still risky... I would fill up the cut with soap, conceal the tools and wait for another chance.”
Dolan’s story captures the gritty, often brutal reality of 19th-century incarceration in Seattle. The casual mention of 'smoking opium' as the reason for his fellow prisoners' arrest reflects the era's criminalization of immigrant communities, a thread that would soon harden into systemic exclusion.
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