Trapped in the Earth
A young immigrant rancher dies in a sixty-foot well near South Bay after being overcome by gas.
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.
Albert Deuce, a young Englishman aged 25 years, was accidentally killed this morning on his ranch near South Bay, a few miles from Olympia. Deuce and his partner, Carl Conrad, were digging a well, and the former was working at the bottom, which was at a depth of sixty feet. Deuce called to Conrad to pull him up, as the gas was overcoming him. Conrad commenced to turn the windlass, and when half way up Deuce said, 'Hurry. Can't stand it much longer.' Then the load on the windlass lightened, and Conrad heard the body of his partner strike the bottom. A lantern was summoned and the remains were brought up hurriedly, bruised about the face and a long, ragged cut on top of the head which laid the scalp back on a space the size of a man's hand. The body was brought to the city. Deceased has no relatives in this country nearer than New York and Baltimore.
“Hurry. Can't stand it much longer.”
Accidents in deep, poorly ventilated infrastructure were a common and horrifying reality of 19th-century homesteading. Today, we have OSHA regulations to prevent such deaths, but these stories remind us of the immense human cost paid to establish basic utilities on early Washington ranches.
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