The High Price of Labor
A former city officer turned laborer is critically injured in a sewer trench collapse near the downtown core.
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.
Dave Ramage, a policeman under Chief Bolton Rogers, met with an accident yesterday which it is feared will result fatally. He was employed at digging a sewer at the corner of Weller and Fourteenth streets when the banks caved in. The other workmen escaped, but Ramage was caught and the earth closed together and held him as in a vise from the shoulders down. He was dug out and conveyed in the police patrol wagon to his home at Fremont, where a physician attended him. It is thought that he has been injured internally. Ramage had a beat in Whitechapel for some time and when he was transferred to the residence portion of the city he resigned from the force, saying that he was 'too good an officer to patrol a quiet beat.' Since that time he has been working as a common laborer.
“Ramage was caught and the earth closed together and held him as in a vise from the shoulders down.”
Workplace safety in Seattle's rapidly expanding early infrastructure remains a recurring theme. The transition from police work to dangerous manual labor illustrates the economic fragility of the 1893 financial panic, where even former civil servants were forced into high-risk manual work just to survive.
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