Passenger Train Ambushed Near Puyallup
A passenger train traveling through the Puyallup Indian reservation is targeted by gunfire, narrowly missing a non-union engineer.
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.
Twenty shots were fired by ambushed men at the Carbonado passenger train which left Tacoma at 6 p.m., as it passed through the Puyallup Indian reservation three miles from the depot. The bullets whizzed about the head of non-union engineer Alford, who was apparently the chief object of attack, and imbedded themselves in the cab woodwork. Sheriff Matthews, who was aboard the train, says: 'We were just beyond the reservation school house when a shotgun loaded with buckshot was fired from the bush at the cab of the locomotive. Then followed what seemed to be Winchester rifle shots, followed by bullets from a revolver. We could see smoke in the brush, but could not see who fired the shots.' The engineer threw the throttle wide open and escaped to Puyallup. Several buckshot lodged in the cab, and passengers were showered with broken glass from bullet-shattered windows.
“At first the engineer, thinking the shots were torpedoes, slowed down, but when he realized they were shots he threw the throttle wide open.”
This incident occurred during the Pullman Strike, a pivotal moment in American labor history that brought the country's rail network to a halt. It reflects the extreme volatility of 1894, when labor-management disputes transformed into localized conflicts across Washington's rail corridors.
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