Seattle Fires Back at 'Rough Town' Slander After a Sandbag Robbery
A Vancouver paper reported a traveler was sandbagged in Seattle and sneered at the city's vigilance committee. Seattle's editor says the whole thing is false.
About midnight a man by the name of P. Sharps, who arrived in Seattle from Portland, was attacked by two footpads who came up behind him and knocked him senseless with a sandbag, presumably, and then robbed him of a large sum of money, said to be a considerable amount. The vigilance committee, or the scantling across the trees in Occidental Square, seem to intimidate the footpads. We guess Seattle is a rather 'rough' town.
Where the first of the foregoing items had its origin we do not know, but we found the two coupled together in the Vancouver Register. As there was no truth whatever in the first paragraph, the comment and stricture in the second falls flat. There is no positive proof of any man acting the footpad in or near this city since the summary action of the Committee of Safety on the 18th of January.
“We guess Seattle is a rather 'rough' town.”
Seattle has always argued with how outsiders see its downtown—'rough' in 1883, 'unsafe' in later booms and busts. The editor's insistence that the crime never happened, alongside the nod to vigilante 'Committee of Safety' justice, shows how quickly public-safety fear can become a fight over the city's reputation.
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