The Great Escape: Two Prisoners Vanish from Seattle’s Basement Jail
In a display of audacity and desperation, two men held on smuggling and liquor charges crawled through a torn-off board in a water closet to flee the U.S. Marshal’s improvised prison beneath the Clancy Building.
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.
During the session of the court, a small room in the basement of the Clancy building, on Washington Street near South Second, has been utilized as a prison by United States Marshal Hamilton. Yesterday at 4 o'clock there were 45 prisoners in this improvised jail and in half an hour after there were only 43. In the interval two prisoners, Ben Lundy and William Brown, had taken advantage of the confusion incident to the serving of supper to make their escape, though there were two guards in the room.
They entered the water closet and a board was torn off, either by themselves or a confederate outside. Through the opening thus made they got into the alley next to the Standard theater and from there it was an easy matter to get into the street.
Ben Lundy was arrested on the sloop Emerald in Fort Discovery Bay, on January 10 for attempting to smuggle Chinese and opium into the territory. William Brown was under arrest for having sold liquor to Indians.
The prison from which the escape was made is a miserable place. In it were crowded 45 whites and Chinese, and the air is as foul as it is possible to conceive. The men when they lie down on the straw furnished almost entirely cover the floor. It is said that vermin abound among them owing to the poor facilities offered for washing the inmates and their clothes.
This account of a jailbreak from a cramped, unsanitary basement holding cell highlights the precarious nature of early federal law enforcement in Seattle. The description of the 'miserable place' with foul air and vermin mirrors modern critiques of overcrowded detention facilities, reminding us that the struggle for humane incarceration standards is an ongoing one.
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