The Woman on the Yesler Dock
Despondent and alone, a woman stepped to the edge of the Yesler dock ready to drown herself — until the first officer of the steamer State of Washington caught her in his arms.
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.
A not unattractive woman of about 26 years stood in a woe-begone attitude dangerously near the southwest corner of the Yesler dock on Sunday night, and as she walked nearer the brink and prepared for the final leap, exclaimed:
"May God have mercy on my soul!"
But upon finding herself encircled by the cold, cold waters of the Sound, she suddenly found the strong arms of gallant Jack Elismore, the first officer of the steamer State of Washington, wrapped tightly around her. Though she had a moment before been prepared to rush into the arms of death, she apparently had no serious objection to being in the arms of a live steamboatman, for she allowed him to carry her along the dock without resistance. Then he sat her down and asked her what she was trying to do.
"I want to drown myself," was the mournful reply. "I have got no one to love me, and I'm despondent."
Just what Mr. Elismore said then he will not tell, but he coaxed her to live a little longer, perhaps intimating that there was a large supply of love running to waste in the world. Then he escorted her to a Front street car and sent her to her home in North Seattle. He says she would not tell him her name.
“I have got no one to love me, and I'm despondent.”
The Yesler dock was the working heart of Seattle's waterfront, a place of cargo and coming-and-going where a desperate person could vanish in plain sight. The woman's plea — 'I have got no one to love me, and I'm despondent' — reads with uncomfortable familiarity in an era of loneliness and mental-health crisis. Then as now, a stranger's kindness was the thinnest line between a person and the water.
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