A Brick in a Leavenworth Street Ends a Railroad Man's Life
An engine wiper is jailed at Wenatchee for the drunken-brawl killing of a Great Northern locomotive engineer who leaves four children behind.
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.
WENATCHEE, Nov. 3 — Charles Van Buskirk has been lodged in jail here charged with the killing of H. D. Castleburg at Leavenworth. So far as can be ascertained the trouble began in a drunken brawl. The two men were in a saloon at the time of the fight and it was carried out into the street, when Van Buskirk picked up a brick and killed the deceased.
Castleburg was a locomotive engineer in the employ of the Great Northern railway. Van Buskirk is an engine wiper and was in the employ of the same company. It is said that Castleburg has a sister, Mrs. Edward Westbrook, living at Seattle. Another sister is the principal of the Leavenworth school. He had been married twice, and divorced twice. He leaves four children, two sons and two daughters. The sons are supposed to be at work in Seattle or somewhere on the Sound.
“The two men were in a saloon at the time of the fight and it was carried out into the street, when Van Buskirk picked up a brick and killed the deceased.”
Leavenworth in 1903 was a hard-working Great Northern division town, not the Bavarian-themed village tourists know now, and its saloon fights were part of the rhythm of railroad life. The detail that stays is the family: a man twice married, twice divorced, with four children scattered toward the Sound, killed over an argument that began inside a bar. Violence like this rarely made more than a paragraph, and the paper records the death of an engineer with the same brevity it gave a livestock sale.
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