One Punch in a Tacoma Saloon, and Three Days Later a Man Was Dead
A Seattle commercial traveler needled a dog, then a bartender. He walked the streets with a fractured skull for three days before he finally asked for a hospital — and his last coherent claim was that he'd been sandbagged.
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.
Knocked against a safe in the Peerless saloon by a fist blow struck by George Botts last Thursday afternoon, P. C. Warwick, a Seattle commercial traveler, died last night at St. Joseph's hospital from the effects of the wound.
Warwick was about the streets from the time of the accident until Sunday night, when he became so weak and dazed that he asked to be taken to a hospital. He suffered from a fracture of the skull.
According to witnesses of the fracas, Warwick brought about the affair of his own accord. He was, it is said, slightly intoxicated at the time, and had attempted to pick a quarrel with several of the persons in the saloon. Just after Botts, who is a bartender at the Bohemian bar, had entered the place, Warwick kicked heavily at a dog lying on the floor.
Botts remonstrated, and Warwick started to fight. The battle waged evenly for as much as a minute, when Botts struck the traveling man on the jaw, sending him flying backward. Warwick fell against the safe, but jumped up and commenced fighting with the blood streaming from his head. Spectators interfered and Warwick was taken to his room at the Tacoma hotel.
The same evening he was out again, with his head bandaged up, and commenced drinking heavily, it is said. Not until Sunday night did he appeal to a doctor, and asked to be taken to a hospital. Dr. Dewey, who attended him, pronounced it a serious case from the first, and gave little hope for the man's recovery.
Last night he sank rapidly, managing to say at the last that he had been struck with a sand-bag. This statement, according to witnesses, is not to be believed. Coroner Shaver investigated the case today and announced that he would hold an inquest over the death of Warwick. No arrangements have been made for the funeral. He is little known in Tacoma.
“Last night he sank rapidly, managing to say at the last that he had been struck with a sand-bag. This statement, according to witnesses, is not to be believed.”
The single fatal punch is still a fixture of Pierce County courtrooms — Washington prosecutors have spent the last decade pushing felony charges in one-punch deaths where a single blow drops a stranger onto concrete. What reads here as a saloon brawl was, legally, a homicide investigation that began the moment Warwick's head hit the safe, in a downtown blockscape of bars and hotels that has been rebuilt several times over since.
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