Found Dying in a Cesspool, a Laborer Takes His Last Secret With Him
Jack Kane was pulled unconscious from the Eagle Mill Co. grounds south of the Great Northern tracks. A missing watch, empty pockets and friends who suspect foul play left Newport with a death it could not explain.
Saturday morning about 10 o'clock Jack Kane, a man who had been in this vicinity for several years, was discovered lying unconscious in a cesspool on the property of the Eagle Mill Co., south of the Great Northern tracks. He was naturally in a terribly filthy condition, and died within an hour and a half after being taken out, without recovering consciousness. The body was taken to Miller's undertaking parlors, where it is still held, while Mr. Miller is endeavoring to get into communication with relatives in the East. It is thought he came from the vicinity of Council Bluffs, Iowa, but up to this time no responses have been received to the telegrams sent to various places where he had been living. Kane was about 60 years old. He had been working in mines and logging camps in this vicinity for some time. When last seen at about 10 o'clock Friday evening he was sober, and there is no way of telling how long he had been in the cesspool. No money was found on his clothes and a watch he had worn was missing, which causes some of his friends to believe that he may have met with foul play and been thrown in.
“No money was found on his clothes and a watch he had worn was missing, which causes some of his friends to believe that he may have met with foul play and been thrown in.”
A laboring man's death in an industrial cesspool — pockets empty, a watch gone, foul play suspected but unproven — reads today like the suspicious deaths that still pass quietly among transient workers. The Eagle Mill and the Great Northern tracks have long vanished from Newport's south side, yet the question of who speaks for the men who drift between mines and logging camps has not gone away.
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