A Seattle Hotel Fire Reaches a Family in California
Already recovering from a shipwreck, a Santa Ana woman learns that her mother and teenage brother were killed in Seattle’s recent West Street hotel fire.
Mrs. Frank Ely, of Santa Ana, is just recovering from a long spell of illness. Her mother, Mrs. Louis Otterson, and her brother, Andrew Otterson, aged 15, were victims of the recent West Street hotel fire in Seattle. At the time she heard this news, Mrs. Ely had not yet recovered from the shock of being wrecked on a steamer some months while en route from San Francisco to Los Angeles. The shock of her mother's and brother's deaths prostrated her so that it was some time before it was known whether or not she would survive. She recovered, however, and is now rapidly improving.
“The shock of her mother's and brother's deaths prostrated her so that it was some time before it was known whether or not she would survive.”
Hotel and rooming-house fires were a routine urban nightmare in 1895, and Seattle’s rapid growth produced cheap lodgings where a single blaze could bereave families across the country. The item survives only because a former Seattleite was reading the Los Angeles papers; today disaster news still reaches distant relatives almost instantly.
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