Robbed at the Depot: A Warning to Night Prowlers
A Chinese laborer for E. H. Bennett is set upon by two men near the railroad crossing and relieved of his wages — and the paper warns the robbers to be out at night no more.
One night this week a Chinaman in the employ of E. H. Bennett, while returning home from the city, was seized up at the railroad crossing west of the depot by two men, and robbed of what little money he had on his person. If highway robbery is the game, it would be well for those two worthies to be out at night no more, for a gun will put a period to this sport.
“If highway robbery is the game, it would be well for those two worthies to be out at night no more, for a gun will put a period to this sport.”
Anti-Chinese violence and robbery were routine in 1880s Spokane, part of the same current that produced the 1885-86 expulsions across the Northwest. The paper's sympathy here is thin — it cares about the crime, not the man — but the incident records a Chinese worker's presence and peril in the town's daily life.
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