The Great Escape at Steilacoom
Five convicts at the state penitentiary staged a daring, daylight breakout, leading to a desperate shootout in the woods.
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.
This afternoon at 2:30 o'clock, five prisoners who were at work in the sash and door manufactory at the Penitentiary at Steilacoom broke simultaneously from work, rushed in a body through the door and ran towards the forest on the east side of the Steilacoom Creek floor. As soon as their attempt was discovered, several guards fired upon the runaways, killing one instantly and seriously wounding another in the abdomen. Their names were Wise, Tate, Moore, Kearney and Garro. Wise was shot in the lung, the bullet penetrating his heart, from which he fell dead. Garro was badly wounded, and his recovery is doubtful. Tate escaped to the woods; the others were captured. Tate was the ringleader. He was recently brought to the prison to serve fourteen years for highway robbery. Tate was captured about 10 o'clock by guards who were on the search and were attracted by the sounds and note from a fire which he had made in the woods. He made no resistance, being unarmed.
“Wise was shot in the lung, the bullet penetrating his heart, from which he fell dead.”
This 1880s account of a prison break at Steilacoom captures the perennial tension between the state's penal institutions and the surrounding community. Today, Steilacoom remains a site of historic significance, though the dynamics of incarceration and community safety have shifted from armed forest pursuits to a more complex modern debate about reform and institutional location.
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