There were moments as terrible as other moments were sad. Whirling on Attorney Vance the father cried out: "When you are in a wood and a terrible storm overtakes you; when the huge trees are up-flung from the earth and crash on all sides of you; when the lightning plays and the thunder peals, you do not notice the buzzing of gnats and mosquitoes. After what I have borne, after what I have had to go through, after the sorrow which has been mine, after what I have suffered, the attacks of the attorney for the state, saying I lied, pass me without harm. Crack your little whip! Crack your little whip across my mangled shoulders if you will—I can bear it! If the whiplash of Vance's tongue was all I had to fear; if that was the only shadow across the path of the future, I should be the happiest man alive!" He likened his son's brain to a violin string. "It was tightly drawn. So long as no harsh hand was drawn across it, so long as it was carefully touched, it gave forth a sound of melody. But when came fever, when came a great overmastering, impassioned love, the string snapped. The reason vanished; that was all." "Death," he cried. "Do you think I fear death! Do you think the darkened mind of my son broods on the sting of death? Were I to go to him now and tell him we two had to die, we both would face it unflinchingly. It is not death. it is dishonor, we combat!" In his appeal to the jury not to disagree he begged: "If the sun has to set, let it go down now! If you are going to strike, strike now! I can bear the blow. Do not falter. For God Almighty's sake make a verdict and make it now! I can not go through this again." With all of this emotionalism, sweeping, as it did, everything before it, there was a continually recurrent marshaling of the facts as adduced by the testimony; the lawyer was always at the father's elbow, and an eternal “Why?” cracked out as he dealt with the state's surmises to show that even by its own attempts to explain the boy's conduct they admitted his abnormality. When he concluded, on the evening of February 1st, it seemed certain that he had won his case, the fee of which was his son's life. The next morning Attorney Mackintosh made an able closing argument for the state and at 4:40 in the afternoon of February 2d the case went to the jury. Two ballots were taken and at 9:40 that night a verdict of "not guilty by reason of insanity" was given. Everywhere the verdict was received with approval and applause, not so much through sympathy for the unfortunate youth as for the heroic father who had won his fight. Chester Thompson subsequently was committed to the insane ward at Walla Walla and though released on June 13, 1908, after a jury trial and on the recommendation of the prison physician, he was subsequently recommitted to the Medical Lake Hospital near Spokane to which he went without a guard, giving himself up to the superintendent and telling him that he had come there for treatment. He is there now. According to hospital physicians his case later developed into a typical one of paranoidal insanity and it appears that had the Emory tragedy come later, instead of when the youth's delusions were comparatively hidden, the famous trial never would have been necessary at all. CHAPTER XLVIII GREAT INCREASE IN SHIP BUILDING HALL BROTHERS AND THE HALL TYPE OF SAILING VESSELS-MORAN BROTHERS AND THE BUILDING OF THE BATTLESHIP NEBRASKA-THE LAKE WASHINGTON CANAL-VANCOUVER AND THE INTERSTATE BRIDGE. The story of the rapid increase made in Western Washington's ship building industry in 1916-17 is a story of men ready, willing and able to meet a large and sudden demand by the utilization of potentially great natural resources. It is a story of modern magic-a sort of Alladin's Lamp performance by which shipyards sprang from the ground almost over night. Nowadays the constructing and equipping of a modern ocean-going freight warehouse of great capacity and speed is a matter of but a comparatively short time—and the end is not yet. Ships of wood and ships of iron and steel, of "wind-jammers" and swift steamers, slide down the ways into the water in such numbers that the people of Seattle and Tacoma, the home cities of most of the large plants, have lost interest in launchings-they are events of weekly occurrence, a part of the daily routine. Such, however, was not the case back in 1873 when Capt. Isaac Hall and his brother, Capt. Winslow Hall, laid the foundation upon which they built the successful Hall Brothers' shipyard of Port Ludlow, and later, Port Blakeley. The Halls were New Englanders who saw great possibilities in the long, straight, strong, resisting Douglas fir timbers of Western Washington. They developed the Hall type of "wind-jammer," a vessel of beautiful lines, good speed, capacity and easy handling. Two generations of Halls have built sailing vessels at Port Blakely and while they were not, by any means, the pioneer builders in Western Washington, they were, before the great ship building era of the last two years set in, the largest builders of wooden vessels on the Sound. When Robert Moran took his fleet of twelve river steamers north to the Yukon he was at the head of the largest ship building plant north of San Francisco. Moran Brothers & Company, in April of that year (1898) launched the United States torpedo boat Rowan. It gave them a place in the nation's ship builders of the better class and led to the building of the battleship Nebraska. Robert Moran and Will A. Parry, then secretary of the company, went to Washington for the opening of the Nebraska bids. The two men were greatly surprised when it was found that their bid was lower than that of any other competitor, but the secretary of the navy took all the joy out of this victory when he announced all were too high and that he would call for new bids. The Seattle men undertook to argue the matter and the secretary told them they could have the contract, provided they would lower their price $100,000. They had figured very closely and knew that any such decrease would mean a loss. The secretary was asked to hold the matter in abeyance until Moran and Parry could return to Seattle and consult their friends. The secretary agreed and the two men were soon back in Seattle. The newspapers started a campaign to raise the $100,000 and thus bring the building of the Nebraska to the city. The money was pledged, the contract closed and July 4, 1902, the keel of the first Washington-built battleship was laid with impressive ceremonies in which Governor McBride, of Washington, and Governor Savage, of Nebraska, made speeches and drove the first red hot rivet into the keel. October 7, 1904, the Nebraska was launched, Miss Mary Mickey, daughter of Gov. John H. Mickey, of Nebraska, was sponsor. Another big celebration featured the event and when the ship was given her official trial trip down the waters of the Fucan Straits she fully met the expectations of both the Government and her builders and gave added importance to Western Washington's standing as a manufacturing and ship building district. Another important Federal activity that was attracting attention about this time was the ship canal from Salmon Bay to Lake Washington. This great undertaking, now an accomplished fact, had its inception at a Fourth of July celebration held on the shores of Lake Union in 1854. Thomas Mercer, whose homestead claim bordered the lake, addressed the small crowd of people present and suggested that the "Hyas Chuck," or big water of the Indians, be named Lake Washington while the "Tenas Chuck," or little water, be called Lake Union, because, as Mercer pointed out, of the possibility "of this little body of water some time providing a connecting link uniting the larger lake and Puget Sound." The suggestion met with popular approval, but it was not until 1860 that any steps were taken toward digging the canal. In that year Harvey Pike began to dig a ditch across the portage between the lakes. Pike depended upon his own labor and a spade, his idea being to let the water from Lake Washington cut the ditch out, once the flow was started. In 1867 a report of the board of engineers for the Pacific Coast included Lake Washington and Lake Union in a recommendation for a naval station. This was the first notice the lakes had received from the Government. For years the project was kept alive by the organization of private companies. All kinds of plans were made for all kinds of canals in a number of different places including the dredging of Beacon Hill in the southern end of Seattle, the dredging of a canal from Elliott Bay direct to Lake Union, one from Smith Cove through the Interbay district and the one finally dredged from Salmon Bay. Companies failed and the question got into politics where it caused many a row. John H. McGraw was elected on a ticket whose slogan was, "Dig the Canal!" It was injected into the old Seattle-Tacoma fight and then June 11, 1906, Congress granted the necessary authority and the whole matter was turned over to the Federal Government. Major, later Brig.-Gen. H. M. Chittenden was placed in charge of the work, surveys were made, immense dredgers began digging out the earth, the lower part of the Ballard townsite was filled in, great stone and concrete locks were built and July 4, 1917, just sixty-three years after Mercer had suggested the canal, its official opening was the leading feature of another Fourth of July celebration on the shores of Lake Union. But few persons were present at the first celebration; at the last great crowds of people lined the shores of both lakes, the 1 |