Video: Seattle's chain gangs, explained

Knute Berger sat down with Robert Mak to explain Seattle's little-known chain gang period.
Crosscut archive image.

Knute Berger

Knute Berger sat down with Robert Mak to explain Seattle's little-known chain gang period.

Picturing Seattle's early history, you might imagine pioneers coming over the Cascade passes; Northwest Native Americans gathering shellfish; early settlers logging and mining, certainly. But chain gangs?

They certainly weren't on our historical radar — at least not until Knute Berger dug into the city's turn-of-the-20th-century system of crime and punishment. Then things got ugly.

Dark, dank cells, crowded with vermin; little food; typhoid outbreaks; beatings and plenty of discrimination. Chain gangs, it turned out, were just the beginning.

Last week we ran Knute's four-part series on the topic, which you can read here — Life on a Seattle chain gang, Life in an early Seattle jail, How women & socialists toppled Seattle chain gangs and The surprising way Seattle used to deal with street harassment.

And below, Knute talks with Seattle Top Story's Robert Mak about the topic.

  

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About the Authors & Contributors

Knute Berger

Knute Berger

Knute “Mossback” Berger is an editor-at-large at Cascade PBS.