WELCOME TO
BENTON COUNTY, WASHINGTON
in the heart of the Columbia Basin

IN EARLY 1890's

Northern Pacific Dining
Car Scraps Caused Crisis


By BURTON 0. LUM
-	Tri-City Pioneer


It was about 1:30 p.m. The Northern Pacific's crack passenger train had just 
served its famous dinner in its dining car.  The dining car waiters and help had collected the 
scraps of the meal and had thrown them out on the railroad tracks before the train entered
 the West portal of the Kennewick Bridge which spanned the Columbia River at this point.  
The Kennewick bridge had ten spans and was over three thousand feet in 
length.  Pasco was situated about a mile east of the east portal of the bridge.  
Dogs, coyotes and magpies did a very thorough job of cleaning 
up these scraps after every train. The early day Charles E. Lum's horse spread 
extended from the high.railroad fill that connected with the West 
portal of the bridge, north along the Kennewick bank of the Columbia for several miles.  
His ranch house was near the bridge and his corrals, 
barns and other buildings were near.  All trains by railroad regulations had to stop before 
entering the bridge.   This glimpse at the people from the cities was quite an event each day 
to we children and in  fact to the whole family.  One particular afternoon our two dogs, Jodie 
and Caesar.,  had run to the railroad track where the dining car scraps had just been thrown 
out and  were picking out the steak-bones and other dog delicacies as had been their habit 
for years,  when to their surprise the new Kennewick Telegrapher came pumping his 
speeder with a box on it  to pick up the scraps for his couple of dozen chickens.  
He was angry because the two dogs had 
beaten him to the best of it and reached for his twenty-two rifle and shot our Jodie
 (a small liver colored female Irish spaniel) in the hind leg.  She and her son Caesar, 
who was half Newfoundland and a very large black dog, came running home--Jodie on 
three legs and whining.  The entire family had seen the whole affair.  Father grabbed his 
Winchester rifle, his face was white with anger.  
My mother, a little pioneer woman only five-feet in height and but one 
hundred ten pounds in weight, jumped up and put both her arms around Father's neck and 
held on and told him to care for the wounded dog first.  Father said all right and she took 
her arms from his neck. Father examined Jodie.  The bullet had only entered the skin of 
the leg but had not hurt the bone.  Father probed the bullet out and put arnica on the 
wound.  Father by this time had gained control of himself and took  Mother in his arms 
and kissed her, saying: "Chick, something snapped  for a minute, but I am all right now."  
Father was an expert shot.  The  telegrapher. was in easy 
range if father had shot at him he would have killed him.  A neighbor,       Charles Jayson 
Beach, had seen the dog shot and hastened to Kennewick Station to see the telegrapher 
that did the shooting who happened to be a new  arrival from the East.  Beach told  him 
that in the West the owner of an animal protected the animal if it was 
on an unfenced open range and that the railroads had claim 
departments that paid damages to the owners of the stock that were hurt on their 
unfenced track and right of  way.  Father always avoided a 
meeting with the telegrapher because he was afraid his temper might give way.  
As the shooting of the innocent dog became known to the 
other pioneers, they in turn would have as little as possible to do with him; 
and so in a few months, the Northern Pacific had another telegrapher at Kennewick.
Jodie and Caesar were never molested again in their feasts of dining car scraps.  
Poor Jodie four years after the shooting was killed one night 
by a large lynx while she bravely tried to guard our chicken coop.  
The lynx was caught in a steel, trap and weighed over sixty-five pounds.  
Caesar at this time was with my brother Charley at our Yakima River ranch.  
Upon his, return he seemed to mourn the loss of his mother Jodie.  
He was the only dog in this part of the country who alone could catch and kill a 
coyote, and no one ever knew how many coyotes he killed.  
He would taunt the coyotes until he got close enough to them, and then with a 
burst of speed like a terrier catching a rat, he would grab the 
coyote in the small of the back and break it.  Several times he had eaten poisoned 
meat put out by the pioneers for coyote bait, but he managed 
to get home when we would place a stick in his mouth like a bridle bit, bend his head 
back and pour warm lard down his throat for an emetic.  
This happened several times, and once too often.  He got home, but there was no one 
there to give him aid, and he died on the back porch.

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