Working with Rockfish Inc., the Alliance revealed to reporters that they had been studying the wreck site for years and testing their equipment on it.

The vessel had simply refused to move down the ways at Crawford and Reid, and had to be hauled into the water the next day by Captain Sutter in command of Tacoma Tug and Barge's Fairfield.

She was lightly built and apparently top-heavy, as the steamboat inspectors twice refused to issue her a seaworthiness certificate.

[3] Her captain, Percy Lermond, tasked with collecting fares, was absent from the pilot house, leaving the mate Charles Dennison in charge.

Theoretically fare collection was a job for the purser, but on the smaller vessels, it was customary for the master to perform this function.

[12] The evening was calm and somewhat clear, and as the vessel steamed west past Alki Point into the open Sound, Captain Lermond went to his quarters behind the pilot house to tally the fares.

There were cries, prayers, and groans from men and women, and the wail of a child and the shouts of those who were fighting desperately to gain the deck.

[17] Years later, in a 1913 story about Jeanie's loss off Calvert Island, the Times reported the number of passengers lost by the sinking of Dix as 54.

Mrs. Byler's sons, Charles and Christian, and their sister, Lillian, were all trapped below deck and taken down when the ship sank.

[18][19] Most of the Dix victims were from Port Blakely, and the place was hit hard, that night in the little town being described as "running of a gauntlet of shrieks and moans of grief-stricken wives and mothers ..."[20] Work stopped briefly at the huge Port Blakely Lumber Mill for the first time in the mill's history.

The circumstances of the loss of Dix were all the more shocking to the people on the Sound, who depended on the steamboats for their basic transportation.