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| Year | Stories |
|---|---|
| 1872 | 1 |
| 1876 | 1 |
| 1877 | 2 |
| 1878 | 1 |
| 1883 | 6 |
| 1884 | 1 |
| 1885 | 3 |
| 1886 | 1 |
| 1887 | 3 |
| 1888 | 1 |
| 1889 | 4 |
| 1890 | 1 |
| 1891 | 1 |
| 1892 | 7 |
| 1893 | 3 |
| 1894 | 2 |
| 1895 | 2 |
| 1898 | 4 |
| 1900 | 1 |
| 1903 | 2 |
| 1904 | 2 |
| 1908 | 1 |
| 1909 | 1 |
| 1916 | 2 |
| 1917 | 1 |
54 stories matching symptom
- Smallpox Scare in Downtown Seattle
A man arriving from San Francisco by steamship causes a panic after seeking help for symptoms at a local physician's office.
- The 'Disgusting Custom' of Victorian Child-Kissing
As diphtheria claimed lives along the Pacific Coast, public health experts in 1877 issued a stark warning against social rituals that helped the contagion spread.
- The 1886 Municipal Election: A Fight Over 'Law and Order' vs. Business Interests
As Seattle gears up for a city election, a fierce political battle erupts over the enforcement of liquor laws, city debt, and the controversial administration of Mayor Leary.
- Tragedy at Brush Prairie
After the long illness and death of his wife, a grieving man takes his own life in the room where she lay.
- The Tragic End of a Seattle Logger
After years of success followed by a swift decline in fortune, a once-prosperous logger faces the ruin of his livelihood and his mental health.
- The Health and Independence of American Women
A lively contemporary debate centers on whether the 'ill health' of American women is a result of fashion or a symptom of their economic dependence.
- The Trial of 'Mickey' McGrekan: A Window into Frontier Domestic Violence
A young woman’s struggle for survival and a legal showdown in 1887 Port Townsend reveal the brutal realities hidden behind the closed doors of boarding houses.
- A Deadly Toast in the Waterfront District
A young woman is found poisoned in a Seattle lodging house after a violent argument with a suitor over her refusal to live with him.
- The Fatal Nail: A Tragedy in San Juan Valley
A routine repair job on the family farm turns into a fatal struggle with blood poisoning, highlighting the constant vulnerability of life in 1898.
- A Deadly Jealousy in South Seattle
After shooting a neighbor in a long-standing dispute, a woman’s husband argues that years of mental illness, not malice, drove her to violence.
- A Tragic End at Sea
A sailor suffering from mental health crises committed suicide by fire while aboard the schooner Siimson.
- The Curse of the Golden Calf: Seattle’s Economic Anxiety in 1877
As banks tightened their grip on local capital, a Seattle editor warned that hoarding wealth—rather than investing in local industry and homes—was a dangerous path to ruin.
- The Great Tacoma Smelter Scam
A smooth-talking promoter arrives in the dead of winter, promises a mining fortune, and leaves a town holding the bag.
- Tragedy in the Woods Near Lone Prairie
A woman experiencing a mental health crisis locked her home and set it ablaze, killing herself and her four children.
- The predatory business of 'confidential' loans
A Seattle reporter goes undercover to expose local money lenders charging exorbitant interest rates to the desperate.
- The Quarantine Lie: How Providence Hospital’s Smallpox Cover-Up Sparked a Public Health Crisis
A desperate letter from hospital staff reveals that patients were turned away or allowed to leave while infected with smallpox, leading to a chaotic quarantine and widespread community fear in early 1903 Seattle.
- Spokane Falls Catches the 'Building Fever'
Every block in town is adding a structure, and Frank R. Moore's new brick block on Howard Street signals that the city's old capitalists believe in its future.
- The Jail Was Out of Level
Fred Neuffer was due in court for embezzlement. Instead, Olympia’s county jail became the scene of a strange one-man investigation into whether the floor itself was crooked.
- Hasheesh, Absinthe, and a Human Pelvis in the Page Murder Trial
Defense experts told a Seattle jury that a drug could explain Page's condition on the morning he shot Fraser, while the state argued he remembered everything.
- The Prisoner Who Sawed His Shackles and Blamed the Spirits
Convicted of a daylight knife attack on his wife, Thomas McGee nearly escaped a Seattle hospital jail after a guard discovered his chains had been filed through.
- The Yakima Chicken Fancier Who Saw Forty Cents in Every Lost Chick
Leonard Schott turned a North Yakima business sideline into an incubator-fed poultry ranch, sending broilers to Spokane and diagnosing his chicks with everything from rheumatism to appendicitis.
- The High Stakes 'Sing-Gamble' of the Cedar River
For over 130 hours, tribes from the Black, Cedar, and Puyallup rivers engaged in an ancient, rhythmic gambling ritual near Renton, staking their entire winter's livelihood on the outcome.
- Fifteen Minutes to Confess: The Morphine Trial of Port Townsend's Captain De Lion
A former mayor, Chilean consul and dry-dock promoter worth half a million dollars sits in superior court while his emaciated wife describes a year of morphine, delusion and a pocket watch set on the table between them.
- The Correspondent Called Spokane Poor and Dull. The Local Paper Fired Back.
In 1883, a traveling writer dismissed Spokane Falls as a speculative boomtown with no real hinterland. The local press answered point by point, defending the mills, the grain trade and the city's future.
- A State Veterinarian's 1899 Warning: Fund Animal Disease Control or Pay for It Later
Washington's biennial animal-health report counted diseased horses and cattle, traced a horse meningitis outbreak to mouldy straw in Waterville, and warned lawmakers that tuberculosis could jump between cattle and people.