The Mail Carrier of Port Gardner Bay
A harrowing tale of survival in the winter of 1872 when the mail route between Mukilteo and Snohomish met a sudden, icy squall.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Mr. John D. Press, the mail carrier between Mukilteo and Snohomish, felt aggrieved at an account published by us of an adventure that happened to him, which he felt was intended to ridicule him. With the assurance that we had no such intention, we cheerfully accord to him space for his own statement of the affair: 'I have been employed for the past three months to forward the mail from Mukilteo to Snohomish, which duty has been performed through all kinds of weather to the satisfaction of all. On the 26th, at the arrival of the ship Libby, I left with another in a small boat heavily laden with fruit trees. By a sudden squall, the boat was capsized. My companion, unable to swim, I was obliged to remain in the water to hold the boat bottom up that he might ride for two hours. But I clung to the mail till rescued by Messrs. Kromer, Crawford, and Vining; all of which happened in Port Gardner Bay, two miles from shore, in 20 fathoms of water. I delivered the same mail in good condition and on time.'
“I clung to the mail till rescued... I delivered the same mail in good condition and on time.”
Long before modern infrastructure connected the Snohomish River valley to the Puget Sound, mail carriers faced life-or-death commutes through the cold waters of Port Gardner Bay. This story captures the rugged, singular dedication required to keep communication lines open in early Washington—a stark reminder of how precarious the 'last mile' of delivery was for those living on the frontier.
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