The 'Dead Horse' Auction of 1892
Hundreds of curious Seattleites crowded a Commercial Street warehouse to bid on the mysterious, unclaimed cargo of the Northern Pacific Express Company, turning forgotten packages into a city-wide gamble.
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.
The 'dead horse' sale of unclaimed packages by the Northern Pacific Express Company yesterday drew a great crowd to the store-room at 212 Commercial Street, where it was conducted by A. F. Bell, of Bickerton & Bell. The spectators numbered 700 or 800, and filled the whole room and overflowed to the sidewalk. Mr. Bell was kept hard at work from 10 o'clock in the morning till 6:15 in the evening, selling everything imaginable, from a box of mineral specimens to a package of patent medicine. No man knew what he had bought until the sale was over, for the purchasers were given checks showing the number of the packages they had bought, and the goods were not delivered until the sale concluded. In all, over 1,400 packages were disposed of and about $2,500 was tallied. When the purchasers opened their packages they were treated to many surprises, agreeable and otherwise. One man paid $1.75 for what proved to be a fine gold watch. Another got a silver watch for $10. A gold ring and a bottle of medicine realized $4.10. A dollar and a half paid for two samples of terra cotta from Arizona. Trunks brought anywhere from $1 to $15, valises $2 to $3, quilts and beds $2 to $5, sewing-machines $12, $15 and $18, and a lot of printing material $12. The crowd was composed mostly of workingmen, and many of them invested to the extent of $25 or $30.
“No man knew what he had bought until the sale was over... When the purchasers opened their packages they were treated to many surprises, agreeable and otherwise.”
Long before modern 'Amazon returns' liquidators or blind-box unboxing videos took over the internet, Seattle residents were lining up in 1892 to gamble their hard-earned wages on the contents of abandoned parcels. This historical 'blind auction' culture offers an uncanny reflection of today’s obsession with the mystery and treasure-hunting potential of unclaimed retail inventory.
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