Cattle Rustlers Reclaim Their Horses in Spokane
After a timber speculator used stolen horses as collateral for a bond, the original owners simply took them back.
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.
Several days ago the Post-Intelligencer published the story of how N. H. McLean, the timber land shark formerly of this city, had been arrested in Spokane for fraudulently purchasing sixty-three horses from Jones & Lloyd, of Dayton. An attorney named N. E. Nuzum went on his bond, McLean in return giving him a bill of sale of the sixty-three head of horses. About 3 o'clock yesterday afternoon, the drove of sixty-three horses fell into their rightful owners' hands. Two or three horsemen put in an appearance on the range near the Spokane & Northern depot, where the animals were grazing, and in a trice they had the whole herd stampeded and in a gallop. The band headed in the direction of Whitman county. The parties in charge of the horses here discovered the trick that had been played upon them almost immediately, but they were powerless to check the mad rush of the animals. Out of the sixty-three horses, Mr. Lloyd, of Dayton, is said to be the owner of sixty of them.
“They had the whole herd stampeded and in a gallop.”
This frontier-style repossession highlights a period where property disputes were often settled by direct action rather than the courts. Today, the legal infrastructure for such claims is so robust that self-help measures like this would likely lead to immediate criminal charges for all parties involved.
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