The Skykomish River Tragedy

Coroner Horton returned late on Thursday night from the south fork of the Skykomish river, where he had been to investigate the cause of the death of Thomas Burgess, a saloon-keeper, whose body had been found on the river bank. The coroner left here on Tuesday morning, rode on horseback from Snohomish to Granite point, a distance of forty-two miles, before night, went on next morning to the place where the body was found and to the dead man's former home. That night he rode back to Granite point and on Thursday rode down to Snohomish, reaching there in time to catch the Lake Shore train home. The coroner says that Burgess' body was found by Mr. Farmer, who was formerly assistant prosecuting attorney, and is now holding down a claim on the Skykomish, above Granite point. It lay on a sand-bank in the river, beside a dry channel through which the river flows only at high water. He found it in an advanced state of decomposition. The coroner, after a thorough inquiry, found that just previous to Burgess's disappearance about six weeks ago, he had been on a prolonged spree at Snohomish, and had then gone up to the saloon run by himself and a man named Snyder, about twenty miles this side of the summit, on the Great Northern line, and continued his course of drinking. Snyder at last took him across the river and left him in the brush to sober up, and that was the last seen of him alive. The doctor concluded that Burgess had started to walk across the river on a foot-log and had fallen into the water. Coroner Horton described the region as full of rough men and dissolute women, where men go about with six-shooters hanging by their sides and drink stuff which is a libel on whisky.