A Father’s Anguish in Tacoma
A daughter’s infatuation with a disreputable drug clerk leads to public scandal and an arrest in Portland.
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.
Miss Jacks, of Tacoma, was arrested in a disreputable house at Portland yesterday at the instance of her father, proprietor of the Palmer house. Last winter, she stated she would run away with C. W. Bushnell, a drug clerk, if her parents did not let her marry him. Bushnell had recently secured a divorce from his Walla Walla wife after Judge Beverly scathingly questioned his character, noting Bushnell had admitted to suffering from a disease when he married that girl at Walla Walla. It appears Bushnell had been accused by the girl’s father, a Walla Walla city marshal, of criminal intimacy and was forced at the point of a revolver to marry her. Despite the father’s efforts to shield his daughter, including threatening newspaper men, the girl remained infatuated with the worthless clerk, and both eventually left the city.
“He was so anxious to shield his daughter at the time Bushnell was refused his divorce that he threatened to shoot newspaper men if they published any item connecting his daughter with Bushnell.”
This story highlights the historical lack of autonomy for women and the extreme lengths to which parents went to control their daughters' associations, often resulting in public shaming. The paternalistic language used by the press reveals a period where women's romantic choices were treated as a form of social contagion.
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