The Ambush Near Dubuque
Two farmers were shot dead in the snow by young men lurking in the woods, leaving the community reeling.
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.
SNOHOMISH, Dec. 26.—The bodies of George Shouites and Fred Schmidt, the two farmers who were shot dead by two young men named Robinson and Livingstone, three miles east of Dubuque last Thursday afternoon, were buried in Woodlawn cemetery yesterday at 5 p. m. Health Officer Limerick held an autopsy on the bodies, disclosing several bullets had entered the victims' bodies. The guns were identified as forty-eighty-caliber Winchester rifles. The bodies were discovered near a schoolhouse by Mrs. Helena Kuntz, a sister of Shouites, who had heard rapid firing after the men went out to clear trees. No signs of a scuffle appeared, leading to the belief that the victims were ambushed from the rear. Robinson and Livingstone are currently in the county jail awaiting trial.
“The heart was nearly shot away.”
This 1892 frontier murder case, while brutal, highlights the isolation of Snohomish County settlements before the landscape was fully transformed by infrastructure. The event remains a grim reminder of how interpersonal feuds and access to high-caliber weaponry have long shaped rural anxieties in Washington.
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