Two Native Men, Joe Dick and Alex Peter, Died of Exposure
Two Indigenous men froze to death after a drinking trip went horribly wrong.
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.
On December 21, Joe Dick and Alex Peter, Indians, started to take a rowboat from this place up the river about nine miles to Mr. John McKune's, where some shingle bolts were sorted to be thrown into the river and driven to the shingle mill at this place. Mr. McKune says he hired the boys to take the boat up, and as they were trustworthy he paid them in advance. That settled it. They presumably 'loaded up on fire water' and started up the river with the boat. On the 29th, the dead body of Joe Dick was discovered in a field between the Catholic mission and the river. The next day the corpse of Alex Peter was found in an adjoining field. One of them had removed his pants and coat and had crawled under the edge of a log, evidently imagining himself in bed. Whisky flasks were found on their persons and in the boat. The coroner's verdict was that they came to their death by exposure to the weather while drunk.
“One of them had removed his pants and coat and had crawled under the edge of a log, evidently imagining himself in bed.”
The tragic death of these two men from alcohol-induced exposure highlights the profound social and health disparities faced by Indigenous populations in the region during the 1890s, an era defined by aggressive displacement. Today, the location near the Catholic mission points toward the historic mission sites that played a complex and often destructive role in the lives of local tribes.
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