The Mayor of Gilman's Violent Vengeance
After discovering his wife was coerced into an affair, the Mayor of Gilman took matters into his own hands in a public beating that transfixed the town.
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.
The mining town of Gilman has for the last week been stirred up by a sensation which culminated yesterday in the filing of a divorce suit by F. V. Davis, the mayor and principal of the public school, alleging as grounds the adultery of his wife with George Parks, ex-postmaster of the town. Davis had previously taken satisfaction from Parks by giving him a good thrashing at the Gilman depot in the presence of the whole town. Davis heard that Parks had been circulating a report of intimacy with Mrs. Davis. He went to Tacoma, where Mrs. Davis was studying art, and received confirmation. Davis then went to Gilman resolved on vengeance. On Thursday morning, when the population was gathered at the depot, Davis and his brothers knocked Parks down on the platform and beat him until friends pulled him aside and put him on a train. At a hearing for assault, Davis pleaded guilty and made a speech recounting how Parks had abused his position as postmaster to manipulate and threaten his wife. Davis read his wife's affidavit, which stated that Parks used force and threats to coerce her, and that she had remained faithful to her husband since June 1892.
“Before I would deliberately ruin a friend's family I would bare my breast to the assassin's bullet or burn my hand off inch by inch in the blazing furnace.”
This story highlights the volatile social climate of 1890s Washington, where 'frontier justice' was still a common performance of masculinity in small towns. The 'Gilman' mentioned here is modern-day Issaquah, a town that underwent significant transformation from a rough mining settlement to the corporate hub it is today.
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