The Trial of 'Old Man' Robinson
A jury acquits a man accused of orchestrating a brutal ambush murder, leaving a partner to face the gallows alone.
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.
In the superior court at 10 o'clock last evening, the case of the state against Robinson having gone to the jury, Judge Denny sentenced John White to be hanged for the murder of Shoultes and Schmidt last December. The sentence was in accordance with the verdict returned by the jury at the June term. At 10 o'clock this morning, the jury in the Robinson murder case brought in a verdict finding James Robinson, better known as 'Old Man' Robinson, not guilty. The verdict caused general surprise, which has turned almost to indignation. There is strong talk among a certain element of lynching Robinson, but it is probably nothing more than talk. Their verdict places the whole case in a peculiar position: White has been tried, convicted and sentenced, while James Robinson has been tried and acquitted on the same evidence. The murders of George Shoultes and Fred Schmidt at Dubuque, Snohomish county, on December 22, were committed by George Robinson and John Livingstone, who were incited to the crime by James Robinson and John White. The victims were farmers who had trouble with their neighbors, Robinson and White, about a road which the latter had tried to close. On the day of the murder, they went out with axes to clear away trees that James Robinson had felled across the road, only to be ambushed and shot.
“The verdict caused general surprise, which has turned almost to indignation. There is strong talk among a certain element of lynching Robinson.”
This case highlights the volatility of frontier justice, where personal disputes over land access could escalate into lethal violence. The indignation expressed by the community over the Robinson acquittal reflects the era's fragile faith in the court system, an early example of the tensions between formal legal processes and the vigilante impulses common in the 19th-century Pacific Northwest.
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