The Cabin on the Woods
A remote Clallam County murder is solved when a mysterious note arrives at the sheriff's office.
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.
John Robinson, who is charged with the murder of William Schaling near Beaver, Clallam county, last November, was arrested in Auburn yesterday by Deputy Sheriff C. H. Brown. Schaling lived in a lonely cabin in the woods about three miles south of Beaver, and he and Robinson were partners, living much at each other's cabin. They were last seen at Beaver on election day last fall, but not missed, as it is the usual thing there for squatters to be absent months at a time. Schaling had been missing so long that it was taken for granted he had abandoned his claim, and one of the Conpaaki brothers determined to locate a new settler upon it. Early in September, they broke into the cabin and found the decomposed remains of Schaling on his bunk, wrapped in a blanket, where they appeared to have been for eight or nine months. The back of the skull was smashed as if by a sledge, and a 32-caliber bullet fell out during the examination. Sheriff Woolery of King County received an anonymous note reading: 'Robinson, of Beaver, works in Slaughter sawmill.' Enclosed was a clipping from the Post-Intelligencer. Armed with this, Deputy Sheriff Brown found Robinson at the sawmill; he is now in the county jail.
“The back of the skull was smashed as if by a sledge, and while the skull was being examined a 32-caliber bullet fell out.”
The transition from the wild frontier of the 1890s to an industrializing Auburn serves as a grim reminder of how many vanished into the woods of Washington during the homestead era. While the 'anonymous tip' was a staple of 19th-century detective work, the reliance on a newspaper clipping to track a fugitive highlights the vital role of the press as a decentralized information network in a pre-digital age.
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