Cattle Rustling on Fidalgo Island
Anacortes men are brought to the Mount Vernon jail to face trial for cattle theft as local legal officials clash over court jurisdictions.
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.
Mount Vernon, Oct. 18. George Sommers of Anacortes was brought to the county jail today to await trial in superior court on a charge of grand larceny. The complaint sworn out before Justice Heard charges Sommers and Jacob Lwernsberry with shooting and stealing cattle on Fidalgo Island, where they also conducted a butcher shop. Lwernsberry gave bail. J. H. Smith has been appointed justice of the peace in Mount Vernon precinct by the county commissioners, though Justice Anable, elected last spring, will contest Smith's right to act. After Anable was elected the commissioners divided the district, and the dispute is over the division of the district between the two justices.
“The complaint sworn out before Justice Heard charges Sommers and Jacob Lwernsberry with shooting and stealing cattle on Fidalgo Island.”
Fidalgo Island, once the site of open-range cattle disputes and local political bickering, is now a dense hub of tourism and regional industry. The bureaucratic confusion over judicial precincts in 1893 mirrors the ongoing struggles of rural Washington counties to balance local representation with centralized administrative shifts.
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