The Brutal Ambush Near Dubuque
A multi-year saga of land-use violence concludes as the mastermind behind a bloody road-access dispute is convicted.
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.
At 8 o'clock this morning, the jury in the case of James Robinson for the murder of Fred Schmidt returned a verdict finding the defendant guilty of murder in the second degree. It is probable that the judge will sentence Robinson within a few days. As this was Robinson's second trial, it is thought the verdict will stand. George Shoultes and Fred Schmidt were murdered on December 27, 1892, by two boys named George Robinson and John Livingstone, who were incited to the crime by James Robinson and John White. Shoultes and Schmidt, who were at one time residents of Seattle, were farmers living three miles east of Dubuque. They 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 some trees that John Robinson had felled across the road. George Robinson and John Livingstone were in ambush with rifles, and when Shoultes and Schmidt reached the trees, the boys fired on them from behind. Footprints in the snow told the story of the ambush and assassination. When 'Old Man' Robinson was first tried for the murder of Shoultes, his attorney, James Hamilton Lewis, managed to get a 'kid' jury and he was acquitted, though the same evidence convicted White and the others.
“Footprints in the snow told the story of the ambush and assassination.”
Conflicts over private roads and property access remain a volatile flashpoint in rural Washington, occasionally escalating into the kind of violence that defined this 19th-century frontier dispute.
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