The Sausage Maker’s Long Walk for Justice
After his Skagit County homestead was ransacked, a local sausage vendor spent two weeks trudging through mud to find an officer who would actually serve a warrant, only to be met with a revolver in the woods.
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.
“I am only a poor Dutchman,” said Emil Heinig, the hot sausage vender, yesterday, “but I know right from wrong, and I want to tell you about the wretched manner in which the officers of Skagit county administer the laws. Though foreign born, I am an American citizen. When I came to the Sound three years ago, I took up a pre-emption on the Skagit, about eight miles east of Edison, and lived on the place with my family. Finally, I exhausted every dollar I had in the world in improving the place, and my wife took sick. I moved my family to Seattle to earn money, leaving my household effects in the house on the ranch.
When I returned, I found the house had been broken open. Everything had been stolen except a large cooking range. I made inquiries, and several persons told me they had seen articles belonging to me in the house of one of my neighbors. I worked for two months to save $10 to trace up my stolen goods, then went to the justice of the peace at Edison to get a search warrant, but that officer was always away from home. I then went to another justice, five miles distant, who told me he had sickness in his family and did not care much about the job anyway.
I returned to Seattle and employed a lawyer to draw up a search warrant. Back in Skagit, the constable at Edison told me to go to Brown, another constable. Brown sent me to another fellow, who was drunk. By this time, almost every man, woman, and child in Skagit county knew I was trying to get an officer to serve a search warrant on my neighbor. My neighbor heard I was coming and moved everything out. While on my way to my ranch, I met my neighbor. He rode up with a drawn revolver and shouted, ‘You are the man who accused me of your theft. Get down on your knees and meet your God, for I am going to kill you here and now!’ I braced up and said, ‘You are a base and wicked man, but you dare not murder an unarmed, defenseless man with a wife and seven children depending on him.’ He hesitated, and I watched my chance and broke into the woods. I have walked over 200 miles through mud to induce some Skagit county official to do his duty, and nearly got killed for my pains.”
“I have walked over 200 miles through mud to induce some Skagit county official to do his duty, and nearly got killed for my pains.”
Heinig’s struggle to find accountability within a local legal system that was either indifferent or actively hostile to his plight captures the recurring feeling of bureaucratic alienation. Today, as many Seattle residents feel similarly ignored by overloaded and inaccessible judicial systems, the image of a man walking 200 miles in the mud to demand justice remains a visceral, if painful, reflection of the struggle for equal protection.
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