The Apple Orchard Bandit
An Olympia fruit thief develops a bizarre, tactical routine to raid orchards under the cover of night, only to be stopped by a shotgun-wielding guard.
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.
Olympia, Wash.—A peculiar thief, who persistently pretended to be married, has been prevalent in this city for some time, and some of the place owners have said that at the present time they from a dozen to over a dozen apples are stolen daily, and they are at a loss to know the cause of the thefts. The complainant is usually a man, but in some instances, where it has been at a large scale, even it has been in the type of a letter.
Mr. T. L. Brown, who lives in the vicinity of West Olympia, has recently observed evidence of the theft which has been in the history of entering his orchard at night, picking of the fruit which there to be found in great abundance. Mr. Brown made this fact known to the watchman, Mr. McClellan, who, upon hearing this, kept watch at 3 o'clock on Monday morning, armed himself with rifles and torches for the thief in question. He kept no longer to scout the orchard and took his stand to watch than the thief crawled over the fence, out of the darkness of the night, and built a make-shift place himself there in and began his morning meal. At this juncture Mr. McClellan called him to the proceedings in the shape of well-directed shot that entered the barn floor and so startled him that a second shot laid him low. When cleaned and brought to this city he was found to weigh nearly four hundred pounds.
“The complainant is usually a man, but in some instances, where it has been at a large scale, even it has been in the type of a letter.”
Orchard theft in Olympia in the 1880s feels like a distant, rustic echo of modern urban property disputes, but the anxiety over 'unaccountable' losses remains a constant in Seattle/Olympia civic life. Just as 19th-century orchard owners felt vulnerable to 'mysterious' night-time raids, contemporary business owners and residents often frame petty theft as an inexplicable, growing epidemic that requires armed or aggressive intervention.
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