The Stranger Who Threatened to Level the Town
A vengeful drifter vows to erase a chaotic mining camp, only to return a year later and find it replaced by a civilized city.
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.
The mining town of Bunko once had 10 shanties, 20 tents, and a population of 30 men who drank whiskey, carried knives and revolvers, and stabbed and peppered each other on the slightest provocation. One afternoon, a resident known as Wicked Jim of Arkansas was told by a local official to pack up and get out. Jim complied, but as he rode away, he shouted back: 'I spit upon your town of Bunko. I can build a better one of sand and grease! In less than a year I'll dump your town into the river and hold the site for a private graveyard!' Twelve months later, Wicked Jim and his companions returned to find that the saloons and shanties had vanished, replaced by brick buildings, gas lamps, an opera house, a hotel, and a streetcar line. Confused and standing in the middle of a modern city, they were immediately arrested and sentenced to 90 days in the workhouse.
“The lion can't partner with the jackal! The eagle can't mate with the buzzard! Slinks, sluggers, curs and reptiles, I go!”
This piece of frontier satire reflects the late 19th-century obsession with 'boosterism' and the rapid, often jarring transition from lawless mining camp to orderly, commercialized town. It captures the exact moment when the grit of the frontier was scrubbed away by the arrival of infrastructure and municipal law—a theme that persists in modern Seattle as neighborhood identities are rapidly rebranded by development.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.