The Ghost of Olympia Found
After years of speculation, the identity of a mysterious fugitive hiding in Olympia is revealed as a disgraced Kentucky cashier.
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.
Who was 'Hall'? This is a question that has been asked a thousand times in the last few years, but never answered. He was T. C. Calvert of Bowling Green, Kentucky, a defaulting cashier, short in his accounts by $15,000, who left for parts unknown in 1870. Readers will remember the arrest in Olympia, in December 1879, of 'S. W. Hall' by a deputy sheriff of Macoupin County, Illinois, on a requisition for the person of George H. Halliday. Hall was claimed to have been taken back to that county, and after examination found not to be Halliday, and discharged. It has always been thought here that the deputy sheriff exchanged men on the road between Olympia and Illinois. Such was not the case. After being released in Illinois he went to North Carolina and engaged in school teaching. Last summer his friends got a pardon for him from Gov. Blackburn of Kentucky, and he returned to his old home in Bowling Green. A few days ago he told an uncle of Mr. Val. Milroy something about his experience in Washington Territory, where he said he had been eight years. He spoke of General Milroy and family and others in Olympia, but declined to tell the name he went by here. He has changed greatly since he left Kentucky in 1870, being more fleshy, stoop-shouldered and quite gray-haired. His identification is complete, and at last the world knows who Hall was.
“Who was 'Hall'? This is a question that has been asked a thousand times in the last few years, but never answered.”
Long before the digital era made it impossible to 'disappear,' a man could move to a frontier town like Olympia, adopt a pseudonym, and live for nearly a decade before being discovered. This story captures the precarious nature of identity in the 19th-century West, where one's past was only as close as the nearest lawman's pursuit.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.