The Confidence Man of Washington Street
A grifter exploited local tensions to con Chinese merchants out of $600 under the guise of buying off a prosecutor.
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.
For some months, a big fellow has hung about the low gambling dens and bagnios of Washington Street, subsisting on the earnings of a wretched wreck of what was once a woman. He carried a 'gun' with him on all occasions and stood ready to blow the packing out of anybody that got in his way. But he is no longer a resident of Seattle. On Monday last, he made a 'raise' and sought 'green fields and pastures new' under the following circumstances: He told several Chinamen who were 'Jacksonville merchants' that they were liable to be indicted by the Grand Jury and had better raise a sum of money to buy off the Prosecuting Attorney. The astute heathens readily fell into the adroit trap and collected some $600 for that purpose, with which the stalwart individual left for Tacoma, taking his 'chum' along with him. It was a clever swindle and he got away with the baggage, but we think the long-tailed fraternity will indulge in considerable profanity between this time and sunset.
This 1877 account captures the volatile atmosphere of anti-Chinese sentiment, where predatory grifters leveraged systemic xenophobia to extort vulnerable residents. Today's Seattle struggles with similar power imbalances, though the targets and methods of exploitation have shifted from frontier-era shakedowns to modern gentrification pressures.
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