The Tragedy Under Saddle Mountain
A lonely settler is found dead by his own hand, deepening the mystery surrounding a parcel of land marked by consecutive deaths.
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.
Lying across his bed with a .22 caliber rifle by his side, J. Hartmann, a bachelor, was found dead in his cabin near Saddle Mountain last Friday by J. E. Newby, a neighbor. Mr. Newby notified the officials of Grant County, and the inquest held the first of the week found that the dead man had shot himself through the heart with the rifle. Hartmann came into the country last fall, buying his 20-acre tract from Albert Toepfer. The land is on the east side of the Columbia in Grant County, directly under the 'saddle' of Saddle Mountain. Toepfer died recently in a Seattle hospital under peculiar circumstances, and the news of his death seemed to prey on Hartmann’s mind. He had been acting strangely for several days prior to his death, and from his appearance, it was thought by neighbors who visited him Thursday that he had poisoned himself before resorting to the rifle.
“He had been acting strangely for several days prior to his death.”
The rugged isolation of the Columbia Basin has always attracted dreamers, but as this 1915 account shows, the harsh reality of frontier settlement often ended in profound loneliness. Today, the area remains sparsely populated, a haunting reminder of the high human cost once paid by those trying to cultivate the arid landscape.
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