A Child's Fatal Duty
A land dispute in Snohomish turned deadly when a mother armed her eight-year-old son to defend their homestead.
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 POST has been placed in possession of the following facts in relation to the shooting affray, which resulted in the death of Michael Padden, in Snohomish. It seems that there was a dispute about a piece of land between Clark and Padden, which had been cleared by Clark. Padden came and began building a fence around the premises. Clark being away from home at the time, Mrs. Clark gave a double-barreled shot gun to her eight-year-old son with instructions to drive him (Padden) off the place. The boy went out with the above instructions, and Padden coming toward him, the child emptied the contents of the gun into his body with fatal result.
“Clark being away from home at the time, Mrs. Clark gave a double-barreled shot gun to her eight-year-old son with instructions to drive him off the place.”
This 1880 report of a deadly land-use dispute mirrors the raw, sometimes violent, friction that comes with rapid frontier settlement—and resonates with the contemporary, albeit less lethal, tensions surrounding land use, property rights, and rapid development in the Pacific Northwest today.
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