Tragedy on the Ahtanum
A drunken altercation during hop-picking leads to a fatal stabbing and a local manhunt.
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.
On the night of September 13th a number of Indians engaged in hop-picking on the Ahtanum got into a drunken row, in which Willopo received stab wounds from the effects of which he died on the 10th of October. The wounds were supposed to have been inflicted by an Indian named Allen Satwell, who after the fracas mounted his cayuse and left for the hills. Satwell was recently caught, and on Tuesday was up before Justice Henton for preliminary hearing on the charge of murder. A large number of Indian witnesses were present and the hearing consumed the entire day. Satwell, who claims that the cutting was done by some other Indian, was bound over to the superior court.
“The wounds were supposed to have been inflicted by an Indian named Allen Satwell, who after the fracas mounted his cayuse and left for the hills.”
This case highlights the volatility of life in the Yakima Valley’s labor camps during the height of the 19th-century hop boom, where workers from disparate backgrounds faced few social protections. It reflects the era's reliance on informal, often biased, local justice systems long before modern procedural safeguards were established.
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