The Great Potato Swindle on the Wishkah
A logger attempts to pull a fast one on a local rancher, leading to a heated riverboat confrontation over the weight of seven sacks of spuds.
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.
Joe Keith, who has a logging camp up the Wishkah, was coming down the river this morning on the steamer Josie after a fruitless search up-country for potatoes for the boys in camp. He saw seven sacks of fine-looking potatoes in the bow of the boat and learned they belonged to a rancher bringing them to Aberdeen to sell. Joe immediately began to dicker, but the rancher wanted ten dollars for the seven sacks. Joe offered seven and a half spot cash, but the rancher would only let down a dollar and a half. Joe then swung round, and wanted to know how many pounds of potatoes he had there. 'Not a pound less than 770,' said the rancher. 'Tell you what I'll do,' said Joe, 'if you've got 770 pounds of potatoes there, I'll give you ten dollars for them; if there is an ounce less, you let me have them for six dollars.' 'I'll hold you to that,' said the rancher. As soon as the wharf was reached, four sacks were dumped on the scales and only pulled down 412 pounds, and the potatoes went to Joe at six dollars, for the three other sacks weighed only 235 pounds. Joe happened in at Emery's grocery a few minutes afterwards, where his man was disposing of some butter. As soon as Joe went out, the man wanted to know who that was. When Emery told him that was a logger up the river, the rancher said, 'Not much he ain't; he's one of these here 'broncho' steerers who travels up and down the river to beat ranchers out of their potatoes.' Joe swears the boys on the boat tried to do him up by soaking the sacks.
“Not much he ain't; he's one of these here 'broncho' steerers who travels up and down the river to beat ranchers out of their potatoes.”
Early Aberdeen relied on these river-based mercantile transactions to feed the crews of the timber boom. The tension between the 'broncho steerer' (the hustler) and the local rancher reflects the rough-and-tumble nature of a town defining its rules of trade in the 1890s.
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