The Tragedy of a Lonely Life in Seattle
A man's desperate act of suicide on Commercial Street illuminates the harsh isolation and economic despair of Seattle’s early frontier days.
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.
In the boarding house of Messers. Misse and Young, a man named W. W. Baechert took his own life after thirty years of hardship. Found in his room was a letter addressed to the undertaker, Mr. Young. 'I am about to take a dose of laudanum,' the note read. 'I have no one but myself to blame if I am found dead. If you can, keep my last place of rest from being the Potter's Field. If you should find a widespread feeling on the part of the people to mark my last place, you might let Mr. Young speak to Mr. Crocker and have it fenced in.'
Investigators discovered the suicide was likely prompted by 'straightened circumstances.' Other documents showed Baechert had been admitted to the bar in his youth and had served as clerk of the U.S. District Court at Vancouver in 1862. At the time of his death, he was living in a room on Commercial Street. Two empty bottles, which had contained laudanum, were found in the room, and his body was removed to the morgue.
“If you should find a widespread feeling on the part of the people to mark my last place, you might let Mr. Young speak to Mr. Crocker and have it fenced in.”
Baechert's plea to avoid a pauper's grave reflects the chronic precarity faced by Seattle's transient population in the 1870s. Today, this struggle over dignity in death and the housing instability of the 'unhoused' remains a painful, recurring echo in our city’s ongoing affordability crisis.
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