The Deadly Secret of the Well House
A man posing as a federal agent is found dead in a hidden moonshine still, leaving behind a curious trail of mystery.
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.
Asphyxiated by the fumes from a gas stove in his still, located in a concrete excavation housing the pump and motor on the C. A. Whitney ranch west of the cemetery, the body of E. G. De Vaul was found Thursday. He had been missing since Monday from the home of his sister, Mrs. R. B. McMurry. A searching party identified De Vaul’s car near the cemetery, leading C. A. Whitney and I. C. Hawley to the well house, where they discovered the body. Justice of the Peace M. S. Meeks impanelled a coroner’s jury, which determined the cause of death to be asphyxiation. The still had a capacity of about 15 gallons a day and contained a significant amount of moonshine. Interestingly, several local residents noted that De Vaul had claimed to be a United States revenue officer.
“An interesting sidelight was the statement of several local people that De Vaul had told them he was a United States revenue officer.”
During the Prohibition era, the tension between local enforcement and the bootlegging trade often resulted in strange, dangerous private industries. Today, the site of the former White Bluffs townsite is largely contained within the Hanford Site, a landscape forever altered by both its Prohibition-era secrets and its later industrial legacy.
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