Brutal Assault at the Central Hotel
A young man of prominence is arrested after a violent attack on a woman in Seattle.
Senseless, with her face beaten to a shapeless mass, the body of a half-breed Indian woman was found at the foot of a flight of stairs in the Central Hotel by a roomer who immediately notified the police. Officers soon thereafter arrested Robert Cartwright, son of one of the wealthier men of Snohomish county, who was found in a barber shop washing blood from his hands. He admitted striking the woman, saying he had used a beer bottle as a weapon, but claims she first attacked him with a knife.
“Senseless, with her face beaten to a shapeless mass, the body of a half-breed Indian woman was found at the foot of a flight of stairs.”
This reporting reflects the era's tendency to use dehumanizing, racialized descriptors like 'half-breed' while simultaneously framing the accused attacker’s social standing as a mitigating narrative detail. Such incidents remind us that the violence faced by Indigenous women in Washington is a long-standing crisis that historically went under-reported or was obscured by the status of the perpetrators.
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