Tragedy in the Mount St. Helens Backcountry
A toddler is maimed after an accident with a hatchet in a remote squatter camp.
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.
Castle Rock, May 7—While playing with a hatchet, the 4-year-old son of a man named Couch, a squatter on unsurveyed land in the Mount St. Helens district about forty miles east of this city, chopped off two fingers of his 20-month-old sister’s right hand and injured a third digit so badly that it had to be sewn up to save it. The third and fourth fingers were completely amputated.
“While playing with a hatchet the 4-year old son of a man named Couch, a squatter on unsurveyed land... chopped off two fingers of his 20-month-old sister.”
This story highlights the extreme isolation and lack of social services for families living on the frontier of the Washington territory in the early 20th century. Today, 'unsurveyed land' has been mapped and integrated into the public land management system, but the struggle of rural, isolated families remains a quiet, recurring theme in the Pacific Northwest.
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