The Sheriff's Long Ride to Nowhere
An urgent report of horse theft near Sunset leads to an exhausting night mission that turns out to be a classic case of mistaken identity.
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.
The sheriff's office often has false alarms about stolen horses, but Deputy Sheriff Steward recently answered an emergency call that surpassed them all. It was reported by telephone from Sunset that a span of horses had been stolen from John Mills. The deputy made a forced night drive of 20 miles, only to discover that the horses had simply wandered over a hill, out of sight, and had never actually left the owner's property. Such calls continue to cause the sheriff's office much unnecessary trouble and expense.
“He made a forced night drive of 20 miles, only to find that the horses had but passed over a hill out of sight from the house.”
This brief account highlights the physical isolation of early 20th-century Palouse farmers and the heavy burden placed on law enforcement when communication was limited to intermittent telephone lines and long horse-drawn commutes.
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