The Tragedy at No. 21 Nixons Street
A Puget Sound trader’s sudden descent into madness leaves a wife dead and himself in his blood on the floor of their attic home.
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.
SAN FRANCISCO, April 5. — Capt. A. F. Souther, master of the schooner in the Puget Sound trade, shot and killed his wife and then committed suicide at half-past eight o'clock last night, at No. 21 Nixons Street, near First.
Officers, who answered the police call, went to the premises, a one-story attic frame dwelling, and at the head of the stairs, stretched at full length in a narrow hall, found the dead woman, and in a bed in the rear part of the room, they found Souther with an I.M. revolver in his right hand and a bullet wound in his neck.
The woman was found to have received a wound in the back of her head, on the right side, and in the chest. The woman was attacked in her night clothes and her gown is powder burned, which shows the weapon was held close to her body when fired. From the position of the bodies and the condition of the room, it appears that after the husband and wife had retired, he occupying the side of the bed nearest the wall, he turned and fired at his wife, wounding her in the head. She arose and turned facing him, when he fired again wounding her in the breast. She then passed out of the room and fell at the threshold door, which is close to the stairs. After shooting her he placed the weapon at his own neck and fired, the ball ringing upwards.
The other occupants of the house were asleep when the firing commenced and know nothing of the circumstances or motives which prompted the act.
This 1877 account of a domestic tragedy in Seattle’s early waterfront district highlights the isolation and volatility of life in a boomtown where maritime captains lived on the edge of financial ruin and social obscurity. The specific location, No. 21 Nixons Street (now First Avenue South), was once the heart of Seattle’s rougher boarding house row, a place where the line between respectable citizen and desperate outcast could vanish overnight.
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