A Holiday Horse Raffle
A local man wins big at a Christmas horse raffle, walking away with two animals and a tidy profit.
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.
James F. Kinney, of Prosser, raffled off two horses in this city on Christmas day. The lowest throw was to take one horse and the highest the other. Mr. Kinney retained several chances and made the lowest throw; he bought the chance of the man making the highest throw for $25; so he keeps both horses, and was upwards of $150 in pocket. It was a lucky Christmas for him.
“It was a lucky Christmas for him.”
This anecdote captures the informal, gambling-adjacent social culture of early Yakima gatherings. It serves as a stark reminder of how central livestock—and the trading of it—was to the economy and social entertainment of the region before the motor vehicle era.
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