The 'Lumberman' Who Swindled Seattle's Elite
A smooth-talking con man gains the trust of the city’s fashionable society before vanishing with thousands in unpaid debts.
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.
Seattle—Seattle business men are getting to be regular old E. Z. Marks. Not content with losing $20,000 to a bogus circus agent, they have dropped another $25,000 to an alleged lumberman named J. C. Caskey. Caskey arrived in Seattle from Michigan in 1902 and immediately established a facade of wealth, taking up residence at The Lincoln hotel and organizing the North Avon Mill company. He successfully secured credit from local machinery suppliers and infiltrated the city's high society, attending St. Mark's church and hosting lavish dinners. Having exhausted his credit and local loans, Caskey recently slipped away to California, leaving behind a trail of worthless checks, unpaid notes, and devastated local creditors.
“The Seattle business man is the easiest target at which the bunco man has ever launched his shaft.”
This story highlights a classic 'confidence man' narrative that has plagued boomtowns like Seattle for over a century. The ease with which Caskey exploited the social aspirations of the business class—trading dinner parties for lines of credit—reveals the fragility of trust in rapidly growing speculative economies.
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