Dark Humor on the Seattle Frontier
A grim tale of early Seattle life and the macabre way settlers identified human remains.
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.
One of the best storytellers about the early days of Seattle is John O. Scurry, the engineer, and one of his best relates to a peculiar method of identifying a corpse. One evening many years ago he was sitting with the whole Terry family in Charles Terry's house. Suddenly the door half opened and the lugubrious face of Lemuel Holgate peered in. In slow, sepulchral tones he said: 'E. L., we've found your Uncle Al's bones.' E. L. Terry asked: 'How do you know they are Uncle Al's bones?' 'Because they are so long,' came the answer in just as solemn tones. That broke up the party, and the bones were respectfully buried again after this unseemly digging up in the course of some excavation in the little settlement.
“Because they are so long.”
Early Seattle settlers often lived in close proximity to the reality of death as the town site was carved out of the wilderness. This anecdote reflects a frontier cynicism that helped people cope with the grim tasks of expansion.
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