A Tragic End for a Lovestruck Youth
After his romantic advances were rejected, a Tennessee man took his own life in Port Angeles.
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.
A sensational suicide occurred in Port Angeles this afternoon. S. T. Burford, formerly of Elmwood, Tennessee, shot himself before a mirror in the home of S. S. McDonald. Burford had followed the McDonald family to the city, but after his romantic attentions to their daughter, Edna, became tiresome and she requested the acquaintance cease, he grew distraught. Today, following a lovers' quarrel, he wrote letters to his parents and then shot himself through the heart with a revolver. The coroner's inquest found temporary insanity caused by love and jealousy.
“In the letters he said he could live no longer without his love.”
This reporting is a stark reminder of how 19th-century newspapers treated mental health and suicide with a mix of lurid detail and moralistic framing. It highlights the vulnerability of people moving to a frontier town to escape or pursue social entanglements.
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