The Skeleton in the Nailed-Up Cabin
A grizzly discovery in a lonely Clallam County cabin reveals a forgotten crime.
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.
The corpse of William Schilsing was found last Monday in his cabin on his ranch, three miles south of Beaver. The house had been nailed up and the place apparently abandoned by its owner since last November. On Monday two young men, John Konopaski and Charles Wroupe, believing that the claim was abandoned, proposed to take it. They examined the nailed-up house and found the skeleton of a man under a pile of blankets and rubbish in one corner. An investigation disclosed the fact that the skull of the man had been hammered with an ax or a sledge. A bullet of 32 caliber was also found imbedded in the skull. The flesh of the body was entirely gone and the clothes had been gnawed into tatters by mice or rats. The scene of the murder is a very lonely place in the woods in an unsurveyed township, twenty-five miles south of Clallam Bay.
“The flesh of the body was entirely gone and the clothes had been gnawed into tatters by mice or rats.”
Unsurveyed timber claims in the 1890s were often sites of lawlessness and isolation, where a missing person could remain undiscovered for months. This story captures the precarious, often violent existence of laborers in the remote reaches of the Olympic Peninsula.
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