The Sad Procession of the Snohomish Bachelors
A local scene captures the quiet, threadbare dignity of three men moving house, offering a rare, human glimpse into the isolation of frontier bachelorhood.
Single-blessedness on the move is one of the saddest sights it has ever been our lot to witness. Saturday morning might have been heard the shrill shriek of a wheelbarrow, evidencing the need of oil in its journals, and out on the street could be seen a solemn procession of three men; the first trundled along, with slow and measured tread, the piteously shrieking wheelbarrow, on which was piled an old coal stove whose rusty sides had not in many a long day been gladdened with an application of stove polish, and a few lengths of rusty pipe. The second carried an old pair of boots and a bag of stocking; the third an old, granny-slender which had seen better days, and a cracked-from stem to stem mirror. With solemn tread and no sounding of hilarity or cheer, the trio moved on to the meant house which they occupied, set up the stove and began housekeeping. But we see darkly, as it were, through a smoked glass. The mystery is no longer enshrouded. It is those old bachelors; and, as they unpacked. rusty and moss-grown in the habiliments of loneliness, filed silently into their new house, one was heard to say, with a long-drawn sigh: 'It is, but hadn't orter bin.'
“With solemn tread and no sounding of hilarity or cheer, the trio moved on to the meant house which they occupied, set up the stove and began housekeeping.”
While Snohomish today grapples with high-density development, this 1878 account highlights the 'bachelor' economy of the 19th-century frontier—a time when men often lived in communal, precarious poverty. The piece resonates as a timeless observation on the lack of domestic infrastructure and the loneliness of the transient laborer, a struggle that remains a poignant, if often overlooked, facet of the housing crisis.
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