A mother's desperate search from Minnesota
A Minneapolis woman writes to Seattle police, seeking word of her husband and brother who vanished after reports of a flood in the Pacific Northwest.
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.
Chief of Police Rogers received a letter yesterday from Mrs. Louise Schaefer, of 904 Fourteenth avenue, Minneapolis, asking for information of her husband, brother and a friend, who came to Seattle last November and have not been heard from since the last of February. She says that she has learned from a newspaper that while camping they were drowned by a flood during March. Matthew Schaefer, her husband, was 24 years old, and her brother, Charles Klose, was 20. The friend, whose name she says was unknown to the newspaper, was August Brewer. An investigation of the case shows that there were floods in Eastern Washington about the middle of March and on the 29th there were landslides in the Coeur d'Alene district. In the dispatches from Sprague, Davenport, Pullman, Garfield and Boise about the floods there is no mention of any case similar to the one cited by Mrs. Schaefer.
“She says that she has learned from a newspaper that while camping they were drowned by a flood during March.”
This heartbreaking notice highlights the pre-digital era's reliance on slow, erratic news transmission. Families across the country often had to rely on local police and newspaper reports to locate loved ones who went missing while working in the rugged, treacherous landscapes of the frontier.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.