A Hotel-Keeper's Last Night: The Saloon Shooting at Sultan
George Britton, 28, shot through the groin in a saloon row in the Snohomish County timber town of Sultan, is told he will not last the afternoon — so he sends for a preacher and a lawyer and makes his will.
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.
George Britton, the Dunlap hotel-keeper who was shot in the groin last Wednesday during a saloon row at Sultan City, in Snohomish county, made his will yesterday and also gave his dying statement.
Ever since his removal to this city, twenty-four hours after he was shot, his life has been despaired of. The attending physician at Providence hospital, to which place he was taken immediately upon his arrival in the city, declared the wound a fatal one and death was expected hourly. But he lingered along, and Saturday it was thought he might live. Yesterday, however, he took a change for the worse, and at 12 o'clock was told that he would probably die during the afternoon; that it was hardly possible he would live until night.
Upon this he sent for Rev. Clark Davis and also summoned Louis H. Legg, of the firm of Jenner, Legg & Williams, and made his will and dying statement. He told the preacher that although he had lived a wild life he had been raised a Christian. His mother, Mrs. Robert Britton, lives at St. John, N. B. Britton is only 28 years old and had a splendid constitution.
At 12 o'clock last night Britton was still alive, and it is said that he may live twenty-four hours yet.
“He told the preacher that although he had lived a wild life he had been raised a Christian.”
Sultan was a logging and rail town in 1892, and its saloons were where timber crews settled arguments. Britton's story survives only because he was carried twenty-four hours by train and wagon to Providence Hospital in Seattle — the nearest real surgery — where a priest and a lawyer could reach him in time to take down his last words. The paper never says who fired the shot, or whether anyone was charged; the dying man's statement was the only witness that mattered, and the file leaves it hanging.
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