The $3,000 Offer to Salt a Washington Land Claim

OLYMPIA, Sept. 6.—[Special.]—The hearing in the McBride contest case was continued in the land office today, and resulted in some startling testimony by O. W. Bloom, a witness for the state, who testified that he was approached on the subject of salting the disputed ground. The evidence given by Bloom is as follows:

“On August 1 McBride came to my house and called me out and said: ‘I have a proposition to make to you. We want to salt this ground, and we want you to do it, and it has to be salted; d—d heavy to witnesses. If you do it we will give you an acre of land or $3,000 when we win the case. Will you do it?’ I answered that I would and McBride told me to meet Myron Topliff at 7 o’clock Friday morning, at the junction at Thirty-fifth street and Tacoma avenue, and he would give me stuff to do it with. We met according to appointment, and I presented a contract which I had written for him to sign. Mr. Topliff said he would submit the contract to Mr. McBride and we would meet again that evening at the same place. We again kept the appointment, but Mr. Topliff reported that Mr. McBride could not agree to signing the papers, stating that it might hurt his case.

“Bloom, when asked, disclaimed any intention of making a bargain with McBride, but was simply drawing him on.

“Dr. Kimball was examined this afternoon and testified to the worthlessness of the land as mineral, except in cases where the ground had been salted; returns were in mills or fractions per cubic yard. Kimball’s evidence was to the effect that there was no material difference in the character of section 16 and all the territory bordering on the eastern margin of the Sound. Dr. Kimball was of the opinion that fraud had been practiced by introducing foreign material into the ground with the intention of giving a mineral character to the land. The state will probably rest its case tomorrow. The examination on the part of McBride will continue, probably, to the middle of next week.”