The Man Who Owned the Earth
A laborer from Redmond is committed to an asylum after a mental break convinces him he holds the deed to the entire planet.
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.
James O'Connor, a laboring man, aged about 40 years, was adjudged insane and committed to the asylum by Judge Osborn of the probate court yesterday. O'Connor, who is an Irishman by birth, came to Seattle from Minnesota about a year ago and soon after secured work at Redmond, near Ten Mile Point. He had met with financial reverses before coming to this state, and this so preyed upon his mind that about a week ago he lost his reason. His mania was first discovered about two weeks ago, when he commenced staking off a claim in a field belonging to a neighbor, with the intention of putting in a crop right away. He has a hallucination that he is the owner in fee simple of the whole earth and talks of selling it all off into town-sites. He also has an idea that he has immense herds of horses and cattle upon the thousand hills belonging to his vast estate, and he is in doubt if he had better hitch two horses and one cow or two cows and one horse to his carriage. He is not at all violent and the physicians think that a few weeks in the hospital for insane will restore him to his reason and take away his fancied wealth.
“He has a hallucination that he is the owner in fee simple of the whole earth and talks of selling it all off into town-sites.”
In 1889, O'Connor's delusion was the ultimate expression of the Gilded Age obsession with land speculation and property rights. Today, as Seattle faces an unprecedented crisis of housing affordability and land ownership, the irony of a man 'owning the earth' during a real-estate boom carries a sharp, melancholic sting.
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