The Land Agent Who Cashed a Draft on a Man Who Never Existed
After the federal land agent's suicide, Seattle started talking: $4,800 drawn on a mythical San Franciscan, a friend's wine cellar drunk dry, and not enough cash left in the estate to bury him.
Since the publication this morning of the statement made by the late General Land Agent concerning the Schulze shortage, stories have cropped up concerning the dead man. While for the most part lacking confirmation, there are two that may have some foundation in truth.
One is that a few days before Schulze made practical use of his studies of human nature, he went into a city bank and borrowed the sum of $4,800 in the rawest manner in the world. His credit being good at the bank, he wrote a draft on a man in San Francisco for the amount named, received the cash, strolled out, swore at Henry, his coachman, to show that he was in his usual health and spirits, and drove off. When the draft reached San Francisco Schulze had gone to another field of action. Just then it was discovered that the man he drew on was a myth. What became of the $4,800 is a mystery. There was little of it left when he died, for the administrators say there was not enough cash on hand to pay funeral expenses.
The second story is that Schulze drank up a choice lot of wine Paul F. Mohr left here when he went to New York about three years ago. The wine is said to have been worth between $1,500 and $1,800. It was stored at the Union Club, and permission was given to Mr. Schulze to use some of it. Recently, so the story goes, Mr. Mohr sent out for some of the wine, but a solitary bottle of Chartreuse was all that remained. Attorney D. E. Stevens, Mr. Mohr's attorney here, was seen in relation to the wine story by the Post-Intelligencer correspondent. He denied the truth of the tale and said there was absolutely nothing in it.
It is reported today that not long before he killed himself Schulze told State Senator Dechebach, of Ocosta, agent of the Olympic Land and Investment Company, that the land department needed money, and asked him to remit what money he had on hand. Senator Dechebach sent him $70, all of the company's money he had on hand. It was found that this money was misappropriated, no record of the payment of it being on the company's books.
“What became of the $4,800 is a mystery … there was not enough cash on hand to pay funeral expenses.”
A public land agent with good credit at the bank, a real-estate syndicate's cash moving through his hands, and a paper trail that vanishes — the 1895 version of a story Washington still tells about land offices and insider dealing. The first accounting arrived only after the man was dead, and the estate could not even cover the funeral.
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