The Masked Intruder on the Pilchuck Farm
A farmer finds a masked stranger in his cattle pen at midnight, leading to a fatal, chaotic confrontation that ends in a shooting and a coroner's inquiry.
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.
Considerable excitement was caused in Snohomish on Saturday evening last by the report that A. Haskell, a farmer living about ten miles up the Pilchuck, had shot and killed a neighbor named H. M. Shelton. The report proved only too true, as early the following forenoon Haskell came into town and gave himself into custody. There are several different versions of the affair, but the most generally accepted is that a few days before, a horse had been stolen from Haskell and he had been threatened; that on Friday night, Haskell, in company with others, saw a man with a mask on his face driving some of Haskell’s cattle down one of the lanes on the latter’s farm. The man was told several times to stop and throw up his hands, and as he failed to do so or to reply, Haskell fired. The victim, who was killed instantly (the ball having passed through his left arm and pierced his heart), was found to be Shelton, who had a black handkerchief tied over his face and a coat over his head. A check for a certificate of deposit of $200 in D. Horton & Co.’s bank and $17 in cash were found on the body.
“The man was told several times to stop and throw up his hands, and as he failed to do so or to reply, Haskell fired.”
While legal standards regarding the use of force have shifted significantly in Washington, the tension between rural land security and neighborhood conflict remains a persistent theme in local news. This incident reflects the era's frontier-justice atmosphere, where property disputes often escalated rapidly into violence.
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