The Palouse Massacre: A Family Destroyed by Religious Mania
A farmer takes his own life after killing his wife and children in a brutal religious mania, leaving a chilling note behind.
On Sunday, as the family of Henry Cochrane were going to attend services in the school house about three and one-half miles north of the city, on the Farmington road, they noticed the cattle of R. D. Johnson in the corral. When Mr. Cochrane investigated, he found a scene of horror. R. D. Johnson, one of the wealthiest farmers in the Palouse country, had apparently fallen into a religious obsession. He had poisoned his wife and children with strychnine, and when the children cried out in the resulting fits, he shot them. He then turned the revolver on himself. Notes found scattered about the house, written in a cramped, misspelled hand, indicated that Johnson believed the world was too wicked to live in and that he was 'saving' his family by sending them to heaven. Mrs. Johnson and three children—Willie, 12, and a daughter, 7—were victims. The younger girl, though gravely wounded, survived the massacre initially.
“This world is too wicked to live in. I don't want to live any longer in it. I can't bear to leave my family in it.”
This 1888 tragedy, occurring during a period of intense rural isolation and shifting social norms, highlights the fragility of mental healthcare in early Washington. Today, the Palouse remains a sparsely populated agricultural region, but the stigma surrounding mental health crises—which often delayed intervention in the 19th century—continues to be a focus of modern rural civic health discussions.
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