The Hunter Hunted: A Seattle Man Shot for a Bear
A Seattle man traveling to Port Townsend to file for government land is mistaken for a bear and shot by a school teacher in the dense brush.
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.
Port Townsend, Sept 11—A man named Teacher, a resident of Seattle, with his son, was out this morning in Port Townsend with a guide looking for some government land. At about 10 o'clock, when passing some brush in a thick clump of cedar woods, Teacher was mistaken by O. W. Clawson, a school teacher who was out hunting, for a bear, and shot by him through the left arm with a heavy charge of buckshot. Teacher probably escaped another shot by throwing himself down and crying out to the hunter. His injuries are not considered serious. He was sent to Seattle on the mail boat this afternoon.
“Teacher was mistaken by O. W. Clawson, a school teacher who was out hunting, for a bear, and shot by him through the left arm with a heavy charge of buckshot.”
This oddity reflects the intense scramble for public land and property in the late 19th-century Pacific Northwest, where the wilderness was simultaneously a commodity to be filed upon and a dangerous frontier where a man might be mistaken for a bear by his own neighbor.
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