The Lonely End of a Skagit Prospector
After wandering the rugged wilderness for nearly a month, an elderly miner perished in the mountains near the U.S.-British border.
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.
A few weeks ago we announced that an old man named Alexander Swift, who had gone into the Skagit mines to seek for gold, had been found by miners wandering in an almost famished state among the mountains of that inhospitable region. He had been out for twenty-nine days, and was taken into a camp, fed, clothed and started on the way towards the town of Fort Hope on Fraser river. He never reached that place. Yesterday news was received in town that the body of the lonely old man had been found near the boundary line between the United States and British territory, wrapped in his blankets and bearing evidence of having been dead many days. The discovery was made by Indians. Swift has many warm friends in San Francisco, who will be saddened to hear of his miserable end.
“The body of the lonely old man had been found near the boundary line between the United States and British territory wrapped in his blankets and bearing evidence of having been dead many days.”
The Skagit mining boom of the 1880s lured thousands into treacherous, poorly mapped terrain, mirroring the desperate search for opportunity that has defined Seattle’s history from the Gold Rush to modern economic shifts. Swift's story serves as a stark reminder of the human cost that underwrote the region's early cycles of boom and bust.
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