The Sad Mystery of Alfred Peterson
A lonely traveler dies in a Seattle hotel room, leaving behind only tax receipts, a scrap of land, and a collection of melancholy poetry.
In looking through the papers found on the person of the young man who committed suicide at the Gold Bar Hotel during Tuesday evening, in the hope of getting some clue to his antecedents or the address of his friends, it was learned that his name was Alfred Peterson, instead of Christian Peterson as the papers first suggested. Among his effects was a road tax receipt for the year 1884, signed by Robt. Woodward, of District No. 12, and a poll tax receipt for 1885, signed by W. G. Palmer, Auditor of Walla Walla county. There was also a well-worn plat of a township of land in Chehalis county. The remains were buried in the Masonic Cemetery. The poor fellow had in his pocketbook quite a collection of short poems, cut from newspapers, among which was the following: 'What is hope? A vanishing rainbow / Children follow through the wet; / 'Tis not here—still yonder, yonder / Never once found it yet. / What is life? A thawing iceberg / On a sea with sunny shore; / On we sail, it melts beneath us; / We are safe and seen no more. / What is man? A foolish baby; / Vainly strives, and fights and frets / Demanding all, deserving nothing, / One small grave is what he gets.'
“What is man? A foolish baby; / Vainly strives, and fights and frets / Demanding all, deserving nothing, / One small grave is what he gets.”
This 1885 account of a stranger dying alone in a Seattle hotel room mirrors the profound isolation and lack of social safety nets that remain a stark, underlying theme of the city's modern housing crisis. While the city has grown and modernized, the figure of the 'unidentified drifter' struggling with poverty and despair remains an enduring, haunting fixture of the urban landscape.
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