The Captain, the Thief, and the Midnight Chase
When a suspected cattle rustler boarded a steamer to flee across the border, a determined captain navigated a tense confrontation at the Olympia wharf.
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.
On Tuesday morning, a man came running down the wharf of Olympia, out of breath, shouting, 'Captain Parker, there is a thief on my boat.' Captain Oil Parker, who was cast off at the time, said to the passenger, 'Have you a warrant for the arrest of the man you want?' 'No, sir, but if you will just wait till I go to town and swear it out, I'll return,' shouted the captain, as he rang the jingly bell and headed the steamer Messenger for Tacoma. When the Messenger was a boat twelve miles below, the steamer Willie was sighted coming up the Skookum Bay. A passenger on it, Schooley, signaled, and said: 'I would like to be put on board the steamer Messenger and will pay you for your trouble.' 'Sure, give me a dollar and I'll transfer you to the other boat.' The transfer was made and the passenger soon comfortably located on board the Willie, headed for Arcadia. On the arrival of the Messenger at Tacoma, the first person Captain Parker noticed on the wharf was Schooley, accompanied by a policeman and a deputy sheriff. 'I thought I told you to go to Olympia?' the captain asked. 'So you did, but I came on horseback,' said Schooley, 'so I could ride to identify the thief you have on board, and for whom I have a warrant.' No one was allowed to land until the boat had been searched, but the desired man could not be found. 'Where is that fellow with a blue shirt on?' asked Schooley. 'Away,' said the captain. 'I transferred him to the Willie, just off Steilacoom. What do you want of him?' 'He is a thief,' replied Schooley. 'He lifted a whole herd of cattle belonging to Ike Eilin, sold a mortgaged farm, and everything else he could get his hands on, and is skipping out with the proceeds. I followed him all the way from Olympia to Steilacoom, but the fellow is now walking over to Hood's Canal, from which point he can reach British Columbia in spite of our efforts to stop him.'
“He lifted a whole herd of cattle... sold a mortgaged farm... and is skipping out with the proceeds. I followed him all the way from Olympia to Steilacoom.”
Long before the high-tech pursuit of modern fugitives, this story captures the wild, localized nature of justice in the 1880s, where an entire criminal manhunt could hinge on a dollar-transfer between two small steamers. It highlights a period where the 'Wild West' was defined as much by maritime logistics as it was by the open frontier.
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