The Violent Path of a Border Raider
A profile of a man whose life of violence—from the Mexican War to the Indian Territory—ended in a Seattle jail cell.
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.
Captured in the Choctaw Nation in 1885, a man named Miller is currently detained in the United States jail in Seattle. At 58 years of age, he claims to have killed 30 men in his lifetime. The first man he killed was at a dance in Mississippi. He was tried for the crime and acquitted. He claims that the killing for which he was brought here occurred in his own house in January, where he killed a prominent young Choctaw named Israel Fulsom. This killing, he claims, was an accident; he says Fulsom was drunk and drew a pistol, and in trying to wrench it from him, it discharged, the bullet entering Fulsom's side. Miller served throughout the Mexican War in Captain B.H. Cooper's company and participated in the battles of Orizaba, Monterey, and the City of Mexico. During the war between the States, he was a captain in General B.H. Cooper's command, taking part in the battles of Wilson's Creek, Prairie Grove, Elk Horn, and Cabin Creek. Miller says that if he killed any one during the war, they don't count in his list of thirty. He has a wife and three children, and is very well fixed, having a large farm near Jimtown, well stocked with horses, mules, and cattle.
“He was tried for the crime and acquitted. He claims that the killing for which he was brought here occurred in his own house.”
This profile of a frontier 'desperado' illustrates the mythmaking of the late 19th-century American West, where violence was often framed as an inevitable byproduct of 'rough service.' Today, Seattle’s history is still grappling with the legacies of these expansive narratives, contrasting the rugged individualism of the era with the reality of how systemic violence was actually documented and prosecuted.
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