A Botched Rescue on the Okanogan Road
A deputy's long ride to arrest a suspected murderer ended in a roadside gunfight, with the prisoner shot dead—apparently by his own son—and the young man still at large.
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 Saturday last J. L. Lynn, who runs the stage line north from Ellensburg, returned from Okanogan with an account of a fearful tragedy at the place known as the twenty-seven-mile post on the Q. & O. road, on Saturday, September 7th. Near Okanogan lived a Mr. Paine and family, who bore a rather bad reputation. Paine had been suspected of murder many times and threatened with hanging, but had escaped. Recently the authorities learned his whereabouts and obtained a requisition. The warrant for his arrest was placed in the hands of I. Hubbard, a deputy sheriff of Spokane County, who, with a young man named Aiken, undertook the capture. Paine was seized without much trouble and handcuffed, but his daughter appeared on the scene with a couple of revolvers and made things lively for Hubbard and Aiken until they got the wagon and forced her to give up her arms. Paine was then put into Hubbard's hack and the party started off. Paine's son, a youth of about fourteen, learned what had happened, armed himself, mounted a horse and followed. When about twenty miles from home he came upon the party and dismounted at a distance of about yards. The third shot fired instantly killed his father. Hubbard returned fire with revolver and rifle, but a bullet struck him in the chin and he fell. Aiken, who had been holding the horses, thought his companion dead. One of the horses had been shot, so the young Paine cut the other horse loose and made his escape. The young Paine is still at large, and no trace of him has yet been found.
“Paine was seized without much trouble and handcuffed, but his daughter appeared on the scene with a couple of revolvers and made things lively for Hubbard and Aiken.”
This 1880s Okanogan shootout shows how thin and personal rural law enforcement could be: one deputy, a borrowed wagon and a family armed with revolvers. It also shows the era's papers turning a messy arrest into a frontier morality tale, with the suspected outlaw's son cast as both avenger and accidental killer.
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