The Wild, Wild East

EVEN INTO THE '20s an outlaw atmosphere prevailed on the Eastside where brawls and stabbings were common and shoot-'em-up bank robberies were big news.

Gunfire shattered the quiet downtown area of Bothell as three masked men in a stolen car escaped in a hail of bullets with about $3,000 in loot from the Bothell State Bank.

The bank president gave chase but was left in the dust near Kirkland.

When it was over, two members of the River Rat Gang from Everett were dead and two others were arrested.

It was June 5, 1925, the middle of the Roaring '20s.

Rogers Hornsby and Babe Ruth were on their way to winning batting championships in the National and American leagues.

The Washington Huskies and Navy had played to a 14-14 draw in the Rose Bowl, while varsity rowers placed second and junior varsity took top honors in the National Intercollegiate Rowing Regatta in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Bothell was a thriving community of about 600, mostly loggers, sawmill and shingle-mill workers, produce and dairy farmers and people who worked in local businesses.

A "Wild West" atmosphere lingered those days on the Eastside, which was far removed from the more urban Seattle area across Lake Washington. Shootings, stabbings, drunken brawls and free-for-all fights were common in the small logging and mining towns scattered along the lake and in the close-in Cascade foothills from Black Diamond to Duvall.

Bank robberies, though, were big news, and two shoot-'em-up-style heists in Bothell and Carnation caught the public's attention.

Articles from The Seattle Daily Times describe that June day in Bothell when carpenter Thomas Underhill first saw the black Buick touring car with the three masked men inside drive onto Main Street. Remembering a robbery at the bank the previous January, he shouted a warning and became the first target of the bandits.

One robber leaned from the car and began shooting at Underhill, who dodged behind a parked car that was soon riddled with bullet holes.

The town marshal, S.E. Hitsman, and his son, H.E. Hitsman, ran to a hardware store a few doors from the bank, grabbed rifles and ammunition from behind the counter and climbed to the roof of a pool hall across from the bank.

Entering the bank, one robber held Ross Worley, the bank cashier, and Vaughn Bosley, assistant cashier, at gunpoint while the other rifled cash drawers and grabbed a bag of money from the open safe vault. The third bandit stood near the front door.

Outside, the driver of the getaway car waited.

As they ran out the bank door, the bandits were greeted by rifle fire from the Hitsmans and later from behind by Worley and Bosley, who had grabbed rifles from the vault.

A shot from Worley's gun hit one robber, who was pulled into the car by his partners. The car sped off as bullets flew.

Bank President A.G. Worthington was outside when the robbers fled, and he jumped into his car, chasing them as far as Kirkland before he was outdistanced.

Two of the robbers were hit by gunfire and died - Jimmy Pollock and George Jones. Another man was wounded and arrested in Portland and the fourth was arrested in Vancouver, Wash.

The loot from the robbery was never recovered.

The bank building still stands on Main Street, now occupied by the Bothell Nutrition store.

Another foiled robbery

Equally spectacular was the foiled bank robbery in Carnation on Thursday, Aug. 13, 1924. It was the stuff dime westerns were made of.

Carnation, incorporated 12 years earlier, was a logging boom town of some 530 residents along the Snoqualmie River.

Tolt Avenue, a wide dirt road, speared through town. Scattered along both sides of the roadway were a variety of businesses, including the Snoqualmie Valley Bank.

The Seattle Daily Times account told this story:

"Dramatically interrupting an attempted daylight hold-up at the Snoqualmie Valley Bank at Carnation, formerly known as Tolt, at 2:15 o'clock yesterday afternoon, Sheriff Matt Starwich and six deputies shot and killed D.C. Malone, alias A.J. Brown, leader of the bandit band, and captured the driver of their automobile."

A few days before, Malone had tried to hold up a Seattle restaurant but couldn't open the cash register. His bad luck continued when he ran up against Starwich, a tough lawman known for his flamboyant style.

On learning of the planned robbery, Starwich staked his deputies around town.

"So confident was Starwich that he invited all newspaper reporters and photographers attached to the Court House to go to Tolt, warning them to remain in hiding until the bandits were caught," reported The Times.

Starwich armed the deputies with sawed-off shotguns and revolvers.

He put three deputies in a small room in the bank while he and two deputies hid in a small shed across the street.

Isadore Hall, bank vice president, agreed to serve as the teller while the regular teller was sent home.

Noon passed; the posse ate lunch and returned to their posts. At about 2 p.m. a car drove slowly into town, passed the bank, turned around and came back. Two men jumped out and ran into the bank while one remained at the wheel. Another man approached on foot from where the car had turned around and walked into the bank.

Starwich and his deputies approached the driver.

"Stick 'em up," the sheriff said, according to the story.

"The driver stuttered . . . his hands didn't go up," the story recounts. "Starwich grabbed him by the shoulder, hauled him out of the car and felled him with a blow on his jaw."

Inside the bank, Malone jumped over the counter and then heard Starwich's voice outside. Suddenly, he turned and ran toward the vault only to be met with the bullets of the deputies who stepped from the back room.

Still firing, Malone staggered backward and hit the informant, Ted Lashe, who died later in the day.

Wounded a dozen times, Malone kept firing until he was felled by a shotgun blast and died.

During the exchange, Deputy Virgil Murphy was hit in the left thigh.

Later, deputies figured more than 50 shots were fired during the melee.

This report includes information from "A History of Tolt/Carnation, A Town Remembered" by Isabel L. Jones.

------------------------- Matt Starwich was the law -------------------------

King County Sheriff Matt Starwich was a legend in his own time, often using his fists instead of a gun to take a criminal into custody.

The short, strong, barrel-chested Austrian immigrant who spoke six languages was pressed into a sheriff's posse in 1902 tracking down the notorious "Cayuse Harry" Tracy who once headed up the famed Hole In The Wall Gang.

Tracy showed up in the Seattle area on the lam, killing a sheriff's deputy in a Bothell shootout and later a Seattle police officer before heading out to cross the Cascades on foot. He was finally cornered in a hayfield in Creston, Lincoln County. Hit by gunfire, he shot himself in the head.

Starwich's role in the hunt won the respect of the county commissioners, who appointed him deputy sheriff of the small coal-mining town of Ravensdale east of Kent.

Miners soon came to respect him. One story tells about the time five laborers got roaring drunk, terrorized the village and took over the railroad station. The flamboyant Starwich walked into the station, methodically knocked the five men out, cuffed them and hauled them to jail.

Another time a man shot and killed two Ravensdale brothers and then holed up in a vacant building. Starwich is said to have kicked the door down and, after dodging three shots from the man's pistol, knocked him out and dragged him outside.

And there was the riot in which Starwich arrested so many men he had to commandeer a coach on a passing passenger train to haul the prisoners to the county jail in Seattle.

Starwich was finally elected sheriff in 1920 and held office until his retirement in 1926. Eight years later, he lost the sheriff's race to William Severyns, who turned around and appointed him county jail superintendent, a post he held until his death on Dec. 6, 1941.

- Lou Corsaletti