Edward E. Carlton, the husband of Mrs. Etta M. Carlton, who was brutally murdered in her house at Watertown, Mass., in March, 1883, died in Texas a few weeks ago from injuries received by falling from a railroad train. Carlton hung around Boston for a year after his wife’s murder, until he succeeded in collecting a $5,000 insurance on her life. He was able to prove that he had no hand in the actual killing of his wife, but there are probably not many persons who regard him as innocent of the crime.
• Senator [Charles W.] Jones [Democrat] of Florida has been absent from his seat in the senate chambers throughout the session thus far, and it is said he is in a western city laying desperate seige [sic] to the affections of a lady who up to this time declines to be captured. The lady who is the object of Senator Jones’ attentions is a Miss [Clotilde] Palms, now about thirty years of age, and only daughter of Francis Palms, the richest man in Michigan, and a well-known pine baron. It is said the senator has never met Miss Palms in private. [Jones never returned to the Senate. He died in a Michigan insane asylum in 1897.]
• At Madisonville, Ky., Mrs. Beals, a farmer’s wife, told her husband that James Brackett, a young farm hand, had tried to kiss her. Brackett called her a liar, and both men drew pistols. Brackett fired first, missed his aim and was shot dead.
• The debate upon the bill for the restoration of Gen. Fitz John Porter to his former rank in the army began in the national house of representatives on Thursday, and Representative [Martin Alonzo] Haynes of his state made a speech in its support.
• Near Little Rock, Ark., Ben Holmes, a married man, was shot by Cecil Thompson. Holmes had been courting Thompson’s stepdaughter, to which Thompson objected, and in a quarrel which ensued Holmes was killed.
• Governor Squire, of Washington territory, has proclaimed martial law, and United States troops have been ordered to Seattle to protect the Chinamen from the mob.
• Fred Stevens and wife, of Great Falls, were arrested in Dover on the 8th inst. for being drunk on the street, and assessed $8.76 each, fine and costs, which they paid. Nice pair.
• United States Marshal Ireland, of Salt Lake City, Utah, has offered a reward of $500 for the capture of the notorious Mormon, George [Quayle] Cannon. [Cannon was Utah’s non-voting delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives from 1873 until 1882, when the Edmunds Act made polygamy a felony. Cannon, who had six wives, went underground for a time, and later served six months in the Utah penitentiary.]
• W.H. Purdy, a lad of ten years, who ran away from his home in New York city four years ago, is one of the several heirs to an estate of $2,500,000 left by a maternal relative. His father would like to find him.
• At West Carmington, Ohio, on the morning of Feb. 14th, a liquor saloon kept by one Hawley was blown up with dynamite. The people of the village have been at war with Hawley for some time.
• George Q. Cannon, a leading apostle of the Mormon church, who has been in hiding from the United States officers for over a year, was arrested in Winnemucca, Nev., Feb. 13th. He is regarded as the chief man of the Mormon church in its defiance of the national law.
• Two boys from Great Falls are serving a thirty-days sentence for riding on the train between Great Falls and Rollinsford without paying their fare.
The New Hampshire Gazette, February 18, 1886
• Twenty-five men narrowly escaped death by the blowing down of an ice-house building at Boothbay, Me.
• During the discussion in the house on the Fitz John Porter bill, Mr. Swineburne of New York, through his clerk, stated that jealousy was one of the fine arts taught at West Point.
• The great McCormick reaper works at Chicago have closed down, and 1.400 employes [sic] have begun a siege of enforced idleness. Mr. McCormick declined to discharge his non-union men at the demand of the union men, and closed the works.
• It has been ascertained that 45,000 people died in Montreal from smallpox during the recent scourge.
• During a recent municipal election in Philadelphia a gang of democratic roughs, armed with knives and revolvers, demanded the surrender of the ballot boxes in one ward, but the boxes were saved by the assistance of the police.
• The two daughters of President [James] McCosh, of Princeton college, are great pedestrians, and in the habit of walking from Princeton to Trenton and back, a distance of twenty miles, when they have any shopping to do. [According to Google Maps, the distance between Princeton and Trenton is more like 30 miles.]
• Chagrined at the receipt of a comic valentine, a druggist of Newark, N.J., drank poison from one of his own bottles.
• A Montreal despatch of Feb. 17th said: “Judge Yates of Peoria, Ill., who acted as curator to a rich widow of the place, and who, after having squandered her fortune of over $1,000,000, absconded and deserted his wife and family, has, together with a young woman named Cameron, whom it is alleged he has ruined, and who fled with him, been traced to this city. The woman is still here, but Yates disappeared a few days ago, having, it is thought, discovered the presence of several American detectives in the city.”
• Mrs. Sarah Davidson of Lower Boulder, Cal., shot a bear, and with the bounty received for it she paid for a sewing machine.
• Andrew J. and Alfred S. Bebout, editors and managers of the Toledo Sunday Democrat, have been arrested for sending obscene matter through the postoffice.
• Miss Grace Hendricks, a niece of the late vice-president [Thomas A. Hendricks], and one of the belles of the town of Arita, Iowa, on Friday, publicly whipped with a cowhide H.L. Brown, a leading citizen, for slandering her.
• While four men in Great Falls were putting a piano in a house, on the 19th inst., their four coats being hung on a fence, five tramps went by, and stole the coats. The workmen chased the thieves and after a hard fight lodged four of them in the jail.
• Two of the salvation army warriors, named Priest and White, were arrested, and fined $5 each in the Great Falls police court, some months ago, for parading and beating a drum in a compact part of the town. They appealed to the supreme court. Last week at Dover they came into court and admitted the offense, but under the bill of rights claimed they had a right to worship God according to their own beliefs and methods, and believed the law unconstitutional. The court declined to review the sentence. The respondents will bring the case before the full bench at the law term, as they say the result is of vast importance to the salvationists of the country.
• The Fitz John Porter bill was passed by the house on the 18th inst., by a vote of 171 to 113. Representative [Martin Alonzo] Haynes of New Hampshire voted yes, and Representative [Jacob Harold] Gallinger nay.
The New Hampshire Gazette, February 25, 1886
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Our thanks to the Portsmouth Athenaeum, holder of the newspapers from which the items above were excerpted. – The Ed.