I See by the Papers...

This article gets a prize for cluelessness (let's call it the "Aside From That, Mrs. Lincoln, How Did You Like The Play?" award). It telescopes together three news items: a summer wildfire, a gunshot injury to a local man, and that someone booby-trapped a door with intent to kill or maim anyone who entered. By this account, the incident that caused the wound is little more than an unfortunate firearm accident, but um, isn't having a gun rigged to a door the most newsworthy event, here? Shouldn't the newspaper name the potential murderer? Report if the county sheriff and prosecutor will do anything about it? No followup either, apparently. After tossing off the revelation that the cabin owner set the deadly trap to specifically blast someone else, the closing about fire damage is the award winning touch.

LOADED GUN TOOK MAN BY SURPRISE

THE WEAPON HAD BEEN LOADED FOR ANOTHER BUT "DOC" CHAMBERS GOT IT
Great Devastation Wrought by the Recent Forest Fires Over on the Coast Section

"Doc" Chambers, a man well known about town, returned here Wednesday afternoon from the Stewart's Point county, where he had been at work on the tanbark. He brought home a gunshot wound in the groin, and says that several doctors told him that he would die as the result of the injury, but he seemed pretty much alive after his arrival in Santa Rosa.

According to his version of the accident which gave him the injury he says that he had left the camp on the Richardson place at Stewart's Point to summon assistance to combat with the forest fires that had broken out. In going through the woods, he says that he came to a cabin where the teamsters and others are accustomed to call and get a drink. He called to the man who occupied the cabin to see if he was in, and then opened the door of the place for the purpose of getting a drink of water. He had no sooner pushed open the door when an explosion occurred and he felt the effect of having a deep hole torn in his limb. He ascertained that a "set gun" had caused the trouble and the charge with which it was loaded he had received full blast. He walked back some distance, he says, to another house and there his wound was dressed. Later he was given medical assistance in Guerneville. He says that the owner of the cabin had set the gun for another man. Chambers says that four of the trestles of the Richardson railway and much lumber, ties and pasturage were destroyed.

- Press Democrat, September 15, 1904