100 years ago in Spokane: A wounded man collapsed before he could fill anyone in on the source of his injuries

A wounded man staggered into Sacred Hearth Hospital and moaned, “I’m hurt bad; send for my wife at –”

And then he fainted.

Police were now faced with several mysteries. What caused that bleeding gash in his chest? Who, if anyone, had attacked him? And who, exactly, was he?

Police found the answer to only the latter of these questions. A card in his pocket identified him as William Edwards, 35, a war veteran. They were able to locate his wife at 4 a.m., about three hours later, at the home of her mother. Yet she could shed little light on the situation.

Neither she nor her mother had any idea how Edwards had ended up at the hospital. He was with them at his mother-in-law’s home that afternoon and evening, but he left sometime that evening to visit someone at the veteran’s bureau.

Doctors were puzzled about the cause of his wound. At first, they thought it was a knife wound, but further examination showed a ragged hole that indicated a blunt instrument, or at least not a stab wound.

His wife said he had been subject to heart trouble ever since being wounded in the war – trench foot and blood poisoning. She guessed that possibly he had collapsed from a heart attack and “fell on some object that made the breast wound.”

Police raised the possibility that he had been robbed and beaten, but his wife said nothing was missing from his pockets.

Also on this day

(From onthisday.com)

1818: The 49th parallel forms as the border between the United States and Canada.