Charles James Lathrop, 40, male, was a deputized civilian in Grays Harbor County when he joined a small posse searching the backcountry outside Montesano, Washington. On April 16, 1913, the hunt led him toward a rough cabin in the Wynoochee/Satsop country, part of a long effort to bring a notorious fugitive to heel. Lathrop would not return. He was shot and killed that day in the woods, far from town, after months of tension that had held the county in fear.
The man they were after had become a dark legend: John Tornow, the “Wild Man of the Wynoochee,” blamed first for the 1911 shooting deaths of his teenage nephews and then for the March 1912 slayings of Deputy Colin McKenzie and Game Warden A. V. Elmer. Through winter and spring, search parties combed the timber and swamps as rumors multiplied about Tornow’s cunning and ruthlessness. Lathrop and fellow woodsman Louis Blair, both deputized for the pursuit, pressed on with Deputy Sheriff Giles Quimby, following sign through snow and cedar to what they believed was Tornow’s hideout.
The final approach came across a narrow footlog toward a shanty built over a marsh near a small lake west of Matlock. The woods erupted. From cover behind a hemlock, Tornow fired the first shot that felled Blair; Lathrop answered from the hip, but another round tore into his neck and dropped him where he stood. Quimby, firing repeatedly, kept the outlaw’s head pinned to the tree and then ran nearly eighteen miles to raise help. When a posse returned, they found Tornow dead in a sitting slump against the hemlock, his clothes patched with gunny sack and stuffed with fir needles, the hideout stocked with the scant gear of a man who had lived too long alone.
There were no arrests in Lathrop’s killing; the suspect died at the scene under the posse’s fire. The county later memorialized the fallen officers whose deaths had set the chase in motion, and Lathrop’s name joined theirs in the roll of those lost in the line of duty. In the end, the long terror that had shadowed the logging camps ended in the same thicket where it began—gun smoke drifting through cedar shade, and a community left to mourn a man who had stepped forward when the search for a killer asked for volunteers.
