Hot Stuff

A Detroit Paper Prints It About Early Days in Alpena.

     The following from a Detroit paper is about the rankest piece of yellow journalism that has so far appeared in print, connecting Alpena with the assassin of President McKinley:
     “If Czolgosz lived among those foreigners near Alpena, it’s no wonder that he tried to murder the president,” said E. E. Davis of this city, who has often visited the district where the Polish colony lives.
     “On those Polish farms there, they fight all the time among themselves and it is not such an uncommon thing to kill a man. They don’t think anything of taking a life, and what can you expect of them?”
     Mr. Davis told a story typical of the conditions which prevailed when young Czolgosz grew into manhood. The chief actor in this story was later sent to the penitentiary for complicity in the Molitor murder.
     “He used to carry the mail,” he said. “He would go out in the winter when the snow was so deep as to make driving out of the road nearly impossible, and he would lay his rifle across the bottom of his cutter. When he had to pass any one, he would pick up that rifle and aim it at the driver of the other rig, and [?] ‘Get out of the road, you——,’ and the other fellow had to get out or get shot.[”]
     The tough foreigner about Alpena was so dreaded that not until nearly 20 years after Molitor’s murder was any of the guilty ones arrested. This is where Czolgosz took his first lesson on the value of human life.