Local historian tries to track down historic pistol

EVERETT — In 1951, farmer Otto Eitzenberger was plowing his field near Silvana when he found the remnants of an old pistol.

The wood on the .32-caliber pistol had rotted away, revealing the 12-inch long barrel made of iron. The rest was made of brass. It was a breach loader and bore the number “10274.”

Eitzenberger brought his find to the Arlington Times, which published an article and put what was left of the old pistol on display in its office.

Little did Eitzenberger know, his discovery would become a mystery that a local historian is trying to solve nearly 75 years later.

The mystery

In October 2024, historian Tug Buse gave a presentation in Stanwood near his hometown of Warm Beach. After he presented, a woman gave him a slip of paper with a name and phone number. “Loren Kraetz,” the slip read. Buse gave him a call, and they had a long conversation about local history.

“There’s a saying that when an elder dies, a library burns because there’s so much wisdom and knowledge lost,” Buse said. “Mr. Kraetz is a library. It’s amazing what he knows about.”

Kraetz told Buse he visited the Arlington Times office sometime around 1951 and saw the pistol on display.

Now, it’s nowhere to be found. When Eitzenberger was still alive, Kraetz asked him if he ever got the pistol back. He never did. That’s the first mystery.

The second question: Where did it come from?

“The land where the relic was found was cleared in 1916, and it formerly was a beaver swamp, thus the supposition is that the weapon might have belonged to a beaver trapper,” the original Arlington Times article read.

But for Buse, the theory didn’t quite add up. So he went digging.

“I think it’s true that that weapon did belong to a person who was looking for beaver pelts, but not who you would think,” he said.

Kraetz’s memory is “as sharp as a razor blade,” Buse said. He described the pistol in detail from when he saw it more than 70 years ago, which allowed Buse to make a full-scale drawing.

Once he had a visual, Buse determined the pistol was likely manufactured before 1790. The gun had a flintlock firing mechanism, which was invented in the early 1600s and was the main firing mechanism for pistols, muskets and rifles until around the 1830s.

The bottom of the pistol’s handle also flares out in a distinctive way. Buse looked through hundreds of photos of flintlock pistols on the Smithsonian Institution website and noticed handle bases became smoother and rounder after 1790.

“What we have here is a small caliber, custom-made, expensive, breach-loading weapon,” Buse said. “This weapon is not a weapon that would have been carried by your average beaver trapper.”

Traditional beaver trappers, such as those who worked for Hudson Bay Company, usually carried long guns because they were accurate at a long distance. Native Americans carried similar weapons, Buse said. The pistol must have been a personal defense weapon and probably belonged to someone wealthy.

Beaver trappers didn’t start traveling through rivers and looking for Native Americans to trade with until the 1830s, Buse said, and it’s unlikely someone would carry such an old pistol up the river.

But how else would this pistol make its way into a beaver swamp near the Stillaguamish River? Buse’s theory goes back to an expedition to the Puget Sound in 1803.

Expedition Guatamozin

To Buse’s knowledge, explorers who ventured into the area before 1800 didn’t travel through the Stillaguamish River.

But two years before Lewis and Clark arrived at the mouth of the Columbia River, before they even established their team, a separate group of travelers went on a fur trading expedition to the Pacific coast.

The group took a ship called the Guatamozin, another name for Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor. The Guatamozin was originally built as a private warship, so it had the fortitude the group needed for what they saw as a dangerous trip. Native Americans would attack fur trading vessels, Buse said, often in retaliation for violence they had experienced from white traders in the past.

Somewhere near Alaska, the Guatamozin was damaged. For the repairs, the crew needed white oak, which is native to Washington. White oak doesn’t grow on the ocean coast, so the crew decided to sail into the Admiralty Inlet. They stopped in Penn Cove at Whidbey Island, where they stayed for seven weeks until repairs were complete.

During George Vancouver’s expedition in the 1790s, he didn’t venture into the Stillaguamish River. However, he did stop at Port Susan Bay, where he likely saw the river. He ended up placing it on his charts. Records from the Guatamozin expedition refer to places in the Pacific Northwest using Vancouver’s names, so the Guatamozin crew likely used Vancouver’s charts to navigate.

While they were waiting for repairs, a group on a smaller boat journeyed around Camano Island, past what is now Everett and Marysville, through Port Susan Bay and up the Stillaguamish River, looking for people to trade with.

“Exactly the kind of guy”

A young officer named Alexander Brooks led the mini expedition. Brooks came from a wealthy family on the East Coast and went to Harvard University.

“Before the discovery of this pistol, this was just a theory of mine that was supported by circumstantial evidence, but Alexander Brooks would be exactly the kind of guy to have carried a pistol just like that one,” Buse said.

Alexander Brooks’ father, John Brooks, later became the governor of Massachusetts in 1816. John Brooks is where the final piece of the puzzle lies.

Buse theorizes that the numbers on the pistol, 10274, are actually a combination of letters and numbers that refer to John Brooks’ wedding date. He was married in 1774, so the pistol could have been a wedding gift. If John Brooks received the pistol in 1774, it would align with the pre-1790 design. The final theory?

“John Brooks gave the pistol to his son for personal protection and good luck, and Brooks lost it in the beaver swamp that became Otto Eitzenberger’s field,” Buse said.

Buse hopes someone may have more information about the pistol’s current whereabouts. He can be reached at tugbuse@gmail.com or 360-338-1135.

“I could really take a good look at it,” he said. “I could photograph it from all sides, and I could really study it. And then I could send those photographs to people who are real experts in historical guns, and say, ‘Where do you think this was made? When do you think it was made?’ Get more information. That would be the ultimate prize.”

Jenna Peterson: 425-339-3486; jenna.peterson@heraldnet.com; X: @jennarpetersonn.