There is truth to the old adage “every tombstone tells a story.” Few do so as provocatively as Mayville, N.D., police officer Even Paulson’s headstone. For 129 years snow, ice, wind and moss have done their best to sully his grave marker in the town’s tidy cemetery, but not enough to obscure the gripping inscription:
EVEN PAULSON BORN DEC. 29, 1862 KILLED WHILE ON DUTY AS NIGHTWATCHMAN AT MAYVILLE, N.D. SEPT. 3, 1893 1 O’CLOCK A.M.
To lay eyes on the chiseled epitaph is to feel the piercing depth of loss dealt to a close-knit community. It’s uncommon to find the cause of death on a tombstone. In this case those few words held the genesis of their aftermath: a community’s anger, the spectacle of a sensational trial played out in the media across five states and the repercussions that would reverberate for two decades.
Paulson was 4,000 miles from his birthplace and just 30 years old when his life came to an abrupt and horrific end down a dark alley in smalltown North Dakota. Born in Seljord, a village in Telemark, Norway, he was 21 years old when he took what was likely his last look at his homeland and his parents. Arriving in Quebec in 1884, he headed for Granite Falls, Minn., and within two years filed declaration of intention papers (a precursor to becoming an American citizen) in Yellow Medicine County. By 1892 he had made his way to Traill County, N.D., where on May
