Mossback’s Northwest: Dead people tell no tales. Or do they?

The Case of the Petrified Madame

Our first strange case involves one of Seattle’s first real characters, Mary Ann Conklin, better known to early settlers and travelers as Mother or Madame Damnable. Conklin was said to have washed up on Seattle’s shores in the 1850s. She had married a sea captain who abandoned her in Port Townsend. In Seattle she took over running the city’s first hotel, the Felker House, a two-story prefab affair shipped around the horn from back East.

It seemed to offer a touch of civilization — it would rent rooms for guests, but also for temporary
courtrooms or meetings. It was also said to be Seattle’s first bordello. In the mid-1850s an uprising of Indigenous people threatened the settlement — the so-called “Battle of Seattle.” At this time the hotel appeared on the first map of the city as “Madame Damnable’s.”

In addition to what was said to go on inside its walls, Conklin herself was apparently something of a terror. When the U.S. Navy was in town to offer protection from attack, they sought to improve a road near the house. The navigator of the sloop-of-war Decatur recorded an encounter: “ … [T]he moment our men appeared upon the scene, with three dogs at her heels, and an apron filled with rocks, this termagant would come tearing from the house, and the way stones, oaths, and curses flew was something fearful to contemplate, and, charging like a fury, with the dogs wild to flesh their teeth in the detested invaders, the division invariably gave way before the storm, fleeing, officers and all, as if old Satan himself was after them.” She was, he wrote, a “demon in petticoats.”