Mother Damnable
Mary Ann Conklin, also known as Mother Damnable and Madame Damnable was an American madam who ran Seattle's first brothel, the Felker House, a major means of funneling money from sailors and lumbermen into local businesses. The name by which she is most widely known derives not from the nature of her business, but from her legendarily unrestrained language, learned at sea and from her customers. It was said that she swore expertly in Chinese, English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Biography
Born Mary Ann Boyer in about 1821 in Pennsylvania, she met and may have married the captain of a whaling ship, David W. "Bull" Conklin, in 1851. In 1853, the captain abandoned her in Port Townsend, Washington, and sailed away to Alaska. She moved to Seattle which at the time was one of several small settlements competing for Puget Sound business.There, she began to manage Felker House for Captain Leonard Felker. In this two-story building, on land purchased from her sometime-ally Doc Maynard, she ran an efficient hotel with clean sheets, good food, and a brothel upstairs. She rented out unused rooms during the day, including the rooms for the Territorial Court.
At the time of the Battle of Seattle, sailors from the sloop-of-war U.S.S. Decatur wanted to improve Seattle's defenses by building a road that passed her hotel and incidentally threatened the bushes that assured the discretion of her well-to-do customers. According to memoirs of the sloop's navigator Thomas Stowell Phelps: