In the late 1800s, Port Townsend was a rapidly growing lumber-boom town. Captains and merchants built grand homes in Upper Town, atop a cliff set back a little ways from the water. Down below, in Lower Town, the docks were alive with commerce: freight warehouses, saloons, hotels and shops crowded the piers, with the saw mill’s lumber wharf capping off the waterfront to the north. Lower Town was also home to most of the city’s shadier denizens—and they were a notorious crew.
Crooked customhouse inspectors, opium smugglers, and kidnappers made tidy sums on the waterfront. Bodies found floating in the bay kept the Jefferson County coroner busy. Fast-and-loose railroad speculation and the barely legal entertainments that catered to a population of sailors and stevedores made the town a perfect study of late-1800s vices. A steamboat captain in 1892 is said to have declared to a passenger: “I’ll let you off at Port Townsend—that’s just five miles from hell.” The city was the embodiment of the Wild West—not desert-bound as we’ve come to know it, but on the gray and craggy Pacific Northwest coast.
Port Townsend’s rough-and-tumble past is ripe for fictionalizing, and it made the perfect setting for my novel, The Best Bad Things. I knew I wanted to set my tale of wayward Pinkertons, secret identities, and opium smuggling in the Pacific Northwest, and began by researching Seattle, Port Townsend, and Tacoma. Of the three cities, Port Townsend jumped out. To begin with, it had the most commerce. In the late 1800s it housed the U.S. Customhouse; this distinction made it the United States’s busiest Pacific port after San Francisco, with Port Townsend taking the 1885 crown for U.S. port to see “the most steam vessels engaged in foreign trade” enter its waters [1]. This volume of shipping traffic on its own would create a bustling, money-flush town with an equally thriving underworld, and Port Townsend in the 1880s was primed for some specific varieties of crime.
Port Townsend was a crucial stop in the Canada-to-United States opium pipeline.For starters, as the site of the Puget Sound’s customhouse—and gateway to cities beyond such as Tacoma and Portland, with robust rail connections—Port Townsend was a crucial stop in the Canada-to-United States opium pipeline. How does Canada figure into this? In the late 1800s, Victoria, Canada, was “the largest opium-refining center outside of Asia,” with a record-high 15 refineries in its Chinatown in 1889 [2]. And Port Townsend is one of the closest American cities to Victoria, making it a convenient link in the smuggling chain. In the 1880s, opium was not illegal in the U.S., but it was subject to a hefty import tax. This duty could be as high as $12 a pound, making the drug well-worth smugglers’ efforts. Smokeable opium was brought into the U.S. by boat, both under cover of darkness and out in the open in falsely marked boxes; by mule, as in the case of a woman arrested with forty pounds of opium hidden inside her skirts; in barrels labeled as provisions; even, in one case, inside two skeleton pianos. And the smugglers had friends up high: the notoriously corrupt Port Townsend customhouse officials.
The city’s customhouse officials were unusually busy—not only because of their workload, but because so many of them were juggling bribes. Customs collectors and their subordinates were accused of embezzling, corruption in the form of passing fraudulent merchants’ certificates, “gambling during office hours,” and “having used government funds for private purposes” [3], as well as arranging the transport of opium, via steamboat, from Canada to the U.S. and forming alliances with other customs inspectors for this purpose [4]. Additionally, when customhouse officials seized smuggled opium, they were permitted by law to auction that product to local merchants and retain the profit. One ousted collector, Charles M. Bradshaw, was charged with just such a double-play of the system: his former deputy collector claimed Bradshaw used public funds to purchase seized opium at auction, and then pocketed the proceeds.
Port Townsend was also a profitable spot for Shanghaiiers, who kidnapped sailors (and plenty non-sailors) and sold them into maritime service. Shanghaiiers, also known as crimps, provided captains with seamen when there were few to be found, or ran off entire ships’ crews before charging the captains to replenish their ranks. Crimps often owned waterfront boardinghouses, where sailors could conveniently rack up “debt” on drinks and working women that could only be payable by their joining a ship’s crew at the crimp’s convenience. In these lodgings, crimps would also serve drugged drinks, and a man who had the misfortune to ingest “knockout drops” might wake up the next morning on a ship, Shanghai-bound (hence the practice’s name). Doped-up liquor, debt, and beatings were crimps’ tools of choice, and were an added hazard to those inhabiting the rougher areas of Lower Town.
Doped-up liquor, debt, and beatings were crimps’ tools of choice, and were an added hazard to those inhabiting the rougher areas of Lower Town.One of those areas was the northern end of the waterfront, which had the highest concentration of brothels (also known as “houses of ill fame,” the delicate terminology used on fire-insurance maps). As one citizen wrote to the Port Townsend Weekly Leader in 1895: “The goings-on in this section of the city would put Seattle’s Whitechapel, in its most shameless days or nights, to shame”[5]. An 1891 fire map lists 24 houses of ill fame in Port Townsend, as well as 26 saloons. Gambling was common at saloons and hotels. Dance halls catered to sailors, mill workers, and stevedores, and at some establishments dances were purchased in the main hall while sex was paid for in back rooms. In the dilapidated sections with the cheapest brothels, frequent brawls necessitated ongoing sidewalk repair: fighting men would habitually tear up sidewalk planks to use as weapons [6]. On top of dodging these brawls and jealous men who turned violent (Violet Wade and Eva Patton were both shot by former clients; Patton was killed), sex workers faced a hostile police force. Sex workers were routinely arrested and brought to the justice court to pay a $10 fee as punishment for their occupation.
Another fuel in the blaze of Port Townsend’s past was the city’s hope to be a main spur of the Northern Pacific Railroad. In 1886 the Northern Pacific started building a tunnel through Stampede Pass that would at last connect the Puget Sound to the East Coast. Railroad agents tried to drum up support in Port Townsend, Seattle, and Tacoma for the line to come to each city. Tacoma won, in the end; Seattle also got a line. But railroad speculation continued into the late 1880s, with a plan to link Port Townsend to Portland via a private railroad. A building boom began around this time, and many of the men who had money to gamble on the railroad became Port Townsend’s most daring real estate speculators [7].
When starting The Best Bad Things, I decided not to use the real forefathers of Port Townsend as characters. The particulars of my story are pure fiction, after all, and I wanted to cast no shadow on the town’s early residents. However, I did take character inspiration from accounts of a few 1880s standouts. A helpful model for my upstanding businessman/smuggling boss, Nathaniel Wheeler, was Edgar A. Sims. Sims made a fortune operating a fish-packing business and served in the Washington state legislature. He also fiercely guarded his clean public image in later years—likely because, in his younger days, he was rumored to have profited off trafficking Chinese immigrants and shanghaiing sailors. He partnered with Max Levy on a few businesses, including canneries and a sailors’ boardinghouse that was a Shanghaiing hot-spot. In 1899 Sims pled guilty to beating city councilman Isaac O’Neill, and it was said he threatened a newspaper editor at gunpoint when the editor was about to publish an image-tarnishing story. Max Levy, in turn, was “the most notorious of Port Townsend crimps” [8], and helped inform my character Barnaby Sloan, the novel’s crimp/brothel owner/all-around baddie. Finally, the character of Judge Hamilton, a city father much concerned with the railroad, has some things in common with real-life Judge Joe Kuhn, including financing city projects and railroad business.
When it comes to Port Townsend’s past, there’s a surfeit of great material—and everything covered here came from historical records! In my novel, I built speculative crimes and incidents on top of these documented ones. After all, when writing historical fiction, much of the fun comes from inventing new spins on recorded facts. Opium, gambling, bribery, crimping, and more—everyone’s up to something dirty in The Best Bad Things.
[1] Thomas W. Camfield’s Port Townsend: An Illustrated History, p. 292
[2] Chinese in Northwest America Research Committee, “Victoria: The Largest Opium-Making Center Outside Asia”
[3] Thomas W. Camfield’s Port Townsend: An Illustrated History, pp. 134-136
[4] Chinese in Northwest America Research Committee, “Smuggling Incidents and Stories”
[5] Thomas W. Camfield’s Port Townsend: An Illustrated History, pp. 11
[6] Thomas W. Camfield’s Port Townsend: An Illustrated History, pp. 20
[7] Thomas W. Camfield’s Port Townsend: An Illustrated History, pp. 292
[8] Richard H. Dillon, Shanghaiing Days, p. 264
