Empty-nester’s ‘second act’: Riverboat madam

By Finn J.D. John
February 9, 2025

Please note this article is a re-researched, rewritten, and expanded version of an article published July 25, 2010.

PADDLEWHEEL RIVERBOATS and fancy bordello girls seem like a match made in pop-culture heaven, don’t they? Plush “parlour houses” and luxurious riverboats both were common in the “naughty nineties,” and both represented probably the closest thing to luxury a working man or woman would find in a frontier waterfront city like Portland or San Francisco, or even St. Louis or New Orleans.

And yeah, there were times when the twain did meet in real life. Naïve farmboy Aquilla Ernest Clark was lured into the clutches of Portland shanghaier Larry Sullivan by a flock of beautiful, friendly ladies obviously hired for the purpose, who joined him and eight other victims on a chartered riverboat for what they thought was a “birthday party” cruise. (Here’s a link to that story.)

And who can forget Eliza “Boneyard Mary” Bunets, the 40-year-old solo practitioner who apparently entertained her customers aboard mothballed sternwheelers in the Oregon Steam & Navigation Co.’s “boneyard” at the foot of Flanders Street? (Here’s a link to that one.)

But the combination seems to have reached its peak in the case of a Portland madam named Nancy Boggs, who actually operated a bordello aboard a 40-by-80-foot barge anchored in the middle of the Willamette River, in the early 1880s.

NANCY VEAZIE BOGGS came to the World’s Oldest Profession rather late in life. In fact, it appears she got into the business as a “second act” career after her daughter left the nest. By the time she comes into our story, she was in her late 40s.

She was born in 1833 in Pennsylvania, and married a blacksmith named Isaac Boggs when she was 20. They had two kids, Alexander and Eliza, and moved across the continent to Oregon, where Nancy’s brother had a land claim near Silverton.

The marriage didn’t last long. Reading between the lines, it looks like Isaac abandoned his wife and daughter, gallivanting off with young Alexander to Clatsop County, where he soon remarried (to a 14-year-old girl). At that point Nancy moved with Eliza to Portland.

In Portland, at first at least, Nancy seems to have barely gotten by. She worked as a domestic servant for a while; she sued a man for breach of promise after he apparently jilted her, and another man, the municipal dogcatcher, who she accused of having seduced Eliza. At some point Eliza apparently was married off, though — most likely this happened around 1875 or 1876 — and Nancy was left alone, in an empty nest.

(There is a darker way to interpret these events, though — darker, but likely closer to the truth. Nobody, in the 1870s, ever sued a man for seduction unless she was pregnant. But we hear nothing more, nothing at all, about Eliza or Eliza's baby. The darker possibility is that Eliza died in childbirth, leaving Nancy with a real empty nest — and a pretty good motivation to make a “nothing matters anymore” kind of decision about what to do with the rest of her life.)

Whatever her motives one thing is for sure: In 1877, she opened a bordello.

She must have been pretty good at running one, because by 1880 or so she had saved up enough to buy and outfit a 40- by 80-foot houseboat, with which, at age 48, she took her new mid-life career to the next level as the West’s very first maritime madam.

Now, before we go on, we have to be clear about something — the line between history and folklore gets very blurry with this story, starting right about now. Much of what we know, or think we know, about Nancy Boggs’ waterborne palace of debauchery and sin comes from some pretty sketchy sources. The folks who wrote the official history books in the 1880s didn’t much like to even admit that such things as brothels and saloons and opium dens existed in their bright, hard-working, wide-awake new city. So we’re forced to rely on less-official sources.

Most versions of Nancy’s floating-bordello story can be tracked back to Edward “Spider” Johnson, an old waterfront tough, ex-shanghaier and saloon bartender, who in the early 1930s used to sit down over schooners of beer with legendary raconteur Stewart Holbrook and, in the lingo of the day, “fill his wattles with crammers and moonshine” about the good old days on the shanghaiing-era Portland waterfront. Holbrook wrote up the Nancy Boggs story in the Morning Oregonian in 1931, 50 years after the events it supposedly chronicles.

Some of Spider’s stories have turned out to be so exaggerated that nobody can tell what, if any, germs of truth they sprang from — for instance, the legendary “crammer” about the 39 dead and dying men shanghaied out of the basement of a funeral parlor (they’d mistaken it for the bar next door and thought the barrel of formaldehyde was full of cheap rye). (Here’s a link to that story.)

Many, if not most, serious historians have, over the years, dismissed the story of Nancy Boggs’ waterborne Temple of Venus as a hoax, something wholly made up by Johnson to get Holbrook to keep buying him drinks. The fact that Holbrook refers to the floating bordello as a “whiskey scow” has also led more than one historian astray — a scow is a very specific type of small boat, and bears very little similarity to a barge other than usually being square on both ends.

One researcher in particular, though — Don Horn — dug deeper into the story, and made some real breakthroughs. Nancy was real; her floating bordello did in fact exist — although it may have been more like a “love shack” than a pleasure palace. Horn found that Spider exaggerated certain elements a lot. So it’s pretty much impossible, at this point, to fully disentangle the folklore from the history as regards Nancy Boggs and her career as Portland’s own Aphrodite on the Stormy Deep.

That said, here’s the story as Spider gave it:

IN 1881, PORTLAND was actually three cities: Portland, East Portland, and Albina. There were three city governments and three police forces ... and, of course, three City Halls collecting liquor taxes on drinking establishments within their city limits.

This was both a problem and an opportunity for Nancy, because Portland and East Portland considered their city limits to include the river — all of it, or at least most of it. So, with both city halls claiming her as a constituent and sending her tax bills, Nancy compromised by stiffing them both.

Now, there were no bridges yet between the two Portlands at the time. Inter-city business had to be conducted using the Stark Street Ferry, or with privately owned rowboats, to get back and forth.

And not many yards away from the Stark Street Ferry as it passed back and forth, close to the middle of the river, Mary Boggs ran her establishment on what amounts to a houseboat, albeit one barely smaller than a regulation basketball court.

Spider Johnson told Holbrook that it was painted in a lively Christmastime color scheme of brilliant reds and greens, and that the sounds of merriment and debauchery could be heard ringing out over the waters from it at all hours of the night. Little rowboats, operated by Nancy’s employees, shuttled diligently back and forth to both sides of the river, ferrying rambunctious customers to join the party and home again after they’d had enough.

And, well, maybe all of that is true, although it would not make very good business sense for Nancy to be quite so flagrant.

That’s because Nancy’s establishment was high up on the to-do list in all three of the towns it serviced. She was considered quite the shameless little scofflaw. But that wasn't for the reason you probably think.

Sure, prostitution was illegal in Portland in 1881. But, nobody really cared about that. In fact, Portland’s police chief during the entire time Nancy was in business on the river, James Lappeus, was the owner of a saloon and variety theater called the Oro Fino, which girls at times worked out of relatively openly. (Here’s a link to an article about him.)

No, the real reason the politicians and police chiefs of the towns had it out for Nancy Boggs was that pesky unpaid tax bill.

Albina didn’t have much of a claim on her; but, as mentioned, Portland and East Portland both considered her business to belong to them, and to owe them taxes. And liquor taxes were one of the biggest items on these towns’ budgets; it wasn’t something they could afford to overlook.

So several times, squads of bluecoats from one side of the river or another tried to raid her boat. Nancy, tipped off by one customer or another, would simply hoist anchor and have her bordello towed close by the opposite shore. The two towns were bitter rivals, and their police forces did not cooperate with each other; so this strategy worked nicely for some time.

Finally, in 1882, the two towns made common cause and launched what was probably Oregon’s first-ever inter-agency prostitution sting — attacking from both sides at once.

For some reason, Nancy had not moved the boat, leaving it nicely positioned in the center of the river — although it quickly became clear that the raiders were expected. From this commanding position, she and her lieutenants opened fire on the approaching police boats with steam hoses rigged to the boat’s heating plant, blasting scalding steam accompanied by savage screams and curses that could clearly be heard by watching City Hall VIPs on both sides of the river.

The steam, of course, made a tremendous hissing and impressive clouds as it blasted out into the chilly spring air. It must have looked like a spectacular battle. And faced with such determined and dangerous-looking opposition, the cops conducted a strategic retreat.

It’s hard to avoid the impression, from Spider Johnson’s account of this engagement, that it was intended to look a lot fiercer than it actually was. Mayors and police chiefs might have wanted Nancy shut down, but she clearly had some good friends among the regular beat cops on both sides of the river.

But that night, under cover of darkness, someone apparently cut Nancy’s anchor line, setting her bordello drifting helplessly down the river toward the sea.

And it was moving at a pretty alarming pace. Despite its reputation as a slow and easy waterway, the lower Willamette moves right along when the water is high, as it usually is in the spring ... and as it definitely was at this particular time.

As almost any Victorian-era woman would, Nancy first went for help to the one man still on board, a customer who had hit the jug especially hard and was sleeping it off. This fellow was every bit as helpful as you would expect a man like that to be. So Nancy let him sleep and, with a few words of reassurance to her girls, got in one of the rowboats and started pulling for the east side of the river.

She came ashore in Albina, and immediately sought out the skipper of a sternwheeler whom she knew. After she explained to him that a barge full of girls and whisky was in distress and needed help, the captain rousted his crew, fired the boilers and headed downriver to the rescue.

At dawn the next morning, Nancy’s “hospitality” barge was back at anchor. One source says it was right back where it was the night before, in a little thumb-in-the-eye to whoever had tried to get rid of it; several other sources, including Spider Johnson, say it ended up anchored a few miles down the river, near Linnton. Quite what arrangement Nancy and her girls made with the captain and crew of the sternwheeler to thank them for their gallant midnight rescue is, happily, lost to posterity.

THIS BATTLE MIGHT have been won, but Nancy must have known the war had just started and would likely not end well for her. And in fact, shortly after this incident, she miscalculated in evading one of the raids and was captured by police. She was, of course, prosecuted; but all that was required was to pay a fine and catch up her liquor-tax arrears.

That is apparently when she brought her operation ashore in East Portland, setting up housekeeping at a new joint on Pine Street near Third. Here, she paid her liquor taxes and had, as far as I’ve been able to learn, no further problems with the law.

About five years later, Nancy gave up the business and married a man named Ned Mullery. The two of them moved to an island in the Columbia River by the Washington side. She died there in June of 1905, at the age of 72.

It has to be said, that the real story of Nancy Boggs, the part that is provably true and not folkloric at all, kind of puts the maritime legendry to shame. This is a woman who, looking around her empty nest after her daughter has moved out, thought to herself, “I’m only 45 years old, still young and energetic enough to launch a second-act career, so ... by golly, I think I’ll become a bordello madam.”

(Sources: “Nancy Boggs Mullery,” an article by Donnie (Don Horn) published Aug. 9, 2023, in oregonencyclopedia.org; Wildmen, Wobblies and Whistle Punks, a book by Stewart Holbrook and Brian Booth published in 1992 by OSU Press; Jimenez, Corri. “The Red-Lights of Portland,” The ASHP Journal, Winter 1997; Portland Morning Oregonian archives, 1931)