The Tragedy of 'Cowboy Mary' and the Lost Lover of Whitechapel
After her partner died by suicide, a local woman known as 'Cowboy Mary' was arrested for disorderly conduct while mourning him at a Seattle morgue.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Nora Irving, the notorious woman known as 'Cowboy Mary,' mistress of the suicide, Frank Lund, gave evidence of having a sympathetic heart. Just before Lund took the fatal dose, he was seen coming down Jackson street, in the Whitechapel district, crying like a schoolboy. When asked what was wrong, he sobbed, 'My girl went back on me.' He then ran into a saloon and took the poison which caused his death. Not until yesterday morning did 'Cowboy Mary' become acquainted with the fact of Lund's death. When she found out, she went wild with grief and tore her hair and clothing. She hurried to the undertaking rooms where the body was and wept over the remains. 'He was a poor unfortunate, just like me,' she wailed. 'He was no good, but I had no right to get mad at him. I was his only friend. Now he's gone, and all because of me.' To make good her resolution, she gave the undertakers $9, all the money she had in her possession, to see that he was given a decent burial. Half an hour later, 'Cowboy Mary' was arrested for being drunk and disorderly on the street and locked up in the same room where Lund had died. From behind the bars, she tearfully inquired, 'Did they give poor Frank a decent burial?'
“He was a poor unfortunate, just like me. I was his only friend, but he was as good as me, any way.”
This story captures a snapshot of life in Seattle's historic 'Whitechapel' district—an area near present-day Pioneer Square—where the city's most vulnerable inhabitants often lived in precarious, tightly-knit social webs. Today, the struggle for dignity in death for the unhoused and marginalized remains a poignant, recurring issue in Seattle, mirroring the way city authorities of 1891 treated Nora Irving's grief as a public nuisance.
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