[3] 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 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.
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 (later Rear-Admiral) Thomas Stowell Phelps: ...the 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.After her death in 1873, her remains were initially buried in the Seattle Cemetery and moved in 1884, when that site was made into Denny Park.
[3] Her gravestone, at Lake View Cemetery on Seattle's Capitol Hill, incorrectly lists her death as occurring in 1887 (three years after the grave was moved.)