There she enlisted a steamboat to provide assistance. So, bidding her frightened girls to be calm, Nancy lowered away a small rowboat, got into it, and rowed as for dear life to the shore at Albina ". The scow's lines were then cut by the police, sending it down river, ".A woman of decision and quick action, Miss Boggs first attempted to wake the one man on board. Cursing and screaming like all the harpies alive, Nancy poured life steam over the bluecoats, who got out of there quickly". She herself in person met the combined police forces with hose in hand, and out of the hose issued three terrific blast of steam straight from the scow's heating plant. Do not for a moment believe Miss Boggs was not ready. Egged on by reformers, the police of both Portland and East Portland made a combined raid on the scow. ".Then in 1882, came one of those great moral waves that sweep over American cities every decade or so. On both east and west shores, she stationed boatmen-pimps charged with seducing, then rowing customers to the middle of the stream, where Nancy and her girls took care of the rest". Miss Boggs's floating palace of sin was a success from the night it opened.
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In the meantime, she had it stocked with the best she could find of what came in bottles and corsets. She painted it bright green and stationed it in the middle of the river. The lower section was provided for the devotees of Bacchus and Terpsichore, the upper was totally devoted to Venus. The lovely and alert Miss Boggs, learning that there some doubt as to who should administer the laws in the harbor, sought to make capital of the situation.ĭredging up sufficient cash to purchase an old sawdust scow, she had erected on its deck a two-story house. At that time there were two cities, Portland and East Portland, with the river between them, each seeking to outdo the other.
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".but the fact is that in 1880 Miss Boggs was the owner and proprietor of a floating hellhole that was anchored in the Willamette River, which is Portland's harbor. It was republished in 1992 in Wildmen, Wobblies & Whistlepunks, Stewart Holbrook's Lowbrow Northwest: The best known version of the story was written by Stewart Holbrook as part of The Three Sirens of Portland, in American Mercury magazine's May 1948 issue.