Lou Graham, Notorious Madam of Old Seattle by Libbie Hawker

I most often write about ancient history, so my 2016 novel Mercer Girls, set in mid- to late-19^th-century Seattle, was a bit of a departure for me. It’s a novel I wrote for my traditional publisher, Lake Union, as they were hoping for a “historical beach read” for their summer list—something fun, light-hearted, and focused on women’s friendships. I was glad to see Mercer Girls take off and find its audience (it was even a finalist for the 2017 WILLA Award), and received so many emails about that book from readers that I knew I had to explore the setting of old Seattle more in future books.

As I researched Seattle’s development and history during the period just after Mercer Girls ended (the 1880s and 1890s), I became acquainted with a truly unique and memorable historical woman—one who, like so many other women throughout world history, was largely forgotten or intentionally erased, relegated to virtual nobody-ness. But the five-foot, three-inch firecracker of a brothel owner known as Lou Graham was certainly not a “nobody” in her own time. In fact, she was one of the most controversial figures in all of Seattle’s history—and the city only exists today because of her.

Lou Graham’s name at birth was Dorothea Georgine Emile Ohben, and she immigrated to the United States from Germany at a fairly young age. But sadly, that’s all historians know about her early life and origins. By the time she was thirty-one, she had changed her name to Lou Graham and had found her way to Seattle, which by then (1888) was a city only a few decades old.

Seattle had grown up out of the logging trade, and had prospered wildly at first, but as the Transcontinental Railroad came ever closer to Washington Territory, a southward bend in the rail route also became a twist in Seattle’s fate. The Transcontinental had originally been intended to build its terminus at Seattle, so as to take advantage of the booming lumber industry. Instead, the terminus ended up in a shoddy little logging camp called Tacoma (a friendly rivalry between Seattle and Tacoma still exists to this day, the remnant of a much more serious political and economic rivalry from the late 19^thcentury.)

After Seattle lost its hopes for the terminus, the balance point of its fragile economy shifted to vice. Gold miners from Alaska made infrequent trips to Seattle to stock up on supplies, and they inevitably wanted to toss a few of their gold nuggets at all the conveniences of city life, the pleasures that were so hard to find in the remote and Spartan mining camps of the Yukon. Those pleasures were, of course, gambling, liquor, and prostitution.

All would have been well for the city if it hadn’t been for the suffragists. In the 1870s and early 1880s, Washington Territory became a great supporter of women’s voting rights, and was the third portion of the United States to legalize suffrage (Utah and Wyoming were first and second—also territories at the time, not states). The moment women had the vote, they promptly outlawed vice, and within two years, Seattle’s economy tanked. The crash was so sudden and so severe that it led to many years of instability, which not only saw the city decline in population and productivity, but also led to dangerous racial tensions as out-of-work white men sought to blame “outsiders” for their woes. All across the nation, Chinese workers who had come to build the railroad—and to work in many other important industries—were blamed for “taking real Americans’ jobs,” and Seattle, remote as it was, couldn’t escape that poisonous sentiment. A days-long anti-Chinese riot erupted, which led to the displacement of countless Chinese immigrants and even Chinese Americans and further destabilized Seattle’s precarious economy.

Into this daunting climate strolled Lou Graham—who, by 1888, had amassed a small fortune in the sex trade. No longer interested in doing the hard work for herself, she aimed to set up a brothel, the likes of which the west coast had never seen. Lou’s place was to be a singularly classy affair, more like the tea houses of Japan than a typical American cat-house. Lou intended to hire only girls (and gents, it must be stressed) who could entertain in more than one way. Her employees were highly accomplished and well-trained singers, dancers, actresses, musicians, and comedians. Many of them could speak multiple languages fluently; some came from the best women’s colleges back East and could converse with their gentlemen callers on any intellectually stimulating topic. Seattle had never seen anything like Lou’s parlor house.

Unfortunately, her operation was entirely illegal.

Just how Lou managed to stay in business with an ultra-conservative political party and the police force arrayed against her is anybody’s guess. Her methods and justifications have been lost to history. But in under two years, the mere presence of Lou in Seattle energized the business sector and pumped fresh blood into the rapidly perishing body of the once-hopeful city. Somehow, Lou kept her nose just clean enough to stay operational (I explore how she might have done it in my new novel, Madam) and soon, thanks to Lou and her talented employees, Seattle was the only fashionable place to do business in the Northwest.

The city seemed to be on the mend, thanks to Lou’s intervention. But in the summer of 1889, a cataclysmic event rocked Seattle to its foundation and virtually destroyed the city all over again. I won’t tell you here just what happened—you’ll have to read Madam to find out. I will say, however, that in the less-than-two years since Lou first set foot on Seattle’s shore, she managed to become the wealthiest resident of the city. And in the aftermath of the cataclysm, it was Lou—and Lou alone—who had the financial means and the brains to rebuild Seattle and get it back on track. It’s no hyperbole to say that this thriving American city—international hub of the aerospace, biotech, software, and online commerce industries—owes its very existence to one woman whom history nearly forgot.

Or did history try to erase Lou Graham? I think her disappearance from the records may have been more intentional than accidental. It’s damning enough to be a woman who makes history. It’s even worse to be “the wrong kind of woman.” Lou had three strikes against her: her gender, her involvement in sex work, and her sexual orientation. All-but-invisible as she is from the historical record, I had to do a considerable amount of intensive and very tricky research to locate any reliable information about Lou Graham at all. My chief sources quickly became obscure, sometimes poorly preserved newspapers from Lou’s own era, and from these widely scattered and difficult-to-access scraps, I pieced together a portrait of her life. The more I read stray snippets mentioning the infamous madam, the clearer it became to me that Lou Graham was a lesbian. She was frequently mentioned alongside her “housekeeper,” a woman called Amber Delmas—so frequently that their association couldn’t be either coincidence or a mere employer-employee relationship. The more I searched for and studied Lou, the more convinced I became that she was and is one of the great unsung heroes of LGBT+ history.

I faithfully preserved her lesbianism in my novel, Madam. With such skimpy “official” historical portraits of this crucial figure of Northwest history, it would have been easy for me to write her as a heterosexual woman, and to justify that depiction by pointing to the few and depressingly thin “biographies” (paragraphs, really, in broader histories of Seattle) that exist, none of which make mention of Lou’s private life, her partner, or this important aspect of her personality and self. But I think we’ve done enough erasing of LGBT+ people from history. I wanted the world to know Lou as she truly was. And I want the world to understand that it was one woman—one incredibly intelligent, unshakably brave, fearsomely determined lesbianwoman—who saved one of the most important cities in North America from destruction not once, but twice, all on her own. That’s a history we shouldn’t forget.

Madam gave me the opportunity to explore other important aspects of Seattle’s early history, too. I was grateful for the opportunity to explore the challenging topic of racism and the way economic uncertainty can stir up our worst impulses and cause us to turn against our neighbors. That’s a theme which most American readers will find distressingly topical right now. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that our country has faced these trials before, and to stand firm in our belief that we willovercome our negative instincts and create a better country for all our citizens and all our immigrant neighbors.

After all, Lou Graham, the heroine you never heard of until now, was an immigrant, too. Without her, the Northwest—indeed, all of North America—would have had a dramatically different history.

There is so much more to Lou’s story, and the story of Old Seattle, than I could tell in this book alone. I plan to write two more installments in the Old Seattle series, which will cover the latter parts of Lou’s career and the astonishing, heart-rending drama that occurred upon her death—a tale that makes any given Charles Dickens novel look like a Cub Scout meeting by comparison. More Old Seattle books will be forthcoming in 2019 and 2020; I am also working on a nonfiction biography of Lou Graham, but goodness knows when I’ll be able to finish it. The more I learn about Lou, the more fascinating she becomes. I may never reach the bottom of this rabbit hole!

I hope you’ll explore both of the available novels in my Old Seattle series: Mercer Girls, and Madam. And if you’re interested in reading more of Lou’s adventures, email me and let me know!

Libbie Hawker, June 25, 2018