{"id":30994,"date":"2020-05-23T16:18:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-23T16:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mathewingram.blog\/?p=30994"},"modified":"2020-05-23T16:18:00","modified_gmt":"2020-05-23T16:18:00","slug":"harry-allen-notorious-thief-and-bootlegger-born-nellie-pickerell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2020\/05\/23\/harry-allen-notorious-thief-and-bootlegger-born-nellie-pickerell\/","title":{"rendered":"Harry Allen, notorious thief and bootlegger, born Nellie Pickerell"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From 1900 to 1922, Harry Allen  was one of the most notorious men in the Pacific Northwest, says an article from Atlas Obscura<\/a>. “The West was  still wide and wild then, a place where people went to find their  fortunes, escape the law, or start a new life. Allen did all three.  Starting in the 1890s, he became known as a rabble-rouser, in and out of  jail for theft, vagrancy, bootlegging, or worse. Whatever the crime, Allen always seemed to be a suspect.” During his short life (he died at the age of 40), Allen was a bronco-buster, a longshoreman, and worked as a second in boxing matches. He was also the subject of lurid news stories in tabloid newspapers because he was born female and his given name was Nell Pickerell. “This Girl Refuses to Wear Skirts; Nellie Pickerell Acts, Talks and Dresses Like a Man, and says She Ought to Have Been One,” said one story in the Boston Post from 1900.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In an 1908 interview with The Seattle Sunday Times<\/em>, Allen described his discomfort with his assigned sex. \u201cI did not like to be a girl; did not feel like a girl, and never did look like a girl,\u201d he said. \u201cSo it seemed impossible to make myself a girl and, sick at heart over the thought that I would be an outcast of the feminine gender, I conceived the idea of making myself a man.\u201d Allen\u2019s identity fascinated local papers, which cast it as part of the zeitgeist of the American frontier. One publication framed him among \u201cthe scum of the West\u201d for his active career of saloon brawling, bootlegging, bronco busting, and horse stealing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Allen wasn’t the only one who found new possibilities for reinvention in the New World, as the Atlas Obscura piece notes<\/a>. When 80-year-old lumberjack Sammy Williams died in Montana in 1908, the undertaker discovered his assigned sex, dumbfounding the community that had only ever known him as a man. Joseph Lobdell, born and assigned female in Albany, New York, surfaced in Meeker County, Minnesota and became known as \u201cThe Slayer of Hundreds of Bears and Wild-Cats.\u201d Historian Peter Boag, who researched some of the early trans pioneers, says \u201cIf people thought you were a man, you wouldn\u2019t be bothered or molested, there\u2019s good evidence that some women dressed as men to get better paying employment.” The best job most women could hope for was cooking or housekeeping. <\/p>\n

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From 1900 to 1922, Harry Allen  was one of the most notorious men in the Pacific Northwest, says an article from Atlas Obscura. “The West was  still wide and wild then, a place where people went to find their  fortunes, escape the law, or start a new life. Allen did all three.  Starting in the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Harry Allen, notorious thief and bootlegger, born Nellie Pickerell”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30994\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}