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Murray C. Morgan
Harry Morgan and His Business
Puget's Sound: A Narrative of Early Tacoma and the
Southern Sound
University of Washington Press, 1979
P. 263-67
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Copyright, 1979, Murray Morgan
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Harry Morgan and His
Business
 Other
entrepreneurs met other needs. Harry Morgan drifted into Tacoma in
1884 from Maryland, or so he said, and quickly established himself
as Boss Sport, the fellow in charge of the community's illicit
entertainment activities.
He
was in his mid-thirties, a compact, dark-haired man with a big
dark mustache and ill-fitting dark suits, the prototype of the
boomtown gambler: friendly, Republican (the Republicans were in
local power), generous to the needy - especially to those he had
helped become needy, provided they did not complain to authorities
- and reputed to be a man of his word in business dealings, though
this was hard to prove since he seldom signed papers.
The
gambling games that Morgan ran were, if not honest, at least open:
there was little excuse for not knowing what you were getting
into. Morgan was loud in defense of vice as a civic virtue:
"What
do you want to blast us for?" he asked a reporter from the
Ledger, which showed an unfavorable interest in his Board of Trade
Billiard Hall when it first opened. "You never saw a
religious town in your life that was worth a damn."
"If
it comes to that," one of his henchmen added, "we and
our friends have more influence in the town than all the church
people. The refined element ain't any good. They don't build up a
town because they ain't got enterprise."
"I
tell you," Morgan concluded in a classic apologia, "a
town without saloons and gamblers ain't worth a damn. Look at
Seattle. Everything is open there and strangers say it's a good
place because things are lively and men spend their money. If you
break up this game you are only driving money out of town."
There
was no question that Morgan's activities brought money into town,
though the prosecuting attorney on occasion raised difficulties
about the methods employed. There was, for instance, the
Livensparger case.
The
J. C. Livensparger family of Minneapolis was among the thousands
lured west by the completion of the Northern Pacific. In the
spring of 1886 Livensparger sold his livery stable, withdrew his
life saving from the bank, and with wife and young daughter took
the train west. They arrived in Portland looking for a new life,
but first a place to spend the night.
Under
the gaslights outside the station, Livensparger fell into
conversation with Jefferson J. Harland, who directed the newcomers
to a rooming house nearby. The accommodations proved unsuitable.
Occupants in adjacent rooms changed every half hour or so, and
between times were noisy. In the morning the Livenspargers found
more decorous lodging, and in the afternoon Jeff Harland, heavy
with apology, found them. He said he should have realized the
rooms would not be to family taste, but he had been preoccupied
with business problems.
He
was developing a new town, Coal Harbor, and the work was almost
more than he could handle. So many details; so much for one man to
do. Here he was, a sure-fire millionaire in the making, sole owner
of an enterprise that was a key to the mint, and he had to
scrabble for cash. Why, he was going to take time off from the
really important things to go up to Seattle and collect money. Not
that those people up there were deadbeats, just slow to pay if you
didn't put a hand on their shoulder and look 'em in the eye.
After
all, it was only a few thousand dollars. A year from now they'd
all be bragging they'd been in business with Jeff Harland and
might have gotten in on the ground floor of Coal Harbor.
Livensparger
got in at the basement. He not only went north with Harland to
scout out the Puget Sound area for investment, but he bought
Harland's ticket and loaned him money to get his watch out of
hock.
The
NP schedule was rigged so that travelers to Seattle had to spend
the night in Tacoma. The men took a room at the Blackwell. Harland
went for a stroll and returned to say he had bumped into an old
friend, George Williams, a very shrewd fellow, very far-sighted,
knew everybody and everything in Tacoma, exactly the fellow to
give Livensparger good advice on business opportunities. Williams
would be at Harry Morgan's Board of Trade that evening.
Torches
set in iron stands guttered on the board sidewalk outside the
Board of Trade. A barker sporting a derby and checked vest
described the opportunities for judicious investment.
Come on now, any gentleman
with half a dollar and a whole heart. Tempt the Goddess of
Fortune. If you have half a dollar don't squeeze the coin till
the Bird of Freedom farts and the Goddess of Liberty faints.
Invest it here. Throw the dice and see what you draw. Everybody
has a chance. If you're lucky you win, if you ain't you lose.
The smallest prize is a dollar bill.
Inside
the swinging doors the visitors found themselves in a big room
with a bar along one wall, a small stage alongside it. Waitresses
took turns singing and dancing. The stage faced a line of
curtained boxes where in obscurity the girls could hustle drinks,
at the very least. Harland and Livensparger went to the gaming
rooms on the second floor. George Williams was rolling dice in a
game called Twenty-One, or Bunco. He was doing so well Harland
joined him. He invested the last of the money Livensparger had
loaned him in Portland, lost it, borrowed more, lost that.
Harland
was no quitter. He kept trying as long as Livensparger had
anything left to loan. On their way back to the hotel, Harland
assured his patron that he had no cause to worry about the $610
they had left at the Board of Trade. He would pay it back out of
the money he was going to collect in Seattle next morning.
Next
morning Harland was gone. So was Livensparger's watch.
Livensparger became suspicious. He told his story to Prosecuting
Attorney Fremont Campbell, who had heard similar tales. Harland
and Williams had both worked in the past as dealers for Morgan,
and Campbell suspected were now employed as bunco-steerers who
hung around railroad stations and saloons and improvised freelance
swindles.
A
grand jury indicted Harland for swindling and theft, Williams for
helping. Morgan hired the veteran, respected, and expensive Elwood
Evans to defend the con men. He got Williams off, but the jury
found Harland guilty as charged and the judge sentenced him to
eighteen months in the new territorial prison at Walla Walla.
Evans appealed.
His
brief cited as error the fact that women served on both the grand
jury and superior court jury that convicted his client. The
territorial supreme court sustained the appeal; the legislative
act giving women of Washington Territory the right to vote and
serve on juries was ruled unconstitutional. Harland was free to go
about his business.
Knocking
out woman suffrage was a bonus to Morgan, who, like most sporting
men, disapproved of females having the franchise, the theory being
they would favor prohibition. The publicity resulting from the
trial, as well as the continued attacks by the Ledger, helped
Morgan considerably. Tacoma was growing fast, but every newcomer
to town soon learned where Morgan operated and the recreation he
offered.
In
1888 the Boss Sport opened a new joint, Morgan's Theater (later
called the Comique), at 817 Pacific Avenue, where the Olympus
Hotel now stands.
The
Ledger implied that Sodom and Gomorrah would have rated PG to
Morgan's X. They blamed the Morgan Theater for every Tacoma
shortfall from stumps in the street to the murder of a young man
on a somewhat distant downtown street. But the paper did offer a
convincing diagnosis of the myopia among policemen visiting
Morgan's establishment and the prevalent vertigo among magistrates
dealing with offenses committed on the premises: money impeded
vision.
Once
some patrons of Morgan's place were brought before a municipal
justice unaccustomed to encountering as defendants those who had
not yet been victimized. It dislocated him so much that he imposed
fines of only ten dollars, which the prosecutor felt obliged to
note was only half of the minimum required by law.
Adjusting
admirably, the judge raised the fine by ten dollars and suspended
half the imposition. Such adumbration eventually led the city
council to revoke Morgan's license, a defeat he calmly
circumvented by transferring the license to a buddy.
In
time the Ledger's carping annoyed Morgan sufficiently to cause him
to bankroll the transformation of his theater program bill into a
dally paper. It was called the Daily Globe and employed as its
editor J. N. Frederickson, a desk man whose memory lingers in the
Valhalla of journalism as perpetrator of the headline, over the
story of a hanging, JERKED TO JESUS.
Editorship
failed to inspire Frederickson further, and Morgan lured, from the
Oregonian William Lightfoot Visscher, a Civil War cavalry colonel
of impetuosity and pungent prose. Visscher was disenchanted with a
community which relied on gravity to pull riches past it. He did
not want to become a freshwater barnacle. He responded to Morgan's
brandishments to come to Tacoma and say something nice about vice.
Direct
endorsement of sin Visscher avoided, at least as far as one can
tell from surviving issues of the Globe. But sinners he tolerated
as he did Masons, Democrats, Englishmen, and Socialists not
opposed to hard liquor.
Tacoma
journalism could be rough. Sam Wall of the Evening Telegraph
disagreed so strongly with an eightline comment on his character
that he walked into the Evening News city room and told Herbert
Harcourt, who had emitted the offending opinion, that it was his
intent to kill him. He then shot Harcourt through his tiepin, a
target that deflected the bullet from fatal course. Wall was
captured but not brought to trial. Harcourt found employment
elsewhere.
Visscher
avoided such excesses of expression. He contented himself with
giving good coverage of community affairs and parodying the
Ledger's former anti-Chinese theme by running edits headed THE
LEDGER MUST GO.
The
Globe scored points, gained circulation, lost advertisers, and,
after two years of understated vindication of vice, went under.
Morgan,
too. The Boss Sport died unexpectedly in April of 1890, aged
forty, to the relief of the Ledger and the benefit of the Pierce
County legal profession. Morgan left no will. He was reputed
wealthy, and court records showed him possessed of papers for
considerable real estate, much of it gained on double-or-nothing
bets lost by patrons who had blown their cash.
Included
in his inventory were a shingle mill at Buckley, a sawmill on
Boise Creek in King County, and two thousand dollars in IOU's from
Pierce County Sheriff Lewis Byrd, which might have come in handy.
But Morgan's list of creditors read like the city directory, and
as word of his intestate state spread, heirs sprouted. One styled
herself Lena Morgan and produced three little Morgans alleged to
be issue of Harry.
Others
claiming descent or blood ties included an Edwin C. Morgan, Marty
Morris, Mary Barry, and three people named Hampton. Litigation
dragged on for more than a decade. By the time the estate was
settled the lawyers had the money and the Tacoma Boom was hardly
an echo. Morgan's property was auctioned at ten dollars a lot, the
shingle mill for one hundred dollars, and the theater for fifteen
hundred, including Ledger ill will.
Dora
Charlotta Morgan, whom the courts held to be Harry's one and only
widow, was left with nothing except his bouncer, Frank "Jumbo"
Cantwell, whom she had married.
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