THE NOTORIOUS NELL PICKEREL
Transgender troublemaker turned heads in Seattle
One hundred and eleven years ago, Seattle residents woke up to some startling news: Nell Pickerell was back in town.
“The last heard of the irrepressible Nell, she was doing some fancy stunts in Vancouver, the thriving metropolis of British Columbia,” the Seattle Star reported on Feb. 19, 1906.
“Evidently, she did not take well with the residents of that law-abiding town, so she came back. In fact, she always seems to come back, much to the disgust of the police.”
Whatever stunts “the notorious Nell” had performed in Vancouver may be lost to history — there is no mention of her in the Vancouver World. But she was a fixture in papers across the U.S. from 1900 until her death in 1922.
The first story on Nell came out in April 1900, when she was 18.
“(Seattle) boasts of probably the strangest young woman in the United States, if not the world,” said a wire story in the Philadelphia Times. “The Miss is Nellie Pickerell, better known as Harry Livingstone, as she wears male attire constantly.”
Today, Nell would no doubt identify as transgender.
“Nell dons the bifurcated garments (trousers) because she is convinced that nature ran off on a tangent when she was born,” the Times story stated. “Since nature so unjustly deserted her at the crucial moment, she has determined never to close the breach, but to be a man as nearly as possible.
“Her ambition as a man is to be a prizefighter.”
Unfortunately, a girl who dressed like a man was not cool with the Seattle police.
“She has repeatedly been arrested, ostensibly for creating a disturbance of the peace, but really for wearing the wrong clothes,” said the Times.
The unrepentant Nell left Seattle to work as a bartender in Tunnel City, Wash., which a correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch dubbed “the wickedest railway camp in America.” She had a son about this time, who was raised by her parents.
Her notoriety soared on Christmas Day, 1901 when a waitress named Dolly Quappe committed suicide in Seattle by drinking carbolic acid.
“The woman whom she loved (Nell) masqueraded in men’s clothes and won her heart in this guise,” said a story in the Los Angeles Times. “The discovery that her affection was unrequited and the fear that her deceitful inamorata loved another girl led Dolly Quappe to end her life.”
In March, 1902, Nell was arrested after another “young woman of respectable parentage” committed suicide after discovering “Harry Livingstone” was a woman.
A third girlfriend of Nell shot herself in November 1903, although it looks like she survived. But Nell became even more notorious when the Seattle Star printed a photo of her with “Black Jack” Morse, “one of the most notorious and desperate criminals of the west.”
Morse had been shot dead by a policeman in 1900 — and the photo with Nell was in his pocket when he died.
Nell’s rap sheet was quite extensive. In August 1902, she got drunk and punched a cop in the jaw, which led to a donnybrook and a trip to the hoosegow.
In 1906, she was arrested on a trumped-up vagrancy charge. The San Francisco Call speculated the police held her because she knew something about the robbery of a Great Northern train near Seattle on Oct. 2, 1905.
(The heist may have been pulled off by B.C.’s most famous train robber, Bill Miner, but was never solved.)
By 1911, Nell had changed her nom de plume to Harry Allen and was charged with selling liquor to native Indians near Spokane. In 1912, she was jailed in Portland for being a “white slaver,” period slang for living off the avails of a prostitute.
In 1916, Nell was stabbed by her father.
“Hot words led to a quarrel, and the quarrel to blows, which suddenly ended when Robert Pickerell, 79, stabbed his daughter, Nell Pickerell, and she sank to the floor severely wounded in the lungs,” said the Sept. 27, 1916 Seattle Star.
She recovered, but died on Dec. 27, 1922 of syphilitic meningitis. She was only 40 years old.