The Professor and the Madman and the Seattle Mayor

Seattlest finally got around to reading Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. It's been on our "to read" list for, oh, about eight years now.

Imagine our surprise when, on page 47 (hardcover), we came across a strong local connection for the titular lexographically gifted madman, William Minor:

A third half-brother, Thomas T. Minor, died in peculiar circumstances many years later. He moved to the American West, first as a doctor to the Winnebago tribe in Nebraska, then to the newly acquired Alaska Territory to collect specimens of Arctic habitations, and finally on to Port Townsend and Seattle, where he was elected mayor. In 1889, still holding the post, he took of on a canoe expedition to Whidbey Island with a friend, G. Morris Haller. Neither man ever returned. Neither boats nor bodies were ever found. A Minor Street and a Thomas T. Minor School remain, as well as a reputation in Seattle that equates the name of Minor with some degree of glamour, pioneering, and mystery.

We immediately checked out the invaluable HistoryLink, where we found this article on ol' Tom Minor's disappearance.

Minor, his friend Morris Haller, and Haller’s brother-in-law Lewis Cox hunted near Stanwood for several days without much success, so on December 2, 1889, they decided to cross Saratoga Passage to Brann’s Point on Whidbey Island, a distance of 12 miles. Not finding a sailboat to tow their canoes across, the three hunters set out across the often-treacherous passage paddling a large Indian cedar canoe and a smaller canvas one. They were not seen alive again. Search parties set out when they had not returned within a few days.

Once the empty canoes were found washed up on a Whidbey Island beach, it was apparent the men had drowned. Seattle came to a standstill on Sunday, December 15, as huge memorial services and a procession were held in honor of Minor and Haller. Morris Haller’s body was found on January 4, 1890, and Lewis Cox’s body a month later. Minor was never found.

A few discrepancies on details, there -- Winchester goosed the mystery factor a bit.

Granted, we're not a native, and the name Minor rings a faint bell, but we never associated it with glamour, pioneering, and mystery. Anyone else?

(Interesting bit of trivia, also from HistoryLink: Minor was the only person elected mayor of both Port Townsend and Seattle.)