One researcher in particular, though — Don Horn — dug deeper into the story, and made some real breakthroughs. Nancy was real; her floating bordello did in fact exist — although it may have been more like a “love shack” than a pleasure palace. Horn found that Spider exaggerated certain elements a lot. So it’s pretty much impossible, at this point, to fully disentangle the folklore from the history as regards Nancy Boggs and her career as Portland’s own Aphrodite on the Stormy Deep. That said, here’s the story as Spider gave it:
IN 1881, PORTLAND was actually three cities: Portland, East Portland, and Albina. There were three city governments and three police forces ... and, of course, three City Halls collecting liquor taxes on drinking establishments within their city limits. 
A two-page spread showing the Portland waterfront as it appeared in 1887, published in The West Shore magazine.This was both a problem and an opportunity for Nancy, because Portland and East Portland considered their city limits to include the river — all of it, or at least most of it. So, with both city halls claiming her as a constituent and sending her tax bills, Nancy compromised by stiffing them both. Now, there were no bridges yet between the two Portlands at the time. Inter-city business had to be conducted using the Stark Street Ferry, or with privately owned rowboats, to get back and forth. And not many yards away from the Stark Street Ferry as it passed back and forth, close to the middle of the river, Mary Boggs ran her establishment on what amounts to a houseboat, albeit one barely smaller than a regulation basketball court. 
An image of the brand-new Steel Bridge, the first bridge built in Portland, in 1887. This image may actually have been drawn from plans before the bridge was in operation. This bridge lasted less than 30 years before it was torn down and replaced with the Steel Bridge we know today. (Image: The West Shore)Spider Johnson told Holbrook that it was painted in a lively Christmastime color scheme of brilliant reds and greens, and that the sounds of merriment and debauchery could be heard ringing out over the waters from it at all hours of the night. Little rowboats, operated by Nancy’s employees, shuttled diligently back and forth to both sides of the river, ferrying rambunctious customers to join the party and home again after they’d had enough. And, well, maybe all of that is true, although it would not make very good business sense for Nancy to be so flagrant. That’s because Nancy’s establishment was high up on the to-do list in all three of the towns it serviced. She was considered quite the shameless little scofflaw. Oh, sure, prostitution was illegal in Portland in 1881. But, nobody really cared about that. In fact, Portland’s police chief during the entire time Nancy was in business on the river, James Lappeus, was the owner of a saloon and variety theater called the Oro Fino, which girls at times worked out of relatively openly. (Here’s a link to an article about him.) No, the real reason the politicians and police chiefs of the towns had it out for Nancy Boggs was that pesky unpaid tax bill. Albina didn’t have much of a claim on her; but, as mentioned, Portland and East Portland both considered her to belong to them, and to owe them taxes. And liquor taxes were one of the biggest items on these towns’ budgets; it wasn’t something they could afford to overlook. So several times, squads of bluecoats from one side of the river or another tried to raid her boat. Nancy, tipped off by one customer or another, would simply hoist anchor and have her bordello towed close by the opposite shore. The two towns were bitter rivals, and their police forces did not cooperate with each other; so this strategy worked nicely for some time. Finally, in 1882, the two towns made common cause and launched what was probably Oregon’s first-ever inter-agency prostitution sting — attacking from both sides at once. For some reason, Nancy had not moved the boat, leaving it nicely positioned in the center of the river — although it quickly became clear that the raiders were expected.
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The steam, of course, made a tremendous hissing and impressive clouds as it blasted out into the chilly spring air. It must have looked like a spectacular battle. And faced with such determined and dangerous-looking opposition, the cops conducted a strategic retreat. It’s hard to avoid the impression, from Spider Johnson’s account of this engagement, that it was intended to look a lot fiercer than it actually was. Mayors and police chiefs might have wanted Nancy shut down, but she clearly had some good friends among the regular beat cops on both sides of the river. But that night, under cover of darkness, someone apparently cut Nancy’s anchor line, setting her bordello drifting helplessly down the river toward the sea. 
The Oregon Steam Navigation Co. "boneyard" had a sinister reputation. It was where old steamboats went to die; at least one other maritime madam, known as "Boneyard Mary," operated a business out of one of the derelict vessels, although she appears to have been a sole practitioner. (Image: Portland City Archives)And it was moving at a pretty alarming pace. Despite its reputation as a slow and easy waterway, the lower Willamette moves right along when the water is high, as it usually is in the spring ... and as it definitely was at this particular time. As almost any Victorian-era woman would, Nancy first went for help to the one man still on board, a customer who had hit the jug especially hard and was sleeping it off. This fellow was every bit as helpful as you would expect a man like that to be. So Nancy let him sleep and, with a few words of reassurance to her girls, got in one of the rowboats and started pulling for the east side of the river. She came ashore in Albina, and immediately sought out the skipper of a sternwheeler whom she knew. After she explained to him that a barge full of girls and whisky was in distress and needed help, the captain rousted his crew, fired the boilers and headed downriver to the rescue. 
The docks at Albina as they appared in 1888, in a lithograph published in The West Shore magazine that year.At dawn the next morning, Nancy’s “hospitality” barge was back at anchor. One source says it was right back where it was the night before, in a little thumb-in-the-eye to whoever had tried to get rid of it; several other sources, including Spider Johnson, say it ended up anchored a few miles down the river, near Linnton. Quite what arrangement Nancy and her girls made with the captain and crew of the sternwheeler to thank them for their gallant midnight rescue is, happily, lost to posterity.
THIS BATTLE MIGHT have been won, but Nancy must have known the war had just started and would likely not end well for her. And in fact, shortly after this incident, she miscalculated in evading one of the raids and was captured by police. She was, of course, prosecuted; but all that was required was to pay a fine and catch up her liquor-tax arrears. That is apparently when she brought her operation ashore in East Portland, setting up housekeeping at a new joint on Pine Street near Third. Here, she paid her liquor taxes and had, as far as I’ve been able to learn, no further problems with the law. About five years later, Nancy gave up the business and married a man named Ned Mullery. The two of them moved to an island in the Columbia River by the Washington side. She died there in June of 1905, at the age of 72. It has to be said, that the real story of Nancy Boggs, the part that is provably true and not folkloric at all, kind of puts the maritime legendry to shame. This is a woman who, looking around her empty nest after her daughter has moved out, thought to herself, “I’m only 45 years old, still young and energetic enough to launch a second-act career, so ... by golly, I think I’ll become a bordello madam.”
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