No Safe Haven

c. 1906

 

 

In January of 1906, on Port Discovery, not far from the homestead where Mary Ann Lambert grew up, Mary Sadla Tunmer was brutally murdered.

 

Mixed-Race Marriage

 

Mary’s mother Tam-moy was married to English settler James Woodman; first in a traditional Indian ceremony, twenty years later again in a civil ceremony. Woodman ferried passengers from the sawmill to a dock at the head of the bay, also known as Woodman’s Landing. In a harmonious partnership that lasted sixty years, Tam-moy assisted him in this and other commercial endeavors.

Mary Sadla, Woodman’s stepdaughter, was the result of Tam-moy’s earlier marriage to an Indian youth who had died. At fourteen, Sadla left the Woodman home, which she never felt was hers. She became involved with a number of dubious characters, including the gambler Henry Quaile, aka Poker Jack, later killed in a knife fight. In her teens she gave birth to two daughters.

In 1878, Sadla, about twenty-four, met a cook on a side-wheeler. Nelville Tunmer was the son of a tailor from Suffolk, England. After his father died, Ned used his inheritance to purchase a piece of land in America. When he arrived he realized that he had been swindled. Broke, he enlisted. Described as accident prone, Ned realized a military career was not in the cards. He headed west. There he met Sadla, and built a farm for her in Fairmount.

In addition to Sadla’s daughter Elizabeth (her other daughter was adopted by Poker Jack’s East Coast relatives) the Tunmers added a son, William. Ten years later, Ned became the captain of the steam launch Fannie. Not all the cargo on board was legal; according to the Morning Leader on October 20, 1893, Ned was jailed by a custom’s official for smuggling twenty pounds of untaxed opium.

Yet by hook, or by crook, the family of Mary Sadla and Ned Tunmer managed to get by—weathering their tempestuous marriage until Tunmer’s death more than thirty years later.

Yet, after three decades, Sadla was denied the proceeds of Nelville Tunmer’s estate, including his military pension, ostensibly because Sadla could not provide either a legal record of their marriage or a substantial witness.

In recorded testimony Sadla asserted, “Yes, Soldier and I lived together continuously from the time of our marriage until he died. We were never separated nor divorced.”

In her deposition on April 24, 1908, before Special Examiner M.M. Brower, Mary Sadla Tunmer was asked if she could produce the name of the clergyman who officiated at the wedding on the Port Madison Reservation. She could not. She explained, “He traveled around.” However, she did recall one honored guest at the Indian wedding ceremony: Chief Seattle.

What Special Examiner Brower wanted was a white witness. “White people of this country only take about as much interest in the doings of the Indians as the Indians do in the actions of their dogs.” It was difficult to find witnesses “competent to testify,” in other words, a non-Native.

Mary Sadla Tunmer’s petition was further complicated by a competing claim by the grown-up daughter from Ned’s previous marriage to a white woman. Sadla was denied her widow’s pension. With no means of support, she retired to a shack across the bay from the Fairmont railroad station.

 

Unsolved Murder

 

Nine months after the deposition, in an apparently unrelated incident, Mary Sadler Tunmer, age fifty-five, was murdered.

She was found dead in her smoldering cabin, her body singed beyond recognition. Her skull crushed in by a blunt object. The only clue, a glass pitcher of alcohol, drained and discarded on the dock. Nothing else was missing; there was nothing of value to steal.

Before the cabin was torched, both of Sadla’s wrists were nailed to the floor. No one knows why. No perpetrators were ever apprehended.