One of the most important women in the early years of Spokane Falls was Jennie Clarke Cannon, wife of Anthony M. Cannon. Cannon’s and Browne’s names have been linked together in the annals of Spokane history from their arrival in 1878; however, no person was better known, better liked, or contributed more to the community than Jennie.

Although no firsthand manuscript material of Jennie’s has survived, it is possible to tracer her life in Spokane through her husband’s mercurial career and various newspaper articles.

Born March 30, 1840, in Hudson, New York, Jane Frances “Jennie” Pease married Joseph Burlington Clarke in New York City about six weeks before her 21st birthday. In December 1862, they made the arduous move to Oregon City, Oregon. In this small western town their children were born: Marie, 1863; Ralph Lincoln, 1864; George P, 1867; Katherine, 1869; and Josephine, 1871. Joe farmed in the Willamette Valley. His death March 19, 1871, left Jennie with five small children to support.

Moving to Portland several years later, Jennie Clarke took rooms in the Centennial Block and went to work for the Howe Sewing Machine Company. One of her duties was to teach upper class Chinese women to sew. Calling at their homes, Jennies discovered she had a knack for other languages. Although it may have been only pidgin Chinese, she could communicate with people of another culture.

At the same time, there was a handsome, full-bearded gentleman who also lived in the Centennial Block and was an agent for the Howe Company: Anthony McCue Cannon, generally referred to as “A.M.” Selling sewing machines was only the latest business enterprise for Cannon. If nothing else, A.M. Cannon could sell himself. Jennie and Cannon were married July 21, 1878, three months after Cannon had purchased land in Spokane Falls.

The Cannons moved into the two box-houses James N. Glover had used for his first store and residence on the wet side of Howard Street between Front and the river. Even if Jennie had not been living near the main intersection of town, she would have been deeply involved in the town activities. She and Clara Gray, perhaps more than any of the other ladies in those early years, worked may hours to provide entertainment, food and decorations for the little community’s social affairs.

But Mrs. Cannon did not devote all her time to social pursuits. She was an excellent nurse and could be found at the bedside of a sick friend whenever she was needed. Her idea of true happiness was to be doing for those she loved and caring for those who needed her care. Her presence in a sick room was likened to a ray of sunshine for the sick and suffering. As a result, Jennie Cannon became one of the most respected and beloved members of the little town.

Jennie’s generous contributions to charitable causes were to become widely known. She supported Home of the Friendless, the Woman’s Exchange, and the Fireman’s Fund. IT was said that she had a standing offer of $1,000 to any member of the demimonde (ladies of the night) who wanted to give up that profession, leave Spokane and start a new life. When the city of Seattle burned June 6, 1889, Jennie was one of fifteen women appointed to solicit relief funds. Jennie covered Cannon’s Addition while Anna Browne canvassed Browne’s Addition. More than $11,000 was collected in Spokane.

Jennie was an independent woman. It would certainly appear so when she traveled to Portland alone to accompany one of her daughters home from school. The journey was arduous at best before the railroad came through. It meant a ride to the Snake River or Wallula by stagecoach to get a river steamer. In mid-February, such a trip would be quite miserable with open or poorly covered windows, drafty doors, and buffeted by wind, rain, or snow. Comfort stops were not frequent. On the return trip five weeks later, Jennie’s daughter’s trunk fell off when the stage was crossing a swollen stream below Colfax. It remained in the water three hours.

In the fall of 1884, with winter approaching, Jennie began making plans to spend the winter traveling. She confided in a visit to Anna Browne that she knew times were hard, but she had made up her mind that they were going anyway.

Apparently, whenever Mr. and Mrs. Cannon entertained, the party was heralded as the social event of the season. So it was with the reception they gave June 29, 1887, for Jennie’s son, Ralph L. Clarke and his bride, Jennie G. Sheppard of Portland. Following their wedding in Portland on June 15, and a wedding trip to Victoria, B.C., the Clarkes made their home in Spokane where Ralph was the assistant cashier at the Bank of Spokane Falls.

Japanese lanterns lit up the lawns and verandas, while evergreens and flowers decorated the inside of the Cannon home. The bride wore a beautiful pale blue moiré with a train and a handsome de Medici collar. The braid down the front of her gown was trimmed with pearls. Diamonds and a corsage of tea roses competed her attire. The groom wore the regulation black.

Two hundred twenty-four guests greeted the couple while the Spokane Brass Band played serenades in the background. About 11:00 p.m., after refreshments had been served, the band played waltz music for several hours of dancing. A newspaper write-up waxed eloquent: “The brilliant array of costumes has never been equaled in the city and would have done credit to a formal reception in the hub city of the universe.”

On December 5, 1889, reporting on another wedding, the Spokane Falls Review began: “The most brilliant social event that ever occurred in Spokane Falls took place at the Cannon home last night.” It was a double wedding ceremony. At 7:15 p.m. the stringed orchestra struck up Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. Down the broad staircase came Rev. Dr. Crawford of All Saints Church with the two grooms, followed by others in the wedding party. A. M. Cannon descended next with a bride on each arm. The two cousins, Katharine Clarke and Mary Evelyn (Mamie) Pope, wore identical dresses of heavy cream-colored silk with long trains trimmed with duchesse lace. About 30 people witnessed the ceremony. The list of guests for the reception that followed resembled the social register of Spokane.

Afternoon parties for the ladies were also held at the Cannon home. With daughter Marie Bennett and daughter-in-law, Jennie Clarke, Jennie often entertained 100 women at euchre – a popular card game of the time.

Not only were Jennie and A.M. active in community affairs and functions, but so were Mrs. Cannon’s children. Ralph, Katie and Josie sand in the operettas, took part in church affairs, and attended all the balls. When the Young Ladies Guild of All Saints Episcopal Church put on a fund-raising program at the Opera House, Katie sang Coming Through the Rye. A reporter for the Spokane Falls Review expressed the opinion that, to many, this was the success of the evening. Miss Clarke sang with “great sweetness and expression,” he wrote.

Yet, sadness and bereavement did not bypass this family. Jennie’s second son and middle child, George P. Clarke, died April 5, 1883, shortly before his sixteenth birthday. Two years later, A.M. lost his father, William Cannon, at the age of 75. Surely, Jennie did not experience anything more heart rendering than the death of little Marjory Clarke, her first grandchild, at the age of four, in 1892.

In the spring of 1889, the Roseburg Oregon Review claimed that A. M. Cannon was the richest man in Eastern Washington, with a worth of $4-6 million. This would appear to be slightly exaggerated; however, Cannon was enjoying enormous success, even if his health was not keeping pace. Besides his own Bank of Spokane Falls, Cannon helped organize and was elected president of the Bank of Palouse City. At the same time, he was an officer in several other banks.

There were also other varied investments. In 1881, largely in opposition to Francis Cook’s Spokan Times, Glover, Cannon and Browne had started their own newspaper, The Chronicle, which culminated in a newspaper war that turned violent. With Browne, Cannon had half ownership in the Spokane Cracker Company and the first streetcar line. He also became co-owner, with E. J. Brickell, of Glover’s old Sawmill (renamed Spokane Falls Mill Company). In 1888, he founded Greenwood Cemetery and became he cemetery association’s president. He served as director of the Eastern Washington and Idaho Fair Association, as he would for the 1890 Northwestern Industrial Exposition. Indeed, it seemed as if there was nothing Cannon could not do or try to do.

Cannon and Browne also partnered on the construction of the magnificent Auditorium Building at the northwest corner of Main and Post. Construction began shortly before the 1889 fire, but the building was spared because Little Wolf Ditch separated it from the fire’s path of destruction. With their wives, the two men went to New York to order appropriate trimming for their theatre. On the return trip the ladies stopped in Chicago to visit Josie Clarke, a student at the Lake Forest Seminary for Young Ladies.

The Auditorium Theatre proved to be everything its builders promised it to be. It contained the country’s largest stage, 60 by 45 feet, held 1,400 strawberry plush seats and ten elegant hanging boxes. One of the stained glass windows contained portraits of Cannon and Browned. At a cost of a quarter of a million dollars, it took a year and a half to build.

Opening night, September 16, 1890, Mr. and Mrs. Cannon took their seats in Box A with Mr. and Mrs. Hemenway. In Box B sat Mr. and Mrs. Ralph L. Clarke and Mr. and Mrs. B.H. Bennett. Nanon by the Carleton Opera Company was the bill of fare. After an opening address by Col. P.H. Winston complimenting the manager of the opera house, H.C. Hayward, the audience called for Browne and Cannon. It would be hard to imagine a greater moment of triumph and success than those two families enjoyed that evening. The glory reflected their hard work, faith in Spokane, and the goodwill of their fellow citizens.

After the Spokane Fire of 1889, the Bank of Spokane Falls was located temporarily in the Review Building. It was then moved to a three-story brick on the west side of Mill, north of Riverside, until Cannon could built the Bank building on his old site, the northwest corner of Riverside and Mill. Again, Cannon presented a unique concept – a building for only one business. Just one story high with a daylight basement, the little building had revolving doors and a great round skylight in the center of the roof. The exterior was faced with grey polished marble. Inside, marble had also been used generously. Although remembered by many Spokanites for its two large cast-stone crouching lions in front, these were not part of the original construction.

Cannon never had the opportunity to move into his Marble Bank building. His Bank of Spokane Falls failed June 5, 1893, thus becoming the first bank in Spokane to collapse in the national financial crisis known as the Panic of 1893.

It seemed as if Cannon’s entire world began to fall apart. Jennie had been in poor health for two years. In June 1892, she had a serious but undefined operation. After an apparent recovery, a relapse occurred. Dr. R. Ludlam, professor of surgical diseases of women at the Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital of Chicago, was brought to Spokane and the operation was repeated. By September 1893, Jennie was on her deathbed. She had made a last-minute tip to Chicago, hoping to improve her health, but became weaker and had to return home. Throughout her illness, it was said that she never complained and bore her suffering with great fortitude. The last few days she was in a coma. She passed away September 8th, at the age of 53.

Jennie Pease Clarke Cannon lay in state in a beautiful casket draped in black broadcloth in the parlor of her home, surrounded by a bower of flowers. Anna Browne sent a large basket of white and purple flowers that she had arranged with fiver ferns and vines tied with a white ribbon.

Dr. Watson, the Episcopal minister, said at Jennie’s funeral: “We have lost one of Spokane’s greatest citizens and benefactors. No one came to the city that she wasn’t ready to be interested in, although she was not a public woman. Her home was emphatically her kingdom; it’s happiness her happiness. There are two lessons from Mrs. Cannon’s life: one, her large-heartedness and charity, the other her patience and faith.” No other pioneer woman was accorded the front-page coverage Jennie received when she died.

Cannon found it difficult to put his financial affairs in order, and his health failed accordingly. It seemed to him that life would be a useless burden unless he could find somebody to sympathize with him sincerely. “With this thought in mind, he went to Helena, Montana, and convinced the young Mrs. Eleanor Davis Ward, a divorcee of a year with three small children, to marry him. A. M. had first met Mrs. Ward a couple years earlier when she had an asphalt business in Spokane.

Although the marriage was kept secret, word of it leaked out. Spokanites were scandalized that Cannon would remarry, by some reports, within six weeks of Jennie’s death. Certainly the union took place within two months. Mrs. And Mrs. Cannon traveled to New York separately, but by early January, A.M. decided to end the rumors by talking to a reporter for the New York Recorder. The new Mrs. Cannon was a vivacious blonde, attractive in face and figure. Cannon pointed to her “as the best proof that he was in his right mind when he contracted his second [actually third] marriage.” The article printed in the Recorder was duly reprinted in the Spokane Chronicle the following week.

The economic crash of 1893 proceeded to divest Cannon of more than the Bank of Spokane Falls. He and Browned had mortgaged their substantial land holding to build the Auditorium Building. By February 26, 1894, the stockholders met to set a price on the Auditorium. Unable to meet mortgage payments and taxes, Cannon’s land holdings began slipping away. He had guaranteed a $30,000 loan with 61 prime residential lots. In 1895, the Northwestern & Pacific Hypotheekbank foreclosed and bought the property at a sheriff’s sale, thus “wiping out Cannon’s last assets in the city.”

Suffering from heart problems and rheumatism, Cannon went to South America with F.C. Goodin in January 1895. His health improved greatly, and rumor said that Cannon was looking for a quick profit in railroading or mining in Brazil. Not finding it, he returned to New York, where he arranged with George Hutchinson to open an office, signing a year’s lease; however, before anything further could be done, Cannon passes away in his sleep April 6, 1895, exactly one moth shy of his 58th birthday.

As Cannon left no updated will, Eleanor sued for a widow’s one-half of his estate. In 1897, the court decided that hers was a preferred claim over all others, and she was to be paid out of the estate of A.M. and Jennie Cannon.

This story is excerpted from Seven Frontier Women and the Founding of Spokane Falls, by Barbara F. Cochran, and edited by Suzanne and Tony Bomante. For information on this or other local historical books by the Bomantes, visit www.tornadocreekpublications.com