Anyone who’s ever strolled through Fairhaven knows that the name of Dirty Dan Harris is hard to avoid.
He’s best known as the father of Fairhaven, having platted and sold much of the land on which modern-day tourists and locals live, work and play. There’s a street, a steakhouse and a statue in his honor.
But what do we really know about Dirty Dan?
Dirty Dan’s Details
H. Leon Greene wondered who Harris really was, too.
The 81-year-old retired cardiologist is the author of six books, including two involving Whatcom County history. After moving to the area in 2012, Greene realized that for someone prominent enough to have a statue, most people seemed to know very little about Harris besides being Fairhaven’s founder.
It led Greene to pen the first full Harris biography, “Dirty Dan Harris: Scandalous Father of Fairhaven,” published this April.
Owing to both little surviving documentation and a volume of tall tales involving Harris, the quest to separate fact from fiction wasn’t easy for Greene. Even some of the most basic information about Harris is hazy, and Greene acknowledges that much of what we know about him is a series of best guesses.
His full name was Daniel Jefferson Harris, but his birthdate remains unknown, somewhere between 1826 and 1833. The most reliable guess is 1832, Greene says. Harris was one of six children born to a couple in New York, though exactly where can’t be confirmed; likely somewhere on Long Island.
Harris served on whaling vessels as a teenager, and Greene says these formative years in a hardscrabble environment likely gave him his notions of what was socially acceptable, including the lack of frequent bathing that would later lead to his “Dirty Dan” moniker.
The whaling timeline isn’t definitive, but what’s known is that Harris served on the whaleship Levant in the early 1850s, helmed by Captain Mercator Cooper. The captain had previously taken the ship Manhattan to the edge of isolationist Japan in 1845, returning shipwrecked Japanese sailors he found. Harris allegedly claimed he was on that journey, but it’s highly unlikely given he’d have been a preteen at the time, Greene says.
However, the Levant did record one of the first documented continental landings of Antarctica in Jan. 1853, and Harris may well have been on board.
Sometime later in 1853, Harris deserted the Levant while in port, most likely in Hawaii. He probably rode another vessel to San Francisco and then another to Victoria, but Greene couldn’t find crew records to verify Harris’ travels.
In the spring of 1854, Harris took a small vessel and left Victoria, rowing across the Haro Strait and past the San Juan Islands to reach what’s now Bellingham Bay.
Dirty Dan’s Deeds
Harris allegedly helped another early white settler, John Thomas, after coming ashore. He may have lived with Thomas in his cabin near Padden Creek, aiding him until his death from tuberculosis the following winter.
Harris was able to acquire Thomas’ land after his death. As the 1860s and 70s progressed, Harris continued his land speculating. He also acquired a schooner to transport goods to and from Victoria. While most items were things like food and clothing, Harris also transported opium and attempted to smuggle alcohol without paying customs taxes: he’d allegedly mark casks of hooch with the name “Honolulu Sugar,” hoping to fool law enforcement.
Over the years, Harris was arrested and charged with various crimes, including smuggling liquor, illegally selling liquor to Native Americans, and even inciting a war between two indigenous tribes. He was also accused of misappropriating others’ funds, Greene says. In most of these cases, incomplete surviving court records fail to say what, if any, justice was dispensed.
Though many of Harris’ deeds carry a haze of uncertainty, Greene says one astonishing feat is true: his single-handed building of a several-mile-long road to Lake Whatcom, to aid local mining efforts.
Paid $350, Harris completed the road by himself over the course of one summer. He swore off alcohol to be maximally productive, and wrapped himself in blankets at night to fight off mosquitoes.
“The notion that he could bring down old-growth trees, or at least large trees (by himself), is pretty amazing,” Greene says.
By 1883, Harris platted much of his land into a town he decided to name “Fairhaven,” which may have been inspired by a Native American word translating to “place of safety,” according to The Fourth Corner, a 1951 book about early Whatcom County history.
Harris’ subsequent land sales (he allegedly owned 680 town lots at one point) made him a rich man, and he opened the wood-built Fairhaven Hotel in 1884. That same year, he also celebrated the presidential election of Grover Cleveland by erecting a 50-foot-long American flag thought to be the West Coast’s largest at the time.
When Harris later sold his hotel to Nelson Bennett and Charles Larrabee, they declined to pay extra for the hotel piano. As the story goes, Harris instead rolled the piano out of the building, down a nearby dock and into the bay.
Several years after Harris married the long-sought-after Bertha Wasmer (20 years his junior) in 1885, Wasmer filed for divorce and moved to Los Angeles, seeking better climes for an illness (possibly tuberculosis) that would result in her 1888 death.
Harris followed her to reconcile, selling most of his remaining land holdings for an amount estimated at $70,000 (nearly $2.5 million today). He and his ailing wife were cared for in California by Dr. Shorb and his wife; it’s believed the Shorbs took financial advantage of Harris’ declining health after his wife’s death.
When Harris died in August 1890, a complicated court battle ensued over his estate, Greene says. Harris had no children, but a nephew was named as an heir in a copy of Harris’ contested 1871 will. By the time things were settled, a total of five claimants walked away with roughly $33 each, Greene says. Harris’ nephew had disappeared by that time and is believed to have never claimed his share of the estate.
Harris remains buried next to his wife in a Los Angeles cemetery.
Is It Really Dirty Dan?
Today, there’s only one known photograph of Dirty Dan Harris.
Taken in 1884, it features him standing in a rowboat on the Fairhaven shoreline, his face silhouetted and undefined due to the camera’s distance.
How do we know it’s him? Jeff Jewell, Whatcom Museum archivist, says the identification comes directly from many “original” prints of the image, which all list the man as Harris.
A second photo of Harris supposedly existed in the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies but is now missing, Greene says. During book research, Greene hunted through every archival box he could find, confirming the photo was no longer in the center’s possession. The photo’s description notes Harris standing with businessmen on a wharf.
A third photograph, taken of the Fairhaven Hotel in the late 1880s, had been thought by some to show Harris sitting in a chair in front of a doorway.
Bellingham historian Kolby LaBree speculates that man is not Harris, and Greene agrees. Jewell says no known writing exists to confirm the man’s actual identity. Nevertheless, the image still hangs in the Dirty Dan Harris Steakhouse.
LaBree thinks another photo in the archives – featuring 13 people in a large canoe during a 4th of July picnic at the Roeder Mill around 1870 – may feature Harris as a larger man in the middle of the boat. But she can’t prove it.
Regardless of surviving photos, few images were ever taken of Harris simply because area towns lacked local working photographers until 1890, Jewell says.
“Photography was complicated and expensive (back then), meaning photography was for professionals who had to be hired,” he says. “Very few people had a personal camera. I guess Dan wasn’t impressed enough with himself to pay a photographer in Victoria or another big city to take a glam shot.”
The bronze statue of Dirty Dan – commissioned by local historian Brian Griffin and created by Blaine’s Robert McDermott as part of the 2003 creation of Fairhaven’s Village Green – depicts him in a bowler’s hat, lean and ready to make his mark.
“It’s an amazing sculpture, but it’s not really Dan Harris,” Greene says, in terms of its historical accuracy.
An 1874 description by Charles Donovan depicts Harris as having long, unkempt brown hair and a shaggy, sandy beard. He was broad-shouldered, robust and muscular, about 5-foot-11-inches tall and weighing 200 pounds.
Harris is also described as having commonly worn no socks or shoes in his early years, according to The Fourth Corner book. He often appeared in a spotted, greasy coat, with an “unbuttoned red flannel undershirt exposing a hairy chest, bent hat and homemade pants.”
Regardless of his actual looks or deeds, Harris continues to ignite community-wide imagination. A Dirty Dan Harris Festival took place for 17 years before ending in 2020, complete with an uphill piano-moving race. In 2024, it was replaced by the Dirty Dan Harris Murder Mystery Weekend.
While many facts about Dirty Dan Harris will never be known, one thing is more certain: he won’t be forgotten anytime soon.
“It’s hard to separate the myth and the man,” LaBree says. “And I think he himself cultivated that. I think he was a storyteller, and I think that was part of his charm, perhaps, when he was alive.”
