A 'saint' in the desert

A whiskey bottle and a barroom brawl landed Mary Alice Devitt Laird with her colorful nickname.
"No-Nose Maggie" she is known as today, in recognition of the damage inflicted to her face after that skirmish in a mining camp saloon at Fish Springs.
Laird was a prostitute, one of Utah's infamous "ladies of the night," who made a new life for herself after her disfigurement and became a store owner and operator in Utah's isolated West Desert.
Her 40 years in the mining camp of Joy garnered her another nickname from a great-niece writing about her life story -- "Queen of the Desert."
A self-described family historian, Jody Tesch Sorenson says she became intrigued with the story of her "Aunt Mary," who was never talked about much.
"When she died in 1934, she went under the rug," says Sorenson in a phone interview from Everson, Wash.
Sorenson researched Laird's story, from her birth in Minnesota in 1858 to her move West in her late 20s, where she ended up working in brothels in several states, including Utah. The Washington resident's searching resulted in "ââ'Queen' of the Desert: The Real Story of Mary Devitt Laird," a self-published 2007 book from Chickadee Publishing.
Laird's story also lives on at the Great Basin Museum in Delta, where curator Roger Anderson says the store owner was well-known as May Laird, the only resident of Joy, Utah, for many years.
"She had this little store out in the middle of nowhere out in Juab County," Anderson says.
May Laird's story isn't well-known except among the old-time sheepmen, cowboys and miners who visited her store for provisions, he says.
"Had she not been known for her kindness to the sheepherders and the miners, I don't think she would have been remembered here," Anderson says.
Despite her time in prostitution, he adds, "It's one of those rare cases in this area where a person who made her living like she did isn't talked about very negatively. ... She seems to be treated with a great deal of deference."
The museum has some information about Laird in its exhibits, including interviews with folks who knew her and a copy of Sorenson's book.
But Anderson adds, "I don't think we even have a good picture of her."
Starting over
One of 11 children, Laird grew up in Minnesota and later moved with her family to Fargo, N.D. At 27, she married a fellow who may have been a train engineer or a salesman who was often on the road, Sorenson writes.
Her great-aunt's life took a new turn when Mary discovered her husband had another wife and children, Sorenson says.
"She just packed her suitcase and left. This is when she went to Seattle and her life in the 'profession' began," says one family member's account of the event in " 'Queen' of the Desert."
Sorenson tries to trace Laird's travels in the West, starting in Seattle, where the 1885 census lists her as Mrs. Mary Moran (her mother's maiden name), living with a brother. Mary later moved on to San Francisco, Nevada and, finally, Utah.
Mary is listed as a hatmaker in the 1885 census, and Sorenson says she thinks she may have worked as a dance-hall girl before becoming a prostitute.
"Being the survivor that she was, I believe she would do whatever she could to survive," she says.
"Mrs. Moran" was pregnant when she left North Dakota, so Sorenson examines the mystery of what happened to her baby. Family stories tell of Mary sending money to a Catholic "school" in Washington -- Sorenson suspects "a family member would have taken (the baby) and just kept their mouth shut."
A nasty gash
In 1890, Mary turned up in Fish Springs, a silver mining town and a pit stop on the old Pony Express route. She was 32 and calling herself Maggie, and it was there she got into a scuffle with a younger prostitute named Katie.
Katie hit Maggie on the forehead with a whiskey bottle, cutting a horizontal gash across the bridge of Maggie's nose. Katie was later found dead at the bottom of a well -- circumstances unknown -- and a disfigured Maggie "pulled herself up by her pantaloons" and started working as a barmaid, Sorenson writes.
After a time, supposedly to save Maggie from her excessive drinking, bartender Mac Laird "kidnapped" her. He loaded her bed -- filled with a still-asleep and naked Maggie -- in his wagon and hauled her off to Joy, northwest of Delta.
Maggie started working as a cook in a cafe and married Mac Laird in 1895. Together, they operated Laird's Store, a supply post that also had ramshackle rooms for travelers or drifters to stay the night. After Mac Laird died in the flu epidemic of 1917, his wife continued running the store until her death in 1934.
Anderson says May Laird, as she was then known, ran the post office at the store and also filed mining claims for the Detroit Mining Company. Sorenson's book paints an accurate picture of the woman and doesn't try to hide her flaws, Anderson says.
May and Mac Laird both had problems with alcohol and fought often, in front of anyone, Sorenson writes. But May was also known for her magic touch with wild horses and other animals, including a "pet" rattlesnake that coiled up behind her kitchen stove.
Folks also remember how she took care of the sick and never turned away anyone in need; six months before she died, the book says, she was beaten by a couple whose car had broken down in the desert.
Making her mark
"She was a colorful character," says Coleen McNulty at the Tintic Mining Museum in Eureka, the town where No-Nose Maggie is buried.
Laird wasn't the typical woman of the era, but she made it on her own, without a male figure in her life, says McNulty, whose own father knew the Joy store owner.
The Lairds owned 160 acres in the mining country around Joy, but none of that was passed on to her family, Sorenson says. Lady Laird Peak, in Juab County, still bears her great-aunt's name, she says.
Sorenson calls her relative a "desert saint." Prostitution was the last thing the author was looking for, she says, because Laird's life is significant in so many other ways -- as a young woman living alone in the wilderness, as a woman living in a man's society, as a Catholic living in a Mormon state.
"If she were living today, people probably wouldn't like her because she would be too domineering, but it took that kind of person to live out there," she says.
One day, Sorenson hopes to visit the Eureka cemetery where her great-aunt rests with her name on a tin plate.
Sorenson would like to visit the ghost town of Joy, too, even though she's been told, "There's nothing to see. There's just a bunch of rocks."