Meet Huxley, the Free Roaming Tabby White Salmon Calls Its Mayor
At 5:30 p.m., with a World Cup match on and the Tarwater Tavern filling up, White Salmon’s unofficial mayor made his evening entrance. Huxley, a 15-year-old tabby, threaded through the crowd, looked for his usual pillow, and when it was taken, chose another bench, curled up and went to sleep.
A mayor who answers to Huxley
That small scene at the tavern says a lot about how Huxley moves through White Salmon, Washington. People call out to him by name. Some greet him as “Mayor.” He does not hurry, and he does not appear especially interested in ceremony. He simply goes where he wants to go.
Huxley is a tabby with a tan coat marked by darker brown, a long lean body and a thick, ringed tail that has drawn comparisons to a raccoon’s. His almond-shaped eyes are famously hard to read. He is social, but not especially cuddly, and he prefers attention on his head and upper shoulders because an old injury left his back and legs sensitive.
He spends his days and nights in and around the businesses on the city’s three-block main street, especially along Jewett Avenue. He turns up at bars, coffee shops, clothing stores, the local inn and City Hall. More than one downtown spot keeps out water or a bed for him. One local bookstore even has a place ready for him when he decides to stop in.
Trying to locate him at any given moment is almost beside the point. Ask around downtown and the answer is often some version of, “He was just here.” Regulars suggest waiting for him at the TarBar in the evening, or checking the bookstore, or looking in one of the other familiar stops on his route. He drifts in and out of White Salmon’s daily life so naturally that tracking him feels less like following a pet and more like waiting for a local character to make his rounds.
His people know he belongs to the town, too
For all his independence, Huxley is not a stray. He has a home and a family downtown. His owners, Autumn Quigley and Craig Wilson, live above their guitar restoration shop, and they keep his food in the back room wood shop beside a black leather chair with a folded black-and-yellow striped blanket.
That chair is available to him. Whether he uses it is another matter.
Quigley said they sensed early on that Huxley was not going to be an indoor cat. They brought him home from a local animal shelter when he was only 2 months old. They tried walking him on a leash. It did not take. His street life began young, after he jumped from a second-story window of the apartment above what is now the TarBar.
The family has adjusted around the cat they have, not the cat someone else might have designed. Quigley has said she could keep him inside, but he would be miserable. So Huxley roams, and his people keep watch in the way people do when a pet belongs both to a household and to a place.
People text Quigley when they come across him. Wilson sometimes gets calls from residents saying the cat followed them home. The answer, apparently, is usually not alarm. Huxley is simply being Huxley. Quigley has said that when she sees him in town, she may ask whether he wants to come home and eat. Sometimes he does. Sometimes he does not.
That arrangement now comes with one important request. Huxley wears a purple collar with a tag that tells everyone he is not lost and asks them not to feed him. At 15, he is on a special diet for a medical condition, and his owners need him to come home for meals.
A cat woven into a changing town
Part of what makes Huxley’s story resonate in White Salmon is that his little kingdom is larger than any single storefront. He moves easily between old standbys and newer businesses. He can settle into the familiar atmosphere of the TarBar, then appear at Soča, the wine bar known for smoked trout dip and bottles of Gewürztraminer.
In a city of 2,600 that has been changing quickly, that easy passage matters to people. White Salmon was once known for fruit packing and lumber. Over the course of Huxley’s 15 years, the Columbia River Gorge has attracted tourists and affluent buyers, including people with high-tech jobs looking for second or third homes. Housing, traffic and wealth have all become points of tension, and longtime residents have felt pressure.
Against that backdrop, Huxley has become an unusually gentle kind of common ground. Marla Keethler, White Salmon’s actual mayor, has said he is a big part of the town’s character. She first met him the same way many people do, by running into him downtown. Her desk at City Hall is one of his preferred resting places.
Keethler has also said Huxley represents the idea that there is room for everyone in town, including a cat who has inspired countless inside jokes. His title as mayor appears to be one of those jokes, though nobody seems sure who first gave it to him. The town has leaned into it anyway. Huxley has a city-sponsored Instagram account and has become enough of a local attraction to land on the tourist circuit.
The mythology of a roaming cat
Once a cat becomes public property in the affectionate sense, stories begin to collect around him. Huxley has plenty.
He slips through open doors and seems to know exactly how to make himself welcome, rubbing against customers’ legs while they drink wine or browse used books. He may trail someone into a hotel lobby as if he belongs there, which, in White Salmon, he more or less does.
There are the dining-room stories. At Henni’s, the upscale restaurant in town, he is known to make tableside requests for salmon. There is the time he faced down a deer that wandered downtown. There is also the less polished gift he once left in front of women eating at the winery Le Doubblé Troubblé.
Children ask for him, too. James Chapman, who owns the Gorge Ink print shop and acts as an unofficial archivist of Huxley lore, has said kids come in wanting to know whether the mayor is around.
The legends have reached the point where even Quigley hears versions she did not know existed. She has described a whole mythology growing up around her cat. One story claims Huxley once ran for mayor himself. Keethler looked through City Hall records to see whether there was any basis for that tale and did not find one. Still, Huxley’s political image is real enough that his parents made pins featuring him during a 2019 election.
The mythology also includes his practical talents. Quigley has said she has seen him use the crosswalk as traffic in town has grown. That detail feels almost too perfect for a cat who already seems to operate with the confidence of someone who assumes the streets are partly his.
Why White Salmon keeps looking for him
Huxley’s life has not been without worry. Quigley and Wilson once lost track of him for a week, and someone eventually found him in a local park. That memory sits alongside the ordinary uncertainty of letting a cat live so publicly.
Yet the case for Huxley’s freedom is visible every evening he makes his rounds. He is not just outside. He is part of an ecosystem of people who know him, watch for him and make room for him. Shops set aside places for him to rest. Neighbors report sightings. Visitors learn quickly that if they want to find the mayor, they may need patience.
And then, quite often, he appears on his own schedule. He steps through a doorway, ignores the fuss, checks whether his favorite seat is open and settles wherever he pleases.
That is the heart of Huxley’s appeal. He belongs deeply to his owners, who know his habits, manage his diet and understand the compromise required to give him the life he insists on having. He also belongs, in a looser but very real way, to the town that greets him in coffee shops, at bar stools and from behind counters.
In a place where so much has changed, a cat with a purple collar, a downtown route and a talent for making everyone feel included has become something close to civic glue. White Salmon may have an elected mayor. But the one residents keep asking about is the tabby who was just here a minute ago.
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