 Many influential Northwest artists including Guy Anderson, Clayton James, and Barbara Straker James have close ties to La Conner.Radical labor activist Hulet M. Wells (1878–1970), a 1912 Socialist candidate for mayor of Seattle, president of the Seattle Central Labor Council, and founder in 1931 of the Unemployed Citizens' League of Seattle was born in a cabin near La Conner, where his Canadian-born parents homesteaded in 1877.Jailed at McNeil Island Penitentiary for his opposition to World War I, Wells was one of the leading public faces of Washington radicalism during the first decades of the 20th century.