Bartender Murdered at Pioche
By Cowboy George
Fedderman was a bartender in Virginia City in the 1860s, and he had an interested in mining. It was Fedderman's habit of following the booming camps in California and Nevada. When the talk of the newest boomtown hit the area, he was one of the first to get the news. Drunk miners liked to talk, and Fedderman had a lot of questions to ask.
Pioche was three hundred miles from Virginia City, and was located in Southern Nevada. It was a week's travel by stage if he could make the right connection at the different camps on the way south. It was told to Fedderman that Pioche was a wild camp, but the silver strike was the biggest yet and Fedderman wanted his share. He was also told that Pioche didn't have much law and order and if you even looked at a man cross-eyed, you were in for a fight. Being an Irishman and a bartender, he was used to all kinds of trouble.
Pioche had three different cemeteries, one being Boot Hill~and it had a section called "murderer's row." The cemetery already had dozens of graves. The only court Pioche had was a whiskey barrel and the gun was the judge. The one with the fastest gun was usually the winner.
It was said that one of the early sheriffs of Pioche had his own form of justice, where he marched a couple of killers down to Boot Hill and made them dig a couple of graves. Then he shot them dead and rolled their bodies into the holes. The only trouble the sheriff had was getting the holes filled back with dirt.
The local drunks around Virginia City told Fedderman he wouldn't last a year around Pioche. Fedderman finally packed his bag and mounted the stage for Pioche. When he got off the stage, he witnessed a shoot-out on Main Street, where the sheriff killed two men and wounded another.
A lawyer and his wife were on the stage with Fedderman and when they had seen what had happened on the street of Pioche, the lawyer's wife got right back on the stage and told her husband she wasn't staying in a town so rowdy and dangerous.
A local businessman in Pioche by the name of Franklin A. Book, wrote his sister in Maine telling her the following:
"You are right in thinking that we live here just as we please. If we want a hot whisky toddy we have it. If we choose to lay abed late, we do so. We come and go and are free from all fashions and conventionalities of Society, so-called with you. I like this. About one-half the community are thieves, scoundrels and murders and then we have some of the best folks in the world and I don't know but what our lives and property are as safe as with you. You can go up town and get shot very easily if you choose, or you can live peaceably. I don't have any trouble. I will send you the paper with an account of the last fight and verdict. It served them right. When I heard the firing we ran out and saw the running but were some distance off. I was in hopes eight or ten would have been killed at least, as these fighting men are a pest in the community. Mr. Lee was closeby and enjoyed the fight very much. He told me they fought like tigers. It was a splendid charge. He buried the dead in his ministerial capacity, with all due solemnity."
It didn't take Fedderman long in obtaining employment as a bartender at one of the two dozen saloons in Pioche. The bartender knew many miners who also came from the Virginia City area with the same hope of striking it rich like him.
The bartender's reputation was that of a man that didn't take bull from any drunk and if he couldn't talk or reason with the drinker, he would take a big club he had at hand behind the bar.
It was noontime when the drunken unemployed miner staggered in to get a drink at the saloon where Fedderman worked. One could see at a glance that the miner was down on his luck. He was shaking, cold, dirty and he said he was broke.
Fedderman knew the drunken miner from seeing him about town and bought him a drink.
It was the last drink the Irish bartender would ever serve. For no apparent reason, the miner pulled a gun from his shabby coat pocket and shot Fedderman point blank in the heart.
As the story goes, the miner fled the bar to the safety of the butcher shop next door. Nigger Liza, the owner of the market, refused to hide him, and brandishing a butcher knife, ordered him from her business.
The murder-crazed miner then grabbed Nigger Liza and took the knife away from her, then slit her throat. She also died In a pool of blood like the bartender did.
About the time this was going on, the deputy sheriff got word of the first murder and he rushed to the scene and found out that the killer was in the butcher shop.
The killer, not knowing that the deputy was waiting outside, walked out into the wood plank sidewalk in front of the butcher shop. The deputy stepped from cover across the street and shot the killer dead in his tracks.
Law and order was fast and swift in Pioche in the early 1870s, but it would be many years before peace would finally come to this frontier town.
The drinkers in Virginia City were right in telling Fedderman he wouldn't last a year in Pioche ~ he didn't even last two weeks!
Last updated on 03/16/08 06:31 PM