The Wildest Crimes of Old West Vegas

Las Vegas was founded in 1905 at a lonely rail junction in southern Nevada far from any sizable city. This isolation allowed Las Vegas to remain one of the last settlements on the frontier during the waning days of the “Old West.” And amidst this semi-lawless atmosphere, there was plenty of opportunity for criminal activity to thrive.

shooting at the gem saloon

Las Vegas in 1911 was a town that just barely saw its first automobile pass through.  Though it was over a decade into the 20th century, Las Vegas was still in almost every way a frontier settlement embodying the spirit of the Old West. 

The dominant industry and driver of the economy in early Vegas was the railroad.  And a central part of the economic activity spawned by the railroad was vice – which is why it should come as no surprise a Red Light District was established shortly after the founding of Vegas, known to locals as Block 16 – a strip of saloons featuring food, booze, gambling, and prostitution. 

Another striking aspect of early Vegas was the level of racial integration, especially given the city’s later reputation as the “Mississippi of the West” due to systemic segregation.  The main saloons along Block 16 were the Arizona Club, the Gem Saloon, and the Red Onion.  These places looked like scenes from the stereotypical vision of an Old West drinking hole.  Superficially fancy exteriors were the face to a raucous interior where gambling, drinking, and whoring took place.

Rowdy types were drawn to Block 16, and one such of that type was Calarina Leon, who had a reputation around Las Vegas for stirring up trouble.  On September 25, 1911, the dry air was steadily losing the oppressive heat that lashes Vegas each summer.  Tending bar that afternoon at the Gem Saloon was Vady Washington, a former railroad worker that was born to emancipated slaves in Georgia shortly after the Civil War.  Calarina continued to put back drink after drink as Vady took a break to eat some lunch.  Calarina decided in his drunken state to help himself to some of what Vady was having.  Words were had and Calarina was escorted out of the saloon by another employee.

Undeterred, Calarina made his way back into the Gem Saloon, continuing his belligerent antics and again promptly being shown the door. 

When Calarina stumbled through the swinging wood doors of the Gem Saloon to make his third attempt at gaining entry to the establishment, Vady was waiting behind the bar with his gun drawn.  The belligerent patron made it a few steps back into the saloon before a shot was fired. Calarina hit the ground with blood pouring from a gunshot wound and died later that day.

Vady was taken into custody, and the ongoing trial became something of a local spectacle, with a former judge leading Vady’s defense team under the theory that the barkeep was acting in self-defense.  As part of the four-day long trial, the jury toured the Gem Saloon, resulting in the sight of the city’s most upstanding members gathered in the Red Light District where polite company was not to be seen. 

After ten hours of deliberations, the jury delivered their verdict: manslaughter.  It appears this was a compromise decision, with several jurors pushing for murder and others advocating for acquittal.  The day after Valentine’s Day, Vady appeared in court for his sentencing.  News accounts indicate that Vady agreed he should do some time but remained steadfast his shooting of Calarina was justified, or at least did not warrant any regrets on Vady’s part.  The judge expressed his desire to provide as lenient a sentence as possible – two years in the Nevada State Prison.

As for Calarina, his grave still stands at Woodlawn Cemetery near downtown Las Vegas, with a simple inscription: “Killed in a fight at the Gem Saloon.”   

a child abduction and quick justice

It was frigid on the morning of Monday, January 4, 1909, in the young town of Las Vegas.  A five-year-old girl exited the small cottage-style Romero household located in “Old Town” - the less-developed original competing townsite for Las Vegas that was largely vacated shortly after the city’s founding in 1905 – and made her way along the dirt roads to the town’s small one-building schoolhouse. 

Sometime in the early afternoon, Mrs. Romero grew increasingly distracted from her household responsibilities when her child failed to return home from school on time.  Mrs. Romero caught the attention of her neighbors, asking if any had seen her daughter, with someone mentioning they had seen her child walking with a man near the Las Vegas Creek. 

It was only a matter of minutes before Undersheriff Sam Gay and his deputy, along with concerned townspeople and Mrs. Romero, fanned out near Las Vegas Creek, a narrow stream shaded by trees and dotted with the occasional shack that snaked along the edge of town. 

Mrs. Romero yelled her child’s name, and just as darkness began to fall on the short winter day, the Romero child called back to her mother, “I’m over here.”  The frantic mother and the sheriff’s deputy ran toward the child’s voice, but by the time they reached her, the man that had lured her to the forested creek managed to dart into the growing shadows.

Las Vegas in 1909 only had a population of 800 people, so it did not take long before questioning of witnesses by Undersheriff Gay led to the arrest of a newcomer to the city – one Walter Smith, who had arrived from California a week earlier and taken up a job at the Las Vegas Bakery in Old Town.  There is virtually no information that could be found about Smith and he likely was among the frequent transient travelers of the era that hopped the rails searching throughout the west for work.

Justice moved fast in old Vegas.  Judge Henry Lillis was summoned to the squat one-story courthouse to interrogate the suspect.  Smith protested his innocence despite witnesses placing the newcomer with the Romero child walking along the creek, plus Smith lacked a solid alibi for his whereabouts during the time the Romero girl went missing after school. 

Judge Lillis found that while there was significant circumstantial evidence to back child abduction charges against Smith, there was still not enough evidence by which a jury could convict the suspect.  Normally, a suspect is free to go about their business when a court finds there is insufficient evidence to prosecute.  But things worked a bit differently in towns on the frontier at the tail end of the Old West.

Judge Lillis ordered Walter Smith to leave Las Vegas within the next hour.  Undersheriff Sam Gay then turned to the suspect and told him he had just two minutes to get out of Gay’s sight.  News accounts indicate this was one minute and forty-five seconds longer than needed for Smith.

a deputy pulling a gun on the judge

Joe Keate was one of Clark County Sheriff Sam Gay’s most trusted deputies.  And in examining Keate’s exploits, it’s clear to see why Sheriff Gay placed so much trust in his deputy.  Joe Keate arrived in Las Vegas with his wife and two children from Utah around 1910.  After working at nearby mines, he secured a job as a deputy sheriff.  Deputy Keate made the front page of the local papers in 1915 for bringing two bandits to justice after a running gunfight around Moapa. 

But in an example of the fraught line between law and anarchy on the frontier, Deputy Keate found himself at the center of a scandal that would implicate some of the most powerful officials in the county.

Justice of the Peace for Las Vegas W.H. Harkins was presiding over court on the afternoon of September 19, 1917.  Judge Harkins had previously ordered Deputy Keate to bring a local Vegas resident to the courthouse by 6:00 p.m. as a witness in a tire theft case.

Deputy Keate moseyed into the courthouse around 6:35 p.m. with the witness.  He had been called to work early that day and missed breakfast, so Keate decided to stop at his house for a bite to eat before taking the witness to court.  Judge Harkins, a cranky middle-aged man, was visibly upset at the delay Keate had caused and asked if he had any explanation.  Instead of taking this opportunity to offer some sort of excuse, the hot-tempered deputy instead told Harkins that he had to wait for the judge plenty of times in the past, so it was only fair the judge wait for him once in a while. 

It is as true now as it was 100 years ago that it is never a good idea to act like a jackass in front of a judge in their own courtroom.  Judge Harkins found Keate in contempt and ordered him to pay a $5 fine (about $100 today).  Keate pulled out five dollars from his pocket, slammed it on the desk in front of Judge Harkins, and left the courthouse in a huff.

But after a few minutes had passed, Keate returned to the courthouse with four of his associates in tow.  Judge Harkins had just concluded the court session as the posse led by Keate burst into the courtroom, with the deputy carrying a paper-wrapped object in his hand.  He approached and set the mysterious package on the desk in front of Judge Harkins, pulling back the paper to reveal a revolver.  The deputy then pulled the revolver he wore on his side.  “Mr. Harkins, you have dogged me long enough.  You will remit that fine or fight.”

Judge Harkins froze, going white with fright.  District Attorney Bert Henderson rose from his chair and walked up to the judge’s desk.  The District Attorney picked up the revolver, reminding Keate that he was an officer of the law.  Not a second passed before Deputy Keate turned his gun on the prosecutor, saying, “You leave that alone.  I have cut clean with you.”  The prosecutor lowered the firearm back to its place on the desk between Keate and Judge Harkins.

Sheriff Gay arrived at the courthouse about this time as onlookers in the courtroom waited to see whether Judge Harkins would turn over the $5 or pick up the revolver and settle things outside.  The District Attorney and Judge Harkins demanded that Sheriff Gay arrest his deputy.  The sheriff declined their request, noting that no harm had come to anybody.  Sheriff Gay apparently was able to talk some sense into his deputy, and Keate, after offering a few more choice words to the judge, stormed out of the building.

This was the last straw for Sheriff Gay as far as the town elders were concerned.  After all, it had only been two years since Sheriff Gay narrowly managed to save his career after getting blackout drunk one night and shooting out the new electric lights that had just been installed along Fremont Street. 

District Judge Horsey, the chief judge in Clark County, held a hearing regarding the whole matter.  Judge Harkins and District Attorney Henderson both testified to Judge Horsey about their shock when Sheriff Gay responded to their requests to arrest Keate by noting that no harm had come to anybody.  Sheriff Gay testified in response that he made this statement in an effort to prevent the situation from spiraling out of control – Gay believed that if he tried to arrest Keate or seize his firearm that someone could be injured in the scuffle. 

Judge Horsey was irate at Sheriff Gay’s explanation for not arresting Keate and issued an order removing Gay from office.  Judge Horsey’s opinion stressed the importance of preserving the integrity of the local courts and the rule of law in the Las Vegas Valley, and it took particular umbrage at the idea a peace officer could usurp the rightful authority of a judge to issue a contempt citation. 

However, the people of Clark County disagreed with Judge Horsey’s decision. Sheriff Gay was reelected to office at the next election, and Joe Keate later went on to be elected sheriff of Clark County in his own right.

losing your shirt in early vegas

A sizable number of the 80,000 or so residents of Nevada in the first years of the 20th century were prospectors seeking their fortunes in the mining boomtowns that sprung up overnight across the State – places like Goldfield, Midas, and Rhyolite.  The chance to become instantly wealthy offered by these isolated locales attracted thousands of single men from across the country, with most passing through tiny rail junction towns like Las Vegas on their way to find their fortune in the desert.

One such traveler was George Wood, who stepped off a train at Union Pacific Depot in downtown Las Vegas in the freezing dawn on January 13, 1915.  Wood planned to catch the 10:00 a.m. train to Goldfield later that day.  However, Wood was the sort restless enough to pack up with his life’s savings and head to a remote outpost of the Nevada desert to prospect for gold, so waiting around Union Pacific Depot for a few hours wasn’t particularly appealing, especially after Wood caught wind from locals about the town’s Red Light District – Block 16. 

It was not a long walk from the train station before Wood arrived at the row of bars and saloons lining the dirt road along First Street.  Once Wood made his way to Block 16, he eventually wandered into one of the less reputable establishments in an already seedy part of town where he made the acquaintance of Camille Smith, a well-known local prostitute that worked out of the saloon’s back rooms.  Camille made such an impression that Wood decided to delay catching his 10 o’clock train in favor of sharing some drinks with his new acquaintance. 

Camille interrupted her conversation with Wood and beckoned over a friend, 21-year-old neer-do-well Glen Harwood, who the local papers described as a “dope fiend” and was known around Vegas for wiling away his time at the saloons before stumbling back to his family’s home on the edge of town.  The three new friends drank heavily over the next few hours on Wood’s dime. 

As night fell, Wood and Camille decided to take up in one of the rooms in the back of the bar while Harwood went on his way.  But Harwood did not go too far.  Either Harwood or Camille had slipped “knockout drops” (as the local paper referred to the drug), into Wood’s drinks.  Wood remembered heading toward one of the back rooms of the saloon with Camille – the next thing he recalled was coming to the following morning on one of the cold dirt roads lining Block 16, stumbling about shirtless in the freezing winter air.  A sheriff’s deputy found Wood and ushered him a few blocks to the reputable part of town where the unfortunate traveler was put up in a hotel room until he regained his senses.

Once Wood came to, he discovered Harwood and Camille had robbed him of $190 (about $4,000 today), as well as a watch, the ticket to Goldfield, and even most of his clothing.  Harwood and Camille were quickly identified by Wood as the culprits and arrested.  Unfortunately for Wood, police were only able to recover $40 of the stolen money, with the duo likely secreting or spending the majority of the funds. 

Harwood admitted his guilt right away under questioning from the deputy sheriff while Camille pled ignorance to any sort of impropriety on her part.  The District Attorney felt Camille was in on the robbery but that he would have a tough time convincing a jury of her guilt.  The charges against Camille were dismissed while Harwood was sentenced to serve 30 days in the county jail. 

Harwood ran into unexpected trouble a few days into his sentence.  Two fellow inmates – Arthur Wells and James Steele, bandits that had recently been hunted down by Undersheriff Joe Keate after conducting a series of armed robberies of stores in the small mining towns of Clark County – attacked a guard with a piece of wood.    

Harwood, having sobered up during his time in the county jail, showed his true character by entering the fray in an effort to defend the guard, but Wells turned his attention to Harwood, striking him several times.  The attack was over in seconds, with Steele and Wells fleeing the prison on foot as fast as possible and rushing out of town.  A posse of local townsfolk and sheriff’s deputies numbering close to a dozen ventured out on horseback and by automobile into the mesquite brush and dunes surrounding Las Vegas in search of the escapees. 

Steele and Wells were soon captured, standing trial for the assault on the guard and Harwood, as well as for the escape, in a Las Vegas courtroom in the fall of 1915.  The attorney for the defendants did not dispute the facts surrounding the jail break, but he did put forward the novel argument that his clients had been unlawfully detained, and therefore they were justified in using force to break out of jail. 

The law requires suspects to be brought before a judge “without unreasonable delay” upon being arrested.  It turned out that Steele and Wells had been languishing in the Clark County Jail for 23 days after their arrest without being arraigned before a judge.  The jury agreed that this constituted an unreasonable delay, finding the pair “not guilty.”  But the high from this victory was short-lived for the bandits, as both were convicted of multiple robberies in subsequent trials, with each receiving a 5 – 20 year sentence in the Nevada State Prison.

Harwood served out the rest of his sentence in the county jail without incident and turned his life around, making an honest living as an auto mechanic in Las Vegas.  As for the unfortunate would-be prospector George Wood, it is unknown if he ever made it to Goldfield.  And Camille Smith only appears in this one local press article before fading back into the history of early Las Vegas.

hobos and chain gangs

Chain gang.  Those two words instantly conjure images of prisoners sweltering in the hot sun on a rural southern road chipping away at rocks with pickaxes while a stern guard stands watch, the shotgun in his arms silently conveying to the inmates the consequences of disobedience.

But while chain gangs were most common in the southern United States from the period after the end of Reconstruction to the 1940’s, this extreme form of dehumanizing punishment also made an appearance in a sleepy desert town dotting the railroad line between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles in the early years of the 20th century.

Within two years of Las Vegas being founded, the city enacted an ordinance permitting petty crimes to be punished with a sentence to the local chain gang.  The city’s only newspaper, the Las Vegas Age, enthusiastically championed the use of chain gangs as a means of dealing with “hobos” and “tramps” that made their way to the newly established rail hub town in the course of their travels via boxcar.

The Age makes clear that the unofficial policy had been to urge vagrants to “move along” but this strategy proved ineffective.  The newspaper also lamented that jailing those begging and hanging out in Las Vegas would cost the county too much in room and board. 

It seems there was no opposition to the policy of using chain gangs among the young town’s political and business leaders.  In fact, within a few years of Las Vegas passing the first chain gang ordinance, the use of prisoners on a chain gang to perform menial labor on behalf of the municipality was taken as a given.  Helen Stewart, the first commissioner of streets for Las Vegas, proudly employed chain gangs for a “City Beautiful” project to clean up litter from the town’s vacant lots.

There were at least some occasions when prisoners on the chain gang refused to work, but local authorities dealt with such informal strikes by sending the prisoners to the cramped, poorly insulated county jail on a diet of bread and water.  According to local press accounts, this “carrot-and-stick” method was effective in gaining compliance from those sentenced to the local chain gang.

While the development of chain gangs for forced labor, largely road construction, was a continuation of slavery by another name in the States of the former Confederacy, the use of chain gangs in western States such as Nevada seems to have been driven by a desire to deal with the influx of idle newcomers traveling by rail as well as a lack of resources by local officials to otherwise incarcerate such individuals.

And while chain gangs in Las Vegas were used to perform public maintenance tasks like cleaning the streets, the use of chain gangs in neighboring California at this same time focused on reforming “hobos” by having them perform useless labor, such as breaking rocks for no purpose. It was believed by some policymakers of the time that this punishment served as a method of teaching such people the routines of labor, the thinking being that if hobos could be taught to engage in routine meaningless work, they would be more likely to engage in work with a purpose.

Chain gangs fell out of use in Las Vegas by the mid-1920’s, though with the influx of newcomers that came with the building of Boulder Dam, local officials again openly discussed renewing use of the chain gang system to deter idle individuals from spending too much time in Vegas. 

As for the rest of the country, by the 1930’s the larger American public had begun to turn against the use of chain gangs due to the many possibilities for abuse inherent in such a system. And while some States briefly renewed use of chain gangs during the “tough on crime” 1990’s, the practice has essentially been de facto abolished in the United States.

the death of the first lawman in las vegas

Las Vegas was established on May 15, 1905.  With the establishment of the new town, it became necessary to bring law and order to what was a last bastion of the semi-lawless Old West steadily giving way to the modernity of the 20th century.  News reports from the Las Vegas area at this time involve frequent bar brawls and shootouts among the miners and railroad workers that constituted the majority of the city’s populace.

At this time Las Vegas sat at the southern end of Lincoln County, with the county seat of Pioche over 150 miles away.  The sheriff of Lincoln County appointed Joe Mulholland, a former Union Pacific Railroad security guard, as the Night Watchman of Las Vegas.  While Mulholland served as Night Watchman, the position entailed all of the duties expected of a modern police officer, such as patrolling the streets, making arrests, and overseeing the transport of prisoners to the District Court in Pioche for trial.

Mulholland had been on the job for only a few weeks when one evening at Frye’s Saloon (one of the half-dozen or so establishments that served as bars, brothels, boarding houses, or a combination thereof in Block 16, the Red Light District of early Vegas), he became entangled in an altercation with a young twenty-something prospector from Butte, Montana named William McCarthy over the ownership of a ring.  The verbal dispute ended with Mulholland punching McCarthy, pulling his sidearm, and placing him under arrest.

Mulholland took the inebriated McCarthy to the city jail - nicknamed “the Blue Room” - and notorious for its dank, dungeon-like conditions.  After letting McCarthy stew for an hour or two, Mulholland released his prisoner in the dark early morning hours.  Mulholland returned to Frye’s Saloon, where he told the bartender and others gathered at the bar that he had taken mercy on McCarthy.  “I couldn’t let any man stay in that cold, damp cell overnight.”

McCarthy, probably still heavily under the influence, visited his friend, Jack Quintell, to obtain a revolver.  As the sun was rising over the Las Vegas valley, William McCarthy walked back to Frye’s Saloon on Block 16.  Most customers had cleared out by now, and the only people left at the bar were three employees counting out the cash register while conducting a shift change and Watchman Mulholland. 

McCarthy slipped through the rear entrance to Frye’s Saloon and made his way unnoticed to the main part of the establishment.  He looked at Mulholland and asked, “You still armed?”  Without waiting for an answer, McCarthy raised his revolver and fired three times.  The first round struck Mulholland in the upper right chest.  Mulholland spun, causing the last two rounds to land in his back. 

Roy Martin, one of the first doctors in Las Vegas, was brought to the scene of the shooting within minutes and dressed the gunshot wounds in an effort to stabilize Mulholland.  At this time, the normal practice in Las Vegas and other frontier mining towns was to stabilize a patient long enough to send them by train to hospitals in Los Angeles.  Unfortunately, the wounds were too serious to be treated with the meager means available to Dr. Martin in the newly established town, and Mulholland died around eight o’clock the morning of October 1, 1905.

McCarthy was sent by train to Pioche for trial on charges of first degree murder – charges that could have resulted in McCarthy’s hanging at the Nevada State Prison in Carson City.  By all accounts in the local Las Vegas press, the shooting of Mulholland had been committed in cold blood and with premeditation. 

At the time of McCarthy’s trial, he retained the services of a retired Utah judge to act as his defense attorney.  McCarthy presented testimony from his fellow prospectors that Mulholland had belittled and humiliated McCarthy the night of the shooting, and that Mulholland was generally an unlikable person that abused his authority as a law enforcement officer.  No relatives of Mulholland could be located, making it difficult for the prosecution to rebut the charges against Mulholland’s character.  The jury apparently found McCarthy’s explanation of the whole affair satisfactory, deliberating for only an hour before finding him not guilty on the first ballot.  This seems a case of an Old West jury finding that Mulholland was a person in need of shooting. 

The local Las Vegas paper expressed shock at the acquittal of McCarthy.  The young prospector made a brief trip back to Vegas to tidy up his affairs before returning to his hometown of Butte, Montana.  The paper noted the following about McCarthy: “He is yet a young man and it is hard to conjecture what effect his easy acquittal will have on his future character.  There is an opportunity for reform and a more useful career than that which he pursued while in Las Vegas.”

It is unknown whether McCarthy took advantage of the chance for reform he was given upon returning to Butte.