"Wet" Enterprise: Selected Saloons of the Old West

Over its decades-long existence the Maverick Saloon could count six proprietors, five of them apparently law-abiding Montana citizens.  But my guess is that when patrons gathered around the bar at that legendary “watering hole,” the owner about whom the stories were spun endlessly was the Outlaw Lonnie Curry. In the late 1890s the saloon, shown above, was constructed in Harlem, a town in Blaine County, Northeast Montana, located on the Milk River and adjacent to the Canadian border. The Fort Belknap Indian Reservation is just outside its lim its. A postcard of Harlem's main street, unpaved and rutted, indicates the rustic pioneer nature of the town. The man who built the saloon was George Bowles, a transplanted Kentuckian who had fought for the Union in the Civil War.    He went west initially as a stage coach driver and became a rancher.    Bowles was operating the drinking establishment under the name Club Saloon when in July 1899, Lo...

Shown above is a letterhead for the The Valley Saloon, a drinking establishment in the small but violence-ridden town of Saco, Montana.    It identifies as the proprietor a man named “Tom Dunn.”    In January 1897 he was writing to a wholesale liquor dealer to complain about shipping charges on his recent order.    But “Dunn” never existed nor would the saloon owner using that alias live beyond the following year. When the man calling himself Tom Dunn about 1893 rode horseback into Saco, no one in that ramshackle town, shown above, knew who he was.  He had sufficient money to buy a local saloon, became known as its genial proprietor, and even, some said, got married and settled down.  “At the time of his death,” reported one Montana newspaper:  “He had a fairly good reputation among his neighbors and others who knew him.” “Tom Dunn” was, in truth, Ed Starr, a member of several well known outlaw gangs.  According t...

The setting is the Blackfeet Indian Reservation located in  Montana east of Glacier National Park and bordering Canada, an area larger than the state of Delaware.    There Thomas Patrick McGovern, an immigrant from Northern Ireland and saloonkeeper, fell in love with Sophie Gill Longevin, a half-Indian girl just out of her teens, and they wed. The couple is shown above. Often such marriages ended badly, but the McGoverns’ union lasted until Tom’s death, still living among the Blackfeet.   McGovern was born in July 1863, likely in County Cavan.  Of his early years the records are silent, nor is it clear when he immigrated to the United States and settled in a small Montana town called Dupuyer.  This hamlet drew French fur trappers, sheep ranchers from England and Scotland, and a motley group of adventurers.  As one observer put it:   “The settlement was typically wild and unruly, as were most western towns.” There in the 18...

          Milton Edward Joyce, proprietor of the Oriental Saloon in Tombstone, Arizona, has been called “one tough old bird” and, as above, pictured as a mean-eyed Western gunslinger.  Most often cited is Joyce’s violent clash in 1888 with the notorious “Doc” Holliday.  “…That’s just one small slice of this remarkable man’s life”  argues one observer, noting that the characterization ignores Joyce’s civic and business contributions.  Both depictions are valid.  There were two sides to Milton Joyce. Born in New York in 1847, Joyce arrived in California in 1862  at the age of fifteen. He was recorded in the 1870 Census working as a blacksmith in San Mateo, California, twenty miles from San Francisco.    By 1880 he had moved to Cochese County, Arizona, when silver was discovered there, initially recorded as a miner living in Tombstone.    Founded in 1879 this boomtown quickly attracted a mix of t...