"Wet" Enterprise: Selected Saloons of the Old West

  The Demise of “Tom Dunn,” Montana Saloonkeeper 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 ...

  William Brown: Black Saloonkeeper on the Comstock Lode In 1862 two men who found themselves in Virginia City,  Nevada each made that Comstock Lode mining town the launching pad for their careers.    One was Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, the Nation’s most famous author.    The other was William A.G. Brown, shown here, an African American saloonkeeper who languished in obscurity until Nevada archeologists excavated the site of his drinking establishment.   Details of Brown’s life before arriving in Virginia City are scant.  Local records list his death there in April 1893 and give his age as 63.  This would put his birth at 1830 in Massachusetts and likely in or near Boston, the name he gave his saloon.  Although Brown was not born in slavery, his education would have been in segregated schools.  Although Boston was the first city in the U.S. to desegregate its public schools, that did not occur until 1855, when Brown...

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...