Postcards - Frontier Doc, Part 2

In 1957, local anthropologist Margaret “Peggy” Wheat interviewed a man she referred to as a Fallon “legend,” Doctor George Gardner (1885-1970). (“In Focus,” Volume 5, 1991-1992). Last week, I wrote about his relationship with Tex Rickard, who owned a saloon in Rawhide and later financed the third incarnation of Madison Square Garden.

Gardner was a great storyteller, and his memories of frontier doctoring and frontier justice are witty and full of local details. One of them had to do with a murder trial held in Stillwater sometime in the 1890s.

Before being moved to Fallon in 1904, the Churchill County seat was located first in Bucklands Station (1861), then in the mining camp of La Plata (1864), then in Stillwater (1867). A courthouse was built in Stillwater in 1867 and rebuilt in 1868. In 1880, the old courthouse was replaced with a large, white elegant two-story building, constructed on Stillwater’s Main Street. It was the pride of Stillwater. The second story served as a ballroom. A “Reno Evening Gazette” article highlighted scenes from a successful ball held there on January 9, 1882: “At 7:30 the courthouse was lit up, and the dance was commenced…. At 12 o’clock all partook of an elegant supper at J.M. Sanford’s hotel and then danced till daylight.”

In its heyday, Stillwater could boast of not only the big white courthouse, but also of hotels, a grammar school, a post office, and a population of at least 150 people.

Which brings me back to Gardner’s story, set in Stillwater when it served as the county seat.

Gardner: “Down in Stillwater—that was the county seat at that time, and whenever they held court, everybody came down there and got drunk—that was why they went down. A fellow shot another man and he killed him. They got into a sort of fight. And this fellow killed the other fellow first. Anyway, that’s the way the story went. …Lem Allen was the judge… The court came to order, they pleaded their cases, and ‘bout every half-hour the judge’d pound on this gavel and say, ‘The court is adjourned for one half hour. We’ll retire over to the Cirac place [hotel], go over there and have a drink.’

All of a sudden somebody said, ‘What are we gonna do with the prisoner tonight?’

The Grand Jury couldn’t answer it except one fellow had a bright idea. He said, ‘There’s another well, a dry well, out there. We’ll put him down in the well.’”

So that’s what they did. They threw a bed down first and told the guy he could go down there and make his bed, and they let him down on a rope.

Gardner: “They figured he wouldn’t try to get out…because he was having such a good time. He had a drink every time the other boys had a drink. … They kept that up for three or four days until the jury came back with ‘Not Guilty.’

That was all: court was over, the fellow was out, and that’s all there was to that….

They’d put a courthouse up and they didn’t have a jail. Just a court room…. That’s the Old West!”

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