Card sharps and gun play at the Pioneer Saloon
His name was Paul Coski and he was by most accounts a quarrelsome man, a roustabout ex-prize fighter who eventually turned to mining, where his brute strength forged a living.
Even in his sixties, Coski climbed into the pit each morning near the boomtown of Goodsprings in southern Nevada.
At night, he turned hell-raiser.
He liked to play cards and drink whisky, a particularly combustible mix of vices that promised trouble.
The end came about 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, June 27, 1915 as Coski played poker with fellow miners inside the Pioneer Saloon.
He’d been drinking heavily and got into a violent struggle with the barroom's proprietor, who caught him dealing from the bottom of the deck.
Chairs scattered and Coski lunged across the table before owner Joe Armstrong fired his six-shooter. Three of the bullet holes still remain in the outer wall.
If you sit at the bar at just the right angle, you can see the sun streaming in, little spotlights illuminating the scene where Paul Coski died.
More than a century later, the Pioneer still serves up drinks and Western folklore about 25 miles from my house in suburban Las Vegas.
One of the oldest continually-operating saloons in Nevada, the bar is listed on the State Register of Historic Places, and for good reason.
Built in 1913, the old saloon has quenched thirsts for generations of miners and gamblers, winners and losers and has been scene to both death and heartbreak.
Its walls are fashioned out of stamped tin and the pot-belied stove supposedly once warmed Union officers during the Civil War.
The long mahogany bar was made before Nevada entered the Union in 1864, shipped out west from Brunswick, Maine in three sections around Cape Horn to San Francisco.
Two of the sections were lost and the third became a fixture in a bar in Rhyolite, now a Nye County ghost town, before it was shipped to the Pioneer after the turn of the century.
The town is named after cattle driver Joseph Good, who settled here just after the Civil War, By 1911, the railroad out of Las Vegas reached town, ushering in a more prosperous era.
By then, Goodsprings had nearly 1,000 residents, stores, restaurants, churches, a theater, brothel, and nine saloons that lined Main Street. The Hotel Fayle, advertised as the ‘finest in the West,’ had opened with great fanfare.
While movies get filmed at the Pioneer, the real history of the rustic old collection of wood and tin is way better than any Hollywood script.
Inside this barroom, you can literally place your finger on the pulse of the West, like the cigarette burns etched into the bar by Clark Gable in 1942 as he sat hopelessly drunk and inconsolable while awaiting word on the fate of wife Carole Lombard, whose plane had crashed on nearby Mount Potosi.
A backroom museum is also devoted to the famous couple.
But what most interests me are those bullet holes that spell the legacy of perhaps the saddest and best-documented tale of drinking, violence and loss that took place here.
On the day Paul Coski was killed, it took 10 hours for Clark County Coroner W.H. Harkins to arrive at the bar from Las Vegas, 35 miles away.
He declared Coski dead where he had fallen and found him officially at fault for the incident.
But what makes the episode resonate is the letter that Harkins sent to Coski’s brother in Idaho — its tone suggesting the simple and straightforward frankness of the day.
Apparently, Davis J. Coski had sent Harkins a telegram when he learned of his brother’s death.
The coroner’s answer was an attempt to put into perspective the untimely death of a troublesome man who probably had it coming, which sums up the story of many of those who helped settle the American West.
The multi-deck headline in the Las Vegas Age newspaper was typical of the day.
“Man killed at Goodsprings. Joe Armstrong Shoots to Death one Paul Coski. Verdict of Coroner’s Jury Exonerates Armstrong — Dead Man Said to Have Been Drinking.”
The lead is cumbersome by today’s breathless standards.
“At an early hour this morning word came from Goodsprings that J.C. Armstrong had shot and killed a miner named Paul Coski,” it began. “Sheriff Gay, District Attorney Henderson and Coroner Harkins left at five o’clock with M.M. Riley in the automobile of the latter and went to the scene of the tragedy.”
He had just dealt a hand of stud poker and everyone at the table folded except Armstrong, who accused Coski of "crooked work with the cards," dealing himself a card from the bottom of the deck.
Tempers flared and the tavern owner tried to diffuse the situation, suggesting that the miner split the $10 pot with another player, but Coski refused.
“Coski, who was a powerful man and an ex-prize fighter with a reputation locally as a bad man then started to climb over the table to get Armstrong, who struck the miner over the head with his pistol,” the Age said.
Armstrong fired, the bullet passing through Coski’s hand and into his chest. But the big man kept coming. Armstrong fired again, finally dropping him.
And here’s where the news account turns into a parable of good versus evil.
“Joe Armstrong is a man very well known and universally liked in this section,” a proprietor who “is quiet, self-possessed and gentlemanly on all occasions and the very last one you would expect to find in a shooting affair,” the story said.
Armstrong was a scout for the U.S. Army during the height of the Indian wars. He traveled with General Alfred Terry throughout the Dakota Territory and was among the first to ride upon the carnage of what had been Custer’s last stand at Little Bog Horn.
Coski, however, was a different breed altogether.
“He bore a very bad reputation where he was known and had no friend to speak a good word for him,” the story read. “He was known as a very quarrelsome man and his body was covered with scars.”
One man was dead, another’s story substantiated. Now it was the coroner’s job to set matters straight with Coski’s family.
In a letter dated July 3, 1915, Harkins is polite but does not mince words.
“From authentic reports, [Coski] had been drinking a good deal since he had quit work and was gambling most of the time,” he wrote the dead man’s brother.
“Your brother was caught gambling crooked and had a very bad reputation. He was a powerful man and they tell me could whip any two men in or around Goodsprings, and made a practice of doing the same once and a while when he would get to drinking and every body would try and stay away from him (only when he was drinking) for when he was sober he was a gentleman.”
He described the circumstances of the shooting. As for Armstrong, he wrote that “I have never heard a breath of suspicion against him.”
He said Coski’s body was in bad condition by the time he arrived because it had remained on the floor for half a day.
In the end, he invited the brother to come to Goodsprings to reclaim the body and satisfy his own curiosity on the circumstances of his sibling’s death.
“You have asked me me just how it happened,” Harkins wrote, “and I have told you true and directly, as it is my duty to do so.”
And then Harkins seems to display a touch of sympathy, a bit of the preacher. He must have been a religious man.
“Kindly do not think that your brother did not get a square deal,” he said, ending the letter. “You have my heartfelt sympathy and may God bless and comfort you and yours in this sad bereavement.”
The generations haven’t done much to change the Pioneer. Indoor toilets were installed in the 1940s but everything else is pretty much the same.
Renegades of sorts — bikers and off-roaders — still thunder in for a drink here.
While nobody plays stud poker or fires off six shooters anymore, Paul Coski still lies in the little Goodsprings graveyard not far away.
“After the inquest, Coski’s body was sewed up in some sheets and placed in a box that had been made for the purpose and buried,” according to the Age. “There being no minister there, Coroner Harkins conducted a simple funeral service.”
The long-forgotten episode is a reminder of those shoot-em-up days of the past, how the West was won — and lost — by men with thunderous tempers who could not hold their liquor.
