Today, a dispatch from Eureka, Nevada, 1879. Eureka grapples with the aftermath of the events at Fish Creek, and Louis Monaco learns some important lessons about his town.
Dear listener,
Do you remember the last time you received news that, in some ways, you expected and, in other ways, arrived as a surprise—news that, if you really were honest yourself, wasn’t really news at all?
Two sheriff’s deputies ride into Eureka late at night with an update from Fish Creek. In the flat language of the law, they report the scene: there’s been a shooting, and there are five casualties, all charcoal burners. None of the men that rode out to Fish Creek alongside Deputy Sheriff James Simpson are hurt.1
In a town like Eureka, there’s often fear that violence will strike at any moment, like a thunderclap from some unknowable god. But violence on this scale is very rare. And so the reports from the deputies take flight into town and a crowd forms in Main Street, flush with the adrenaline that hits when a crisis blooms.
Rumors spiral. There are five dead, no, 11 dead, no, 26. The sheriff’s posse set out to murder the charcoal burners. No, the charcoal burners set out to murder the sheriff’s posse.2
The local newspaper weighs in:
“As full particulars as could be obtained of the conflict, if conflict it may be called, between the Sheriff’s posse and a force of coal burners will be found in our local columns…It seems to have been a one-sided affair. Not one of the officers received a scratch, while five of the opposing party were killed outright and many more perhaps wounded…
As we view it, there is only one question involved in the whole case. Did the officers act with due prudence and discretion? Was the killing absolutely necessary? These are the matters which most concern the public…”3
Eventually, the five bodies of the charcoal burners travel back to Eureka, where the town undertaker gently lays them out for viewing. The reporter from the local newspaper gets right to the point:
“Terrible holes were torn in some of the Italians killed in the Fish Creek fight. The contest must have taken place at close range…It was a sad sight to witness those five men lying cold in death.”4
Within two days of the shooting, the town’s justice system lumbers to life. First will come an inquest by the coroner, where a jury will determine how the men died. Then, depending on their finding, will come a grand jury hearing to determine charges in their deaths.
And then, of course, there are at least 20 charcoal burners still locked up above the saloon, awaiting their own hearings on conspiracy and riot charges. This will be a busy few weeks for the town’s one courthouse and the handful of trial attorneys available.
It starts with the coroner’s inquest, where a grand jury of locals files into the courthouse to begin hearing testimony in the burners’ deaths. Pepi Steler, the town’s watchmaker and a friend of the Ashim family, is one of the jurors. Louis Monaco is in the audience, watching the questions unfold.5
The days since the shooting have been quieter than many expected, as the town waits for the verdict from the inquest. Even the newspaper notes:
“Contrary to the predictions of many persons, no trouble has occurred in Eureka, growing out of the fight at Fish Creek, and the Italians are quietly and peacefully submitting to the law’s course. They have indulged in neither tirades or threats, but confidently claim that they will eventually prove that the killing of the five men was wholly uncalled for and unwarranted…
There is no disguising the fact that the burners have the open sympathy of a large portion of our population, but it is yet too early for any thinking man to form an opinion.”6
During their testimony at the inquest, the posse members all roughly tell the same story. Here’s what they say: about 100 charcoal burners had hassled and threatened the teamsters earlier that day. Later, the posse encountered this same group of burners as they rode to Fish Creek.
Deputy Sheriff Simpson says he turned over the arrest warrant to the burners, and that’s when the shooting started. None of the men say they fired the first shot, but they can’t say who did. Simpson believes the burners were armed and did shoot at his men.7
Sheriff Matt Kyle has asked Thomas Wren to represent the posse members in court. Questioning witnesses in a small town inquest is not Wren’s usual line of work these days. He’s been a member of the US House of Representatives, advocating for this part of Nevada in Washington, DC, and he’s been a high-profile attorney for the big mining corporations. A few years earlier, he represented Richmond Mining when they built a new facility in town.
But before he became a well-paid attorney for the mining industry, Wren knew his way around a criminal trial. He had been the lead prosecutor in a mining town, and when he served in the State Assembly, he’d argued in favor of the death penalty. Yet Wren also understood that a good lawyer could save you from a sloppy trial, and so he’d pushed to establish the right to an attorney in Nevada, whether or not a person could pay.8
Today, he’s keeping things simple, avoiding any complex questions that the posse members might trip over. So far, so good, it seems.
For their part, the Burners’ Association has hired A.M. Hillhouse, a local attorney. Hillhouse doesn’t have Wren’s political juice, but he’s been a fixture in the town courtroom for years, mostly defending miners in ownership disputes.
As the first day of the inquest wraps up, there’s one last person to call to the witness stand: Bob Brown. He had been one of the first teamsters turned away when the coal burners went on strike, and he had filed the lawsuit that forced the original leadership of the Burner’s Association to resign. Now, here he was, testifying at the inquest over the death of five of the charcoal burners.
Hillhouse asks Brown directly whether he used his weapon during the shooting. Brown says that he won’t answer the question because he might incriminate himself, and his attorney, Thomas Wren, has told him he doesn’t have to answer incriminating questions. He says simply that he remembers the fight taking place.
Since every posse member has told some variation of the same story—that they don’t know who started the shooting and that the burners were armed—Brown’s testimony feels out of place and, possibly, revealing. Even the newspaper reporter present in the inquiry writes it up:
“His evidence really injured the officers’ cause, for there are many who say, and justly too, that if the officers did not exceed their authority, they should take the high ground that they were acting in an official capacity, that they had been resisted by force of arms, and had defended themselves to the best of their ability.”9
Brown didn’t do any of that. He just didn’t answer.
The next day, the town undertaker prepares the bodies of the five men for an afternoon burial. But first, the medical examiner completes their report. They find that all five men were shot either in the right or left chest, at least once, by a bullet or by buckshot from a shotgun.10
That afternoon, a group of charcoal burners return to town to escort the bodies to the local cemetery. The undertaker only has two hearses, so he places the remaining bodies in a wagon draped in black. The procession makes its slow way up the low hill from town to the burying ground.11
The coroner’s inquest continues. A.M. Hillhouse, representing the charcoal burners, is fresh off the cross-examination of Bob Brown, which started to show cracks in the posse’s story of the shooting. Now, he has a chance to question the highest-ranking officer on scene that day, Deputy Sheriff James Simpson.
As the newspaper noted:
“It was generally supposed that a lively scene would ensue, and that Hillhouse would handle the officers without gloves. It was known that Simpson would be subjected to a cross-examination, and the room was filled at any early hour by a crowd, all anxious to hear the result, and to see what line Mr. Hillhouse proposed to fight.”12
But the promised sparks never flew. Hillhouse hones in one line of questioning: what weapons was the posse carrying that day? Simpson reports that the posse had two shotguns among them. And since at least two of the charcoal burners were killed by shotgun, Hillhouse establishes that it was likely by the hands of the men under Simpson’s command.
But as the crowd expects him to pounce, Hillhouse stops. He’s accomplished what he set out to do by proving that it was, almost certainly, the posse that killed these men. But he’s also confident that this entire case will be off his desk soon, transferred to some other court in another mining town. Certainly it would be almost impossible to find an impartial jury of locals. Even the newspaper agrees:
“The case will undoubtedly be brought before the District Court, when a change of venue will probably be had, and it will be tried in some other county. No jury of twelve men could possibly be found here who have not formed and expressed an opinion on the affair.”13
And so Hillhouse ends his cross-examination. Just before the jury steps out to discuss their findings, Louis Monaco steps forward to perform one last responsibility.
He rises, and, one by one, he reads off a list of the dead.
“Pompeo Pattini, 35, Swiss
Giovanni Pedroni, 22, Italian
Antonio Canonica, 25, Swiss
Marcelino Locatelli, 25, Italian
Teodor Zerli, 28, Italian”14
Now, the jury steps away to discuss their findings. What appears to be bothering them the most is how to find the right words to frame their verdict. Finally, they return, and as the newspaper reports:
“They finally handed in a verdict that the deceased came to their deaths from shots fired by the sheriff’s posse while in the discharge of their duty.”15
It’s the last part of that sentence that really matters. The posse did shoot and kill these men, the jury finds, but they did so as part of their responsibility to serve warrants and make arrests. Yet, what we don’t know is whether any of the teamsters that rode to Fish Creek with Deputy Simpson that day—including Bob Brown and Billy Martin—were ever actually sworn in as officers in the first place. This is a question that the inquest never asks or answers.
Defense attorney A.M. Hillhouse predicts that the whole affair will be picked up and dumped in some other court’s lap, where they can go through the trouble of finding a jury that isn’t biased by endless rumors and newspaper stories.16
But, as it turns out, the town’s court system isn’t quite done yet.
There are still the 20-plus charcoal burners locked up in the upper floor of a saloon who need to face a grand jury on charges of conspiracy and rioting. And the Italian consul is now visiting from San Francisco, ensuring his countrymen get a fair hearing.17
On Friday, the charcoal burners have their first day in court. By Saturday, the uncle of one of the burners killed at Fish Creek files a complaint alleging the members of the Sheriff’s posse murdered his nephew.18
So, now, there are two cases facing the court in town: the grand jury hearings for the arrested charcoal burners, and a new set of grand jury hearings for the posse members charged with murder.
And to make the situation even more complicated, many of the teamsters that are testifying against the charcoal burners in their case are now the same people accused of murdering at least one charcoal burner in the new case.
It’s a messy tangle, but the court cases plod ahead. In their hearings, A.M. Hillhouse represents the charcoal burners again, with an assist from local attorneys like Robert Beatty—we’ll talk more about him later. And again, Thomas Wren leads the prosecution.
The hearing is a rough outing for the arrested charcoal burners, which includes almost all of the leadership of the Burners’ Association. The witnesses against the arrested burners are almost entirely teamsters, whose business has been directly impacted by the strikes. And, in a town like Eureka, the legal line between a strike and a riot is thin at the best of times. It becomes almost invisible when the teamsters take the stand.
The first witness called in the hearing is Joe Hausman, the German gunsmith who resigned his position with the Burners’ Association when Bob Brown filed his lawsuit. Hausman tells the jury that the Association never ordered the burners to stop the teamsters from loading charcoal. This testimony makes it much harder for the burners to claim that blocking the teamsters was just another part of a labor strike approved by their union.19
Every day, a group of charcoal burners crowd the seating area in the courtroom, even when there is only room to stand and watch. And the testimony gets worse from there. Teamsters take the witness stand and identify many of the arrested burners as the men who tossed hundreds of bushels of charcoal into the dirt, day after day. Another teamster says he overheard the strikers talking about burning down the town or even killing Joseph Tognini and others.20
As the hearing continues, the remaining leadership at the Burners’ Association officially calls off the strike. The charcoal burners still working in the countryside are now free to load the teamsters’ wagons and resume business as usual. For now, there is no more talk about how much the burners will be paid per bushel. By all accounts, the strike is done, and with it, the chance for any real progress.21
But the charcoal burners still have their story to tell. So far, the inquest, the newspapers, the rumors around town have mostly been dominated by the posse’s version of what happened at Fish Creek.
13 days have passed since the shooting at Fish Creek. And now, a letter appears in a California newspaper from a familiar name: Veritas. If this is Louis Monaco, he never admits it, but the writer knows specific details that only someone well connected to the Italian-speaking community in Eureka would know.
The letter lays out the charcoal burners’ side of the story. And it reads:
“On the 18th, I believe, a number of our countrymen and Swiss gathered at Fish Creek, to stop teams from hauling coal should any come to do so. While they were there, they saw a Deputy Sheriff and posse going toward them. Several who understood the English language went down to meet the deputy and see what they wanted, and the others followed for mere curiosity.
The deputy told one of the advanced parties that he desired to make several arrests, and handed one of them a paper purporting to be a warrant. The ones who spoke the English best said that they were there not to allow teams to load coal, but, as Sheriff, if he came to arrest parties, let him look around among the members present, and if he saw the ones he wanted, it was his duty to take them, that they would not resist officers.
The Deputy Sheriff looked around, and, stepping aside, cried, “Fire!” And he and the posse fired upon the unsuspecting coal burners, killing five outright, following the fleeing unfortunates over two miles…The muzzle of the guns must have been within a few feet when fired, as still powder marks were visible on their chests…
The press and police are against us, but public feeling and truth are with us.”22
A few days later, even as the burners continue their hearings, it’s now time for the grand jury to hear evidence in the murder charges facing the Sheriff’s posse. But first, they need to assemble a new grand jury to hear the case. That same month, the local newspaper had said, without hesitation, that it would be almost impossible to put together a grand jury in Eureka that is not biased in the case. But the court pushes ahead anyway.
They briefly consider Louis Monaco for a role on the jury, but he’s the most outspoken supporter of the charcoal burners in town, so he’s dropped from the list. Instead, they pick a grand jury of 17 men. And one of those men is none other than John Torre, the “Big Russian” and king of the charcoal ranchers himself. Torre may be the least impartial juror available. After all, at least a few of the dead may have been on strike at his Fish Creek ranch before the shooting.23
The testimony in the grand jury hearing for the posse members is slow and painstaking, as most of the witnesses require translation from English to Italian, and then vice versa for the jury.
But gradually, through the testimony of six witnesses to the shooting, some patterns start to reveal themselves in the case.
Several of the witnesses testify that one of the teamsters fired the first shot. They also say that the charcoal burners did not shoot back. And two witnesses identify one teamster as the shooter of one of the men killed, and Bob Brown as the shooter of another.24
But these facts are challenged almost immediately after they leave the witness stand. The local newspaper constantly grumbles that the witnesses are unreliable and prone to exaggeration, especially about the length of time that the posse shot into the crowd.
“A child…could make a distinction between three minutes and three-quarters of an hour, and if the witnesses are so utterly unreliable in one thing, all their evidence will be taken with many grains of allowance….It is true that…probably no two men out of a hundred will relate exactly the same story. With all due allowance, however, it must be confessed that the prosecution has not yet strengthened its case.”25
It doesn’t help that two of the witnesses are arrested right after they give their testimony. The posse members say one witness gave false testimony, while they say the other shot at them at Fish Creek. No one seems to object that locking witnesses in the town jail is a highly convenient way to keep them quiet.26
And so it goes for four days, with Hillhouse and Beatty arguing for the charcoal burners and Thomas Wren arguing for the posse. And, then, the court makes an announcement:
“The trial of the Sheriff’s posse…ended as abruptly and unexpectedly as did the coroner’s inquest. By mutual consent a further hearing of the case was postponed.”27
The court insists that hearing from any more witnesses is unnecessary—the grand jury will now have several weeks to mull over the testimony so far and reach a decision. If they don’t, the court will pick the hearings back up the next month.
For now, both the charcoal burners and the sheriff’s posse are free on bail, and there’s an uneasy equilibrium back in town. The members of the posse go back to work as teamsters and officers of the law, and the charcoal burners go back to their coal piles outside of town. Louis Monaco returns to his photo studio, where he and JB capture portraits and scenes from the life around them. It’s probably around this time that his wife Liberata comes to him with news—she’s pregnant with their first child.28
For a time, the noise of the hearings fades away. The mining corporations resume operations, and the charcoal burners load the teamster wagons just like before. In some ways, it’s as though the whole Fish Creek affair never even happened.
About three weeks later, the grand jury announces their decision. The two charcoal burner witnesses arrested during the hearings will face no charges. The jury will also file no charges against the charcoal burners arrested during the strikes. And, finally, they will also file no charges against the sheriff’s posse for the murder of the five charcoal burners. Everyone involved in the proceedings will simply walk away.29
Here’s what the grand jury has to say—showing where their sympathies lie:
“The grand jury regard this as a proper occasion for expressing their entire approval of the action of the Sheriff’s posse in their determination to enforce the law at all hazards, and while the unfortunate result of this determination…must be regretted by every good citizen…if such results are the consequences of demonstrating the power of the people…to protect themselves in the free enjoyment and disposal of their property…then all acts…which in any way contravene or interfere…must be considered and regarded as acts to be resisted, even if death is the inevitable result.”30
In other words, if one person has to die to protect another person’s property rights, so be it.
The grand jury has wiped the slate clean. You could argue that the five men at Fish Creek died for nothing, that all this effort has fallen short of any real change. But you could also argue that there’s a small, faint difference in the way the people of Eureka see the surviving charcoal burners—that the town can now no longer avoid the reality of their lives.
So, after two months of rumors and conversations and hearings and accusations, it’s all over.
By the next month, the town has moved on to happier, shinier news. A new theater opens in town, and Thomas Wren gives the keynote speech.31
As the band pauses their tunes, he steps onto the stage and addresses the crowd. The room is lined with chandeliers and American flags, and the crowd is dressed for the occasion.
Matilda Ashim’s two daughters are there, ready to dance, dressed in black velvet and red and white silk.
The judge who presided over the charcoal burner hearings is there, as his wife, dressed in black silk. A.M. Hillhouse, the burners’ defense attorney, and his wife are there in the crowd, too.
John Torre and Joseph Tognini have both paid good money to help the theater open, and they are likely in the crowd also, although we don’t know for sure.
Thomas Wren’s address is short. The crowd is here to dance, not listen to speeches. But at the end of his talk, he quotes a from a poem:
“On with the dance / Let joy be unconfined.”32
And then the ladies and gentlemen of Eureka dance, under the chandeliers and the American flag.
If you’d like to learn more about the charcoal burners conflict in Eureka, including a moment-by-moment breakdown of events, check out Charcoal and Blood by Silvio Manno. A special thanks to Silvio for his assistance with this series.
Works Cited:
1. Phillip I. Earl, “Nevada’s Italian War,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, Summer 1969
2. Eureka Daily Sentinel, August 20, 1879
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Eureka Daily Sentinel, August 21, 1879
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Sixth Amendment Center, “Reclaiming Justice: Understanding the History of the Right to Counsel in Nevada so as to Ensure Equal Access to Justice in the Future,” The Nevada Supreme Court Indigent Defense Commission, March 2013.
9. Eureka Daily Sentinel, August 21, 1879
10. Ibid.
11. Eureka Daily Sentinel, August 22, 1879
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Eureka Daily Sentinel, August 21, 1879
18. Phillip I. Earl, “Nevada’s Italian War”
19. Eureka Daily Sentinel, August 23, 1879
20. Phillip I. Earl, “Nevada’s Italian War”
21. Ibid.
22. Daily Alta California, August 31, 1879
23. Manno, pg. 182
24. Eureka Daily Sentinel, September 3, 1879
25. Ibid.
26. Phillip I. Earl, “Nevada’s Italian War”
27. Eureka Daily Sentinel, September 6, 1879
28. Eureka Daily Sentinel, May 8, 1880
29. Phillip I. Earl, “Nevada’s Italian War”
30. Eureka Daily Sentinel, September 26, 1879
31. Eureka Daily Sentinel, October 3, 1879
32. Ibid.