The Tale of Vady Washington
A Story of Vegas in the old west
Vady Washington was born in Rome, Georgia in 1877 shortly after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. There is little information about Vady’s early life other than he lived on the farm his father worked with his siblings. Vady’s parents were unable to read or write and had likely been former slaves. After Vady’s father passed away, the family moved west sometime after 1900, arriving in California by 1910. though it is likely he left the Jim Crow south for opportunity elsewhere.
Vady moved with his widowed mother and his sister to Los Angeles by 1910, where he worked as an engineer at an airfield. He got this job after experiencing over two months of unemployment in 1910.
Vady worked in different professions, but his work as a laborer for the railroads was something he frequently turned back to. His work for the railroads eventually took him out west to California by the early 1900’s where he worked at the Southern Pacific rail yards.
Vady was a tall man but not overly built, creating a presence behind the bar at the _______ Saloon.
shootout at a saloon
Calarina Leon had a reputation around Las Vegas for stirring up trouble. Leon’s grave still stands at Woodlawn Cemetery near downtown Las Vegas, with a simple inscription: “Killed in a fight at the Gem Saloon.”
On September 25, 1911 the dry air was steadily losing the oppressive heat that lashes Vegas each summer. Vady was sitting at a counter in the Gem Saloon eating his lunch as Calarina continued to put back drink after drink. Calarina decided in his drunken state to help himself to some of Vady’s lunch. Words were had and Calarina was shown the door to the saloon by another employee. Undeterred, Calarina made his way back into the saloon, continuing his belligerent antics and again promptly being shown the door. By this time, Vady had either finished his lunch or given up entirely on the idea of finishing his meal in peace.
When Calarina stumbled through the swinging wood doors of the Gem Saloon to make his third try to regain entry to the establishment, Vady was waiting behind the bar with his gun drawn. Calarina made it a few steps back into the saloon before a shot was fired and Calarina hit the ground with blood pouring from a gunshot wound. Calarina died that day and Vady was taken into custody.
The ongoing trial became something of a local spectacle, with a former judge leading Vady’s defense team under the theory that Vady was acting in self-defense. As part of the four day long trial, the jury toured the Gem Saloon, some of the city’s most upstanding members were gathered in the Red Light District where polite company was not to be seen. The jury deliberations lasted for ten continuous hours.
When the jury filed back in, they delivered their verdict: manslaughter. It appears this was a compromise decision, with several jurors pushing for murder and others advocating for acquittal. The day after Valentine’s Day, Vady appeared in court for his sentencing. News accounts indicate that Vady agreed he should do some time but remained steadfast his shooting of Calarina was justified, or at least did not warrant any regrets on Vady’s part. The judge expressed his desire to provide as lenient of a sentence as possible – two years in the Nevada State Prison.
One gathers the tone of race relations in early Las Vegas from the articles running in the city’s major paper, the Las Vegas Age. Whenever a black person is referenced in any story, the person’s race is always included as an adjective. The paper also frequently published viciously racist humor – including an article detailing a fictitious match between two baseball teams playing with the Negro League that finds humor by comparing players chasing a ball to trying to “catch a dozen chickens.” Other articles go in depth on the concerning national trend of “Chinamen” marrying white women, with the article proposing the chief mechanism for these marriages is addiction to opium, bailing white women out of jail, and then providing a secure place to indulge their new habit – making mention of the backrooms of Chop Suey restaurants.
Early Las Vegas was a town with a few “town fathers” intent upon establishing a real community.But most of the community was transient, tied to the needs of the railroad.Both Washington and Calarina were brought to Las Vegas out of a certain desire for ambition and adventure.Added to the transient nature of the town was the last vestiges of an Old West ethos that
murder, manslaughter, or acquittal?
Las Vegas in 1911 was a town that just barely saw its first automobile pass through. Though it was over a decade into the 20th century, Las Vegas was still in almost every way a frontier settlement embodying the spirit of the Old West.
The entirety of Las Vegas covered a little more than __ square miles. Today Las Vegas is an example of the urban sprawl that defines urban areas in the desert Southwest, but in 1911 you could stand on one of the mountains overlooking the Las Vegas Valley and the city itself would be but a tiny speck amidst a harsh landscape of shifting dunes and hardened terrain. The city’s grid structure was baked into the DNA from the beginning, with the town centered in neat blocks around the railroad station and adjacent workshops. There were no paved roads in 1911, less than five years after the founding of Las Vegas – only dirt roads.
The dominant industry and driver of the economy in early Vegas was the railroad. And a central part of the economic activity driven by the railroad was vice – which is why it should come as no surprise there was a Red Light District shortly after the founding of Vegas. Block 16 was a strip of saloons featuring food, booze, gambling, and prostitution. Local law enforcement and business interests turned a blind eye to Block 16, leaving it to local law enforcement to take control when things got out of hand.
Another striking aspect of early Vegas was the level of racial integration, especially given the city’s later reputation as the “Mississippi of the West” when de facto segregation was in place. Block 16 largely consisted of the Arizona Club, the Gem Saloon, and the Red Onion. These places looked like scenes from the stereotypical vision of an Old West drinking hole. Superficially fancy exteriors were the face to a raucous interior where table games, drinking, and whoring took place.
While the local paper made it sound as though petty theft and assaults – invariably fueled by alcohol – were the norm throughout Block 16, indicating the area had a reputation as something of a skid row. However, this stigma did not extend to the proprietors of the saloons that lent Block 16 its distinct character in the community.
A review of newspaper articles from early Vegas details a new heinous crime in one of the establishments on Block 16 every few weeks – a prostitute drugging a naïve traveler and stealing his belongings; a spurned customer that mutilated another prostitute’s face before shooting himself in the middle of the street; or busts for illicit opium use.
But one crime illustrates the atmosphere of Block 16, morals in a frontier town entering modernity, and race relations – the murder of _______ by Vady Washington at the _____ Saloon.
