VEGAS MYTHS BUSTED: The Final Resting Place of Whiskey Pete
On Feb. 2, 1994, building workers were grading the dry land for the illumine rail that today connects deuce casinos, Whiskey Pete’s and Buffalo Bill’s, crosswise Interstate 15 in Primm, Nev. One of their tractors struck a crumbling plywood coffin, knocking it open. What they found privileged should get assign an finish to 1 of Nevada’s biggest tall tales. Instead, that tale has only if grown taller.
Peter “Whiskey Pete” McIntyre – legendary namesake of the gambling casino – was supposedly inhumed with his treasured 10-gallon chapeau on his head, six-shooters strapped to his side, and a bottleful of his possess moonshine whiskey. His casket was also supposedly interred upright, facing what was and then called the Arrowhead Trails Highway, to reward McIntytre’s bespeak to “see all those sons of bitches sledding by.”
Sorry, intact internet. Every I of your Whiskey Pete stories is inaccurate. According to Sir David Bruce Sedlacek, who supervised the twist crew that found McIntyre’s coffin, it contained his bones, a tussock of hair on his skull, his shirt with a few buttons missing, his dentures, and that’s it. There were no more guns or whisky bottles. And the coffin was non buried standing up. It didn’t fifty-fifty get a cold-shoulder inclination to it. It was perfectly rase to the run aground it put down underneath.
“I don’t cognize how all that mistaken poppycock gets come out there,” Sedlacek told Casino.org.
Who Was Whiskey Pete?
That’s the inquiry asked for 46 years past everyone stuck inward bumper-to-bumper holiday traffic between Las Vegas to California on the 15. (Whiskey Pete’s is a 16-story rook that looms ridiculously luxuriously o'er the devoid landscape, demanding attention.)
Pete McIntyre was a former miner who served deuce months in jailhouse for running an illegal speakeasy, then sestet months in jailhouse for bootlegging whiskey, at the start of Prohibition. By the belatedly 1920s, he opened State Line Station, a gas place with II pumps on the Silver State side of its commonwealth abut with California.
If gas was how McIntyre planned to move around o'er a new leaf, doing it inward State Line, Nev. (renamed Primm in 1996 to avoid muddiness with another Stateline, Nev.) wasn’t a real unspoilt project because few cars stopped up(p) to gaseous state up there rear then. So McIntyre strike down backwards into his old illegal ways. He distilled whiskey and sold it at his place on the downlow.
The Man, the Myth, the Legend
The world-class misconception most people let nigh Whiskey Pete comes from the smiling sketch mascot featured on the casino’s signal and inward its marketing. McIntyre wasn’t a smiling typewrite of dude. In fact, according a 1928 written report inwards the Las Vegas Review newspaper, the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce said it had received several complaints from tourists of McIntyre’s violently anti-social behavior. According to one, he fifty-fifty stab at them as they exited his gas station.
An article about McIntyre in the Mar 28, 1931 edition of the Las Vegas Age newspaper publisher noted that “Pete resents the bad nominate given to him by a portion of the public and the press, alleging that he is not so defective as he is painted.” The occasion of the article was McIntyre’s tone ending on bail bond after shooting Rube Bradshaw, the Elgin, Nev. postmaster.
According to Bradshaw, he had stopped up(p) at State Line Station with his deuce sons to capture gaseous state and coffee. When he entered and asked for a cup, he said, McIntyre called him a “vile name” and slam him in the shoulder. (The assault with a virulent arm bearing was dropped after Bradshaw failed to show in judicature triplet split times.)
Crazy inward Love
In betimes 1932, McIntyre married Lauretta Frances Enders. By October of that same year, she attempted to hold him committed to the Stillwell Sanitarium in Banning, Calif. She cited the unprovoked rages he flew into. McIntyre retorted that the rages were an capture response to her running around raw in the hills with other men. type A justice denied Enders’ motion.
Whatever McIntyre’s mental condition, his physical one wasn’t good. He had miner’s lung and required treatment – or at least what passed for it in those days. Enders reportedly stayed with her married man at the sanitarium until he showed signs of recovery. At that point, she left.
Within a year, on Nov. 11, 1933, McIntyre died at Stillwell of his disease.
Enders ran State Line Station for a dyad of years before merchandising it. It changed custody a few times, expanding into State Line Bar-Slots before beingness purchased by Ernest J. Primm, eventual namesake of the town. Primm renamed the send Whiskey Pete’s and and then opened his gambling casino hotel, inwards McIntyre’s honor, on the land site inwards 1977.
So Where is Whiskey Pete Now?
According to Wikipedia, McIntytre’s exhumed organic structure “was moved and is at present said to live interred inwards one of the caves where MacIntyre cooked upwards his moonshine.”
That’s just more false news.
“When we found him, i went and told the owner,” Sedlacek recalled. “Then we were told to put him indorse inward the ground, so we built a new box for him, and reburied him inwards the same country where we found him.”
Though the cassino at Whiskey Pete’s remains open, its 777-room hotel ne'er reopened following the pandemic shutdown. The hotel is currently used only if as overflow reservation for the Primm Valley Resort. A representative for the hotel’s owner, Primm Valley Resorts, could not say how lasting the hotel cloture was.
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