Frank Ahlers

IN THE UNCERTAIN STILLNESS BEFORE DAWN on Saturday morning, April 6, 1907, when the lamps of the Big Casino dance hall still burned and the music had not yet fully died away, Frank Ahlers—a teamster from Manhattan—stepped out a rear door and into a narrow alley where his life abruptly ended.  Moments earlier, he had taken a brief turn about the floor with one of the establishment’s female employees.  Then, without farewell or apparent hesitation, he slipped into the darkness and fired a single shot above his right eye.  Death followed within minutes.

Ahlers had arrived in town from Manhattan on the preceding Tuesday.  There, he was employed as overseer of a ten-horse team for Enkhouse, work that demanded long hours and steady attention.  During his short stay, he spent several evenings moving from saloon to saloon, drinking heavily at times, though by Friday night he was said to be comparatively sober when he entered the Big Casino at about eleven o’clock.

While at the bar, Ahlers confided to bartender George McCreary that he had been held up near the corral by the depot and robbed of his watch, chain, and eighty dollars. McCreary advised him to report the matter to the police.  Ahlers left the hall and soon returned with two officers, to whom he attempted to describe his assailants.  His account was indistinct, and after a fruitless search, the officers departed, leaving Ahlers behind amid the lights, laughter, and music of the dance hall.

He ordered several more drinks and again stepped briefly onto the floor before turning away and walking outside.  In the alley behind the Big Casino—removed from the noise and glow of the hall—he ended his life.  His body was discovered almost at once by Charles Miller, a croupier employed at the establishment, who, while walking up the alley, saw the flash of the shot and heard its sharp report echo between the buildings.

In the hours that followed, uneasy talk spread through town that Ahlers’s death had not been a suicide, but a murder.  The rumor quickly faded when the revolver was found lying near where his body had fallen.  A woman friend who had accompanied Ahlers on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings told authorities that she could offer no clear explanation for his act, except to say that after drinking bouts he often sank into deep depression, and that in this instance his despondency may have been sharpened by the loss of his watch, chain, and money.

Such deaths were a grim and familiar feature of boomtown life, where exhausting labor, transient populations, and ready access to drink pressed hard upon men already carrying private burdens.  Frank Ahlers did not perish in a mine or beneath falling timbers, yet his name was added to the growing roll of those claimed not by industrial accident, but by the quieter violences of isolation, despair, and a frontier town forever in motion.

Frank Ahlers was born March 19, 1886, in Austin, Nevada, the son of the late Frederick Ahlers and Lizzie Ermina Hunt.  He left behind a mother and several siblings, and a town that folded his death into the dawn without pause, the alley swept clean and the dance hall opened again.