William Patrick Baker

A QUARREL OVER UNPAID WAGES—and a woman—set the stage for the shooting of William Patrick Baker on March 1, 1910, at Spanish Spring near Manhattan.

Spanish Spring, established in 1905, was once the lifeline on the stage road between Tonopah and Manhattan. Fire erased it in August 1907, and the stage line soon followed it into oblivion. Baker had already sold his one-half interest in the line in January 1906, but he stayed on, running a roadhouse and feed corral and selling wood to nearby camps—a man lingering after the boom had moved on.

The man who shot him was Tang Darrough, a Paiute Indian who had worked for Baker hauling wood for about a month. Newspaper accounts describe both men as intoxicated when they argued over wages Darrough claimed were unpaid. The dispute turned personal when Darrough accused Baker of interfering with a Paiute woman he favored. The argument ended not with words, but with Baker severely beating him.

Darrough left the office, returned with a shotgun, and fired. The first blast shattered Baker’s right wrist. As Baker ran toward a nearby room where he kept his revolver, Darrough fired again, striking him in the right thigh and tearing open an egg-sized wound. Baker survived the shooting—but not what followed.

Initially treated by Dr. McIntyre in Manhattan, Baker was transported on March 7 to Tonopah in one of the Consolidated Mines automobiles and admitted to the county hospital. Infection set in. For nearly four weeks he lingered, his body slowly failing.

Deputy Sheriff Vail Pittman arrived from Tonopah the day after the shooting. Darrough had vanished. Posses followed his trail into Inyo County, California, then lost it somewhere between the Panamint Range and Ryan, a lonely station near the Pacific Borax Company’s Lila Mine. The San Diego Sun reported the capture of a suspect in San Bernardino County on March 10—only to reveal the posse had arrested the wrong man.

Darrough was later reported to have been seen in Round Mountain and even in Tonopah itself. No attempt was made to arrest him. Many believed he never truly left, protected by members of his tribe who quietly returned to Big Smoky Valley. By May 1910, he remained at large. The newspapers never recorded his capture.

Baker died on March 27, 1910, from peritonitis that developed in the hip wound. He was forty-four years old, a native of Canada, and by the time he died, not widely mourned. Had he lived, he likely would have been prosecuted for repeatedly selling alcohol to Indians—a fact that earned him little sympathy from Manhattan residents.

Deputy Sheriff Vail Pittman would fare better. In 1945, he became Nevada’s nineteenth governor.

William Patrick Baker’s story ended earlier, and less kindly. Today, his name survives not in court records or headlines, but among the weathered markers of Old Tonopah Cemetery—another life shaped by violence, whiskey, and the slow certainty that the desert always keeps its dead.