James W. Morin

“SCARED TO DEATH” IS MOST OFTEN an exaggeration—an expression meaning extreme fright. Yet in rare instances it can be literal: a physiological event in which extreme stress triggers a fatal surge of adrenaline, making the phrase both figurative and, in extraordinary cases, factual.

The “Tonopah Epidemic of ’02,” as it came to be called, was in full swing. It was a month-long nightmare of graves, widows, and orphans, and of dead men whose families back home would never hear from them again. When a tenth of a town’s population dies in a single month—as happened in Tonopah in 1902—and no one knows why, or who will be next, courage falters. Appetites vanish. Blood chills when Old Man Death comes creeping in from the valley below.

James “Briney” Morin built an addition to the Kentucky Liquor Store on Main Street in September 1901 and opened J. W. Morin’s Barber Shop, advertising it as “The place to get a good comfortable shave for every customer.” Business went well enough—until the epidemic struck, and Briney found himself shaving not only the warm and living, but the cold and dead.

The following account, published in the July 31, 1915 edition of the Tonopah Miner, relates how Briney Morin was said to have been “scared to death” during a bitter January night in 1902:

“Jimmy was a little barber who stood about two weeks of horror before his sand got down below zero. But his hand was getting pretty shaky, and his cheeks ashy, when one night we woke him up to shave a couple of dead men we were to bury the following day.

Black Alec guided him to the cabin where the first man lay, and Jimmy managed to scrape the bristles from the departed without much more than the usual labor, but he left a few slashes and trimmed off a piece of ear. However, these things don’t matter much to a corpse.

Then he and Alec headed for the other customer, and poor Jimmy’s legs were getting as limber as one of his own towels. They found the shack all right and discovered the remains, half sitting, propped up against the pillows, facing them with dropped jaw and staring, lifeless eyes, for he had come to his end alone.”

“‘God,’ said Jimmy, ‘let’s get out of here. I can’t shave that thing!’

‘Never mind, he won’t hurt you. You will look like that yourself one of these fine days,’ replied Alec.

But Morin’s legs had given out with the load of terror that possessed him, and his trembling white lips refused to say anything but, ‘O God! O God!’”

“So Alec carried him back to his bed in the little shop, and when we took him to the hospital the next day the doctors said, ‘Nothing but fright.’ But he died and was buried two days later.”

Briney Morin’s handwritten death certificate tells a quieter, less sensational story. It records that he died on Monday, January 20, 1902—not of fright, but of pneumonia. His brief obituary noted that he “was known by all and we believe he did not have an enemy in the place; he made friends and retained them.” He was a member of the Ancient Order of United Workmen and was buried by that lodge the following Wednesday. Morin had come to Tonopah from the Randsburg, California mining camp and was just thirty-four years old.

Whether Briney Morin was truly “scared to death,” or fear merely weakened a body already under siege, the story endured—because in Tonopah in 1902, terror was as real and contagious as any illness, and sometimes it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.