Real or Fake? Palisade, Nevada’s “Wild” West

As tourists stepped off the train in Palisade, Nevada, they witnessed brawls, cowboys & Indians, shootouts and all of the other scenes that they had read about in their dime novels back home. It was everything they expected. But history tells us it was all made up. In this episode, we tell the story about the 19th century mining town of Palisade, NV. Then we quiz your knowledge on the Wild West!

If you’ve ever taken the train ride to the Grand Canyon on the Grand Canyon Railway, it starts in Williams, Arizona and before you get on, you get treated to a Wild West show with a fake shootout and what not. Then on the train ride back, the bandits come and pretend to rob the train. It’s a fun little recreation of the old Wild West.

But those types of things really did happen back in the days of the Wild West. As mining towns started popping up in the primitive American West, men mixed with liquor, money and the disappointment of not finding the success they sought. Thieving, fighting, guns and a lack of law enforcement led to some of the stories that would populate an entire genre of literature back East. You’ve heard of Tombstone, Deadwood, Dodge City, Coty and Sante Fe, but one town that’s lost to history was the rough and tumble mining town of Palisade, NV.

The name Palisade doesn’t exactly evoke an image of the Wild West – not by today’s standards. It sounds like the name given to a nice quiet community filled with good people. And when early train travelers visited the town, that’s exactly what they saw.

Let’s go back. When the Wild West started growing with boom towns and the gold rush, eager tourists back East left home seeking adventure. Not everyone who ventured West was looking for precious metals. Once word got out about the gun fights, the saloons, the fighting with local tribes of Native Americans, people wanted to see it for themselves. They had read about these things in dime novels and newspaper columns. With the expansion of the railroads Westward, they had the opportunity to travel there themselves without actually having to pick up and move. 

One such railroad was the Central Pacific. The Central Pacific didn’t exist for a long time because it was quickly absorbed into larger railroads. But when it did, it spanned from Sacramento, California Eastward to Promontory, Utah where it met up with the Union Pacific. One of the stops was the mining town of Palisade, Nevada. 

At the time, Palisade was a hub for several nearby mining camps like Mineral Hill and Hamilton Eureka. Because it was a hub, it grew to have stores, a post office and a population peak of 600 residents. When tourists looking for Wild West adventure stopped, they had a lovely time, but often wrote that they felt “let down” because they didn’t see what they expected. They expected the gun battles, the fights, the Native Americans, the dirty, rough “Ole West” they had read about. That was until 1876.

When the passenger train stopped for lunch at noon and people got off, they saw Frank West and Alvin Kittleby involved in a heated exchange near the Palisade train station. West was leaning against the fence of a corral and was approached by Kittleby, who yelled, “There ya are, ya lowdown polecat! I’ve been waitin’ for ya. I’m gonna kill ya for what ya done to my pore little sister!” The bystanders then witnessed Frank West draw a revolver and shoot Alvin Kittleby in the chest. The tourists watched, screamed and ran for cover back in the safety of the train. Citizens of Palisade scurried to disarm West and carried Kittleby’s lifeless body away. 

Soon, the train was once again departing. And as the train chugged into the distance, the townspeople of Palisade laughed and cheered. The entire thing was a show – all of it fake. 

You may be familiar with WestWorld. It’s a popular dystopian science fiction franchise first written and directed by Michael Crichton in 1973, but made popular recently with an HBO series by the same name. Basically, it’s about a Wild West town that tourists can enter where they can feel like they’ve gone back in time. They witness shootouts and fights and interact with the town as if it’s real, but all of the residents of the town are robots. It was created to let people experience the adventure and danger of an Old West town.

The tourists traveling on the Central Pacific Railway from San Fransisco, Sacramento or Chicago were looking for the same thing. They didn’t know what they’d experience when they got to cities like Palisade, NV, but they had read about it in fantastical dime novels and stories. 

So when that train load of passengers saw Frank West murder Alvin Kittleby in cold blood in the streets near the train station, they were seeing their fantasies realized. They never knew that the whole thing was a set up. It was all fake. 

So why did the citizens of Palisade agree to go along with this plan? I mean, a lot of people were required to make this plan work. Well, this was a tourist stop and its possible that people in Palisade had heard tourists complain that it wasn’t the Wild West they’d imagined. It was in their best interest to give people what they wanted. To get them to go back home and tell stories. Another theory is that they were just bored. But whatever the reason was, it didn’t stop with West and Kittleby. 

They started staging events to take place every time a train stopped. There would be fights in the streets, frequent shootouts, brawls breaking out all over. People would walk through the main street of the town and witness a bank robbery or a duel between two angry men. Many times, there would be elaborate backstories and citizens of Palisade would intervene. At one point, when the train pulled into the station, a man was staged to appear to be hanging from a noose at the station. When someone would “die,” they’d be dragged into Johnson’s Saloon – something that seemed to go unnoticed by the tourists – especially considering that these victims would be revived and come outside to watch the next event. Shooters would use blanks in their guns and victims would use cattle’s blood from the slaughterhouse to make it look more realistic. 

As this went on, local Native Americans from the Shoshone Tribe even got in on the action, staging war parties and huge elaborate battles with the men of Palisade. They’d stage massacres and even pretend to stab and scalp victims. For small sums of money, they’d agree to be tied up and laid on the train platform, accompanied by proud lawmen.

They had essentially created one of the first theme parks in existence. Except the tourists didn’t know it was all fake. Each time, they left thinking they had witnessed the real Wild West. But not before they screamed and ran back to the safety of their train cars – sometimes even jumping underneath the train to hide. They didn’t know the truth – that Palisade was so safe that it’s been said it went years without even having a Sheriff. 

By all accounts, these fake shows went on for just over 3 years, from 1876 to 1880. In those years, Palisade had gained the reputation and nickname of “The most violent place West of Chicago.” Journalists who traveled in on the trains would go back home and write about the violence and record what they had seen to stoke the wild imaginations of their readers. The violence was just a mirage – much like the town of Palisade, Nevada today. If you visit the area that used to be Palisade, it’s mostly all gone. There are just a few structures and foundations left. When mining dried up, it became a ghost town. 

There’s no doubt that the accounts of those few years in Palisade helped to inspire countless works of fiction about the Wild West – and all of those bystanders who saw it firsthand were none the wiser. Palisade, Nevada was the Wild West that never was. The Internet Says it’s True. 

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