RENO, Nev. (AP) -- More than a century after their deaths, the names of four Nevada lawmen killed in the line of duty are being added to a police memorial, including a deputy killed in an 1880 gun battle over a poker game at a Tuscarora saloon.
Based on newspaper clippings from the 1870s-1890s, the officers will be added to the memorial in Reno on May 9 along with Mike Scofield, a Reno motorcycle officer who died in a September crash while responding to a traffic call.
The belated entries are:
* William B. Weaver, 36, an Elko County deputy sheriff killed in 1880 in a six-shooter battle after a fight over the poker game at the Delta Saloon in the mining town of Tuscarora.
* Humphrey Symons, 35, a Gold Hill police officer who in 1879 was the first Nevada lawman known to have been killed while responding to a domestic dispute.
* William J. Kelley, 35, a Lander County deputy sheriff who was “stabbed through the heart” by a woman in Austin in 1876 in a mysterious attack the local newspaper described as “a very complicated case.”
* Alex R. Coryell, 59, a Virginia City policeman who had a heart attack after fighting with a drunken prisoner in 1891.
They will be honored based on research by amateur history buffs Frank Adams and Steve Frady.
Adams, a retired detective, and Frady, a former journalist and firefighter who is chief spokesman for the city of Reno, comb old newspapers for such accounts.
A law enforcement veteran of 30 years, Adams worked the past 20 as an investigator for the Nevada Department of Public Safety where he heard stories that piqued his interest about the history of the Nevada State Police, which existed from 1908-1949.
“Being a detective, I started snooping around, looking at stuff in archives and going through newspapers,” said Adams, who lives in Mesquite.
“I kept running across officers who had been killed in the line of duty, but none of them had been recognized.”
So, Adams wrote a letter to the James D. Hoff Peace Officer Memorial committee.
“I got a nice letter back from them that said, `OK, smarty, now you are our historian.’ Since then, when people run across names, they give them to me to check out.”
The newspaper clips offer sometimes gruesome details of the deaths of the frontier lawmen in the years after gold brought tens of thousands of fortune-seekers to Nevada.
Frady has focused much of his attention on the Virginia City area, where two of the law officers -- Symons and Coryell -- also served as firefighters.
Symons, a native of Cornwall, England, worked as a policeman in neighboring Gold Hill. He “was foully murdered last evening while in the discharge of his duty,” the Gold Hill Evening News reported July 22, 1879.
Symons heard a desperate domestic fracas going on inside of a house, “and upon entering was shot down by (John) Pritchard, who, after the victim lay upon the floor, shot him through the head again and again in the malicious vindictiveness of his drunken soul. He even gloated afterwards in jail over the effectiveness of his butchery.
“The result is that Humphrey Symons, one of the best officers ever seen in this section, has been slaughtered in the prime of his manhood.”
Pritchard was convicted of murder and hanged Jan. 16, 1880.
Weaver, born in Henry County, Mo., was shot and killed by William Hammond while trying to settle an argument over “four bits” in a poker game. The Elko Daily Independent described his death Aug. 2, 1880, under the headline, “A Tuscarora Tragedy.”
“Hammond immediately sprang upon a billiard table and swearing that no damned officer could arrest him, drew his pistol, discharging it at Weaver,” who returned fire, the newspaper said.
“The firing continued until both six-shooters were emptied” and both men died.
Kelley was killed in Austin after he separated two women who fought earlier that day at a horse track. After the sound of a gunshot, Kelley was found in front of a saloon “on the ground in a pool of blood and upon investigation it was ascertained that he had been stabbed through the heart,” the Reese River Revelle of Austin reported Aug. 7, 1876.
One of the women claimed to have been shot at by Kelley and a jury meeting at the firehouse the next day concluded she had stabbed Kelley, although it’s not clear of what became of her.
“This seems to be a very complicated case and we find it impossible to get all the facts,” the Revelle said.
Coryell, 59, died after he arrested and fought with a miner who “had made himself obnoxious in several downtown saloons,” the Evening Chronicle of Virginia City reported June 25, 1891.
Born 1831 at Coryell’s Ferry on the Schuykill River, Pa., Coryell was “an openhearted, honest and upright citizen and as brave as they make them,” the paper said.
Last year, Adams and others found his previously unmarked grave in Virginia City and dedicated a monument there.