Nick Carter (ca. 1866-1916)

CARTER

Posted By: Dorian Myhre (email)
Date: 3/28/2022 at 19:27:55

** Apologies for the racial insensitivity and the prejudice of the times in 1916. I am copying it verbatim in the hopes that someone finds Nick and has some answers as to what happened to him. **

From Nevada Representative September 26, 1916 (page 1)

A colored man named Nick Carter was killed by another colored man known as "Shorty" in a quarrel incidental to a crap game at a camp of the paving gang near the Northwestern roundhouse at Ames at about one-thirty o'clock on Monday morning. Shorty disappeared immediately following the shooting and has not yet been apprehended, although fairly satisfactory descriptions of him have been sent out.

It is understood that the crap game had been going on during Sunday afternoon and evening and Carter had lost some money. Being irritated he called Shorty a "nigger," which designation Shorty resented. Both men had or got guns, and Carter proposed to shoot the "bones" off the table. Shorty undertook to take Carter's gun away and being unable to do so drew his gun and shot Carter dead. There are various conflicts and obscurities in the stories; but this seems to be very near to the truth of the episode. There were a dozen or so colored men around when the trouble began; but the most got away with much rapidity when the trouble threatened to become serious, and about four of them were left for the finish.

Carter was around fifty years of age and was a big husky Negro. Shorty was also husky enough but not so tall. Little seems to be known of Carter's antcedents and practically nothing of Shorty's. Carter had been with the paving gang for some time and Shorty for a week or two. The other colored men around were not inclined to know much about the matter at first; but the threat to put them all in jail as accessories and the promise not to prosecute them for the crap shooting loosened them up to some degree and the story came out after a fashion before the coroner's inquest Monday at Ames. Meanwhile Shorty has probably been getting away as fast and as far as he can do so.