By Bradley G. Courtney

If any early Prescott saloon was cursed, it was Cortez Street’s Keystone Saloon, located north of the Plaza on the west side of that street. Its first proprietor, Gotlieb Urfer, came to America from Switzerland before the Civil War. He arrived in Prescott in 1874, opened a lodging house on Cortez in 1877, and eventually added a saloon, naming it the Keystone Saloon and Lodging House. He married Ellen Dunn of Ireland in 1878.

On Wednesday, December 16, 1885—one day before his fiftieth birthday—Urfer was found lying senseless on the floor behind the Keystone’s bar, bleeding profusely from a bullet wound to his head. According to a December 18, 1885, Courier report, a lodger sprinted into the saloon after hearing a gunshot and saw Urfer with “a great ghastly hole in the right side of his head, from which his brains and blood were oozing.” Several others  nearby also ran in. They saw the bleeding Urfer and “near his right hand, lay a pistol of the bull-dog pattern.” All concluded this was suicide.