Saloons and Saloon Keepers of Park City by Sandy Brumley and Jane Perkins

About this event

Park City Museum will host a lecture called ***Saloons and Saloon Keepers of Parley’s Park City*** given by Sandy Brumley and Jane Perkins on Wednesday, September 2, 2026 from 5-6 p.m. held at the Education and Collections Center located at 2079 Sidewinder Drive. More information can be found at www.parkcityhistory.org. Saloons were a cornerstone social institution in every western mining camp and Parley’s Park City, as our town was known in its earliest days, was no exception. Two of “The Park’s” earliest saloon keepers were Thomas Cupit and Jack Pape, who were also The Justice of the Peace and Deputy Sheriff, respectively. While saloons tended to come and go with their saloon keepers, there were usually somewhere between fifteen and thirty saloons active in the camp at any given time. Cupit and Pape, who were partners in an earlier saloon in Salt Lake City, each operated his own establishment in The Park from the late 1870s up until about 1910, when Jack Pape left for the Yukon. During that period, there were over thirty murders in and around The Park, many of them occurring in various saloons, including The Cupit & Brennan Saloon. Jack Pape’s Grizzly Saloon figured prominently in the famous Black Jack Murphy murder/lynching. Jane Perkins and Sandy Brumley will describe the historic arc etched by Cupit and Pape, as well as their contemporaries. Jane will provide her perspective as a founder of the High West Saloon and Distillery while Sandy will add facts around the 19th century newspapers to uncover many of the stories from this era. A mountain host and hiking guide at Park City Mountain Resort, Sandy Brumley is a descendent of iron miners in Minnesota and an avid student of Park City History. This will be the seventh in a series of presentations he has made for the Museum. He is a hike leader for the Museum and a member of Friends of Ski Mountain Mining History. Jane Perkins' love of Park City’s history began when she and her husband moved here ful...

Location

More at Education and Collections Center, Park City, UT