Born: circa 1838, Mexico
Died: Unknown (after 1874)
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Maggie Moore
The following is republished from the National Park Service and was written by Faith Bennett. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Petra Romero was born in Mexico around 1838 and joined the global migration to the North American West. Not much is known about Romero’s early life, but the nineteenth-century mining boom created the business opportunity that made her locally famous. Re-naming herself “Maggie Moore,” she became the owner and operator of a dance hall in Death Valley called Waterfall Dance House or “Madam Moore’s.”
In 1864 silver ore was discovered in the hills of Inyo County. Pablo Flores, who is said to have made the first silver claim, named the town near Buena Vista Peak, Cerro Gordo (“fat hill”) signifying its promise to prospectors and prompting many Mexican and Anglo-American migrants to move to Inyo. By the 1870s, immigrants and migrants drastically outnumbered native populations. The recent migrants hoping to strike it rich mining the fat hill for silver were almost entirely male. Establishments such as Romero’s dance hall and another owned by Lola Travis, who also immigrated from Mexico, sought profits by offering these lone men food, drink, lodging, and sex.
Romero purchased her establishment in 1871 for one hundred and fifty dollars and operated it as a dance hall and saloon for the next four years. Although at times Romero was recorded as “Mrs. Moore,” there is no conclusive evidence that she was married when she changed her name. Instead, it is likely that she, like other female proprietors of businesses catering to transient men in the West, chose a name that would attract customers. Some have theorized that the saloon-keeper may have selected the alliterative name for herself in reference to the popular Western stage actress Maggie Moore, a glamorous San Francisco-born Irish American performer then at the height of her popularity.
Newspaper accounts and personal histories make frequent mention of Inyo County and its town of Cerro Gordo as being places that “had a man for breakfast” nearly every day, referring to the frequency of finding dead bodies in the morning. The saloons run by women like Travis and Romero were frequent sites of armed conflict. In January 1872, a reportedly drunken Sabine “Albino” Alvarez belligerently attempted to enter Romero’s business in order to obtain more liquor. He allegedly broke through a window, sending glass and debris onto her bed—a bed she shared with Rosales Garcia, according to the local newspaper. Garcia fatally shot Alvarez. Following a coroner’s inquest into the incident, authorities concluded that in truth, this was not a case of self-defense; rather, Garcia had broken the window himself in order to justify his killing of Alvarez by implying the dead man was the violent instigator.
Romero was surrounded by violence as she operated what the Inyo Independent called a “dead-fall dance house.” In the so-called “Waterfall Incident,” one man tried to shoot another point-blank in the skull at Waterfall’s, prompting a “general” shootout in the establishment as well as a few days’ worth of retaliative shootings in town. Perhaps the stress became too much for Romero in 1874. After hosting one final dance at her establishment for a Fourth of July celebration, Romero sold the Waterfall to Concepión Flores for a sum of $3000.
After the sale of her saloon, Romero fades from the historical record and there is no conclusive evidence to describe her next place of residence or her death. Records indicate that the Waterfall Dance House met its demise in 1880 when it caught fire.