Fight management is something every Montana bartender must learn.
“You got to jump into the middle of it and try to steer them outside,” said Chester Pierce, owner of the Wise River Club, a bar here in the Big Hole Valley of southwest Montana. “You get a bad bar fight, and it ruins everybody’s appetite for the night.”
Shootings are far from unknown.
“Almost all of these bars had a shooting in them,” said Louie Rivenes, bartender for 20 years at the H Bar J Saloon.
In Dewey late last year, Gregory Pepin used his semiautomatic rifle against the jukebox.
Roger Malmquist, bartender and co-owner of the Dewey Bar, recognized Pepin when he came in that November morning looking depressed, disheveled and smelling of alcohol.
In better times, the bartender said, he had allowed Pepin to run a tab, which he always paid.
“To be fair to him, he had behaved himself,” Malmquist said.
So this time the bartender said he tried to reason with him.
“I talked him out of shooting the five televisions, the mirrored back-bar, the kegs, the windows and the doors,” Malmquist said. ” . . . He started to calm down.”
Then, that jukebox played, the phone rang and all hell broke loose. Malmquist said he watched in fear and disbelief as Pepin emptied his 30-round clip.
Pepin was walking to the parking lot to fetch more ammunition when he encountered Jackie Fisher, a special agent with the U.S. Forest Service.
She drew her gun and ordered Pepin to the ground, but he did not cooperate, according to Malmquist, who heard Pepin shout, “Shoot me. Shoot me.”
Finally, someone tackled Pepin, and Fisher cuffed him.
