Source:Lytle-bates/content
A wealth of romance is embodied in the historical background of Pittsburgh's street names. Some of the names were written in blood. Some of them were named for men of the sword who swaggered across the pages of this city's early history with a dash and color that belongs to a bygone age. This is the second of a series of articles on the story behind the names on certain street signs.
THE newspaper editor and the young merchant faced each other at 10 paces in the ravine beyond the eastern borders of the little town of Pittsburgh.
The command to fire came and the pistols flashed their red flame against the winter-gray background of the thickets that bordered Three Mile Run.
Both duelists missed. Each man picked up a fresh dueling pistol, and took position again.
The crash of the long-barreled guns, almost as one report, reverberated in the hollow stillness of the ravine. The young Virginian crumpled on the muddy ground, his arms flung wide. Blood ran from a wound in his chest, turning the mud red. A tiny wisp of smoke curled from the muzzle of his pistol where it had fallen a few feet from his out-stretched hand.
Tarleton Bates died within the hour. His duel with Thomas Stewart was the last fought in Pittsburgh. It took place in January, 1806.
And that is how Bates Street, which straggles up the Soho hillside from Second Avenue, got its name.
Bates was 30 when he fell before the fire of Stewart's pistol. He had come to Pittsburgh from Virginia.
The men of the Bates family had always had the courage to fight for what they believed right. Tarleton's father had lost his membership in the Quaker sect because he volunteered at Yorktown.
When he was 18, young Bates came to Pittsburgh from Belmont, Goochland County, Va. He worked for a time in the Quartermaster Department of the fort at Pittsburgh, and then drifted into newspaper work.
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BATES BECAME the editor of the "Tree of Liberty." It was a day when men took their politics as fiercely as life itself.
Members of opposing political parties scarcely mingled in the same friendly society. Democrats did not go to the same dances as their political opponents.
"I believe I am almost the only Pittsburgher not ashamed to call myself a Democrat," young Bates said at one time.
A colleague of Bates as editor of the Tree of Liberty was Henry Baldwin, who later became a justice of the Supreme Court.
On Christmas Day, 1805, an article was pub-published [sic] in Ephraim Pentland's newspaper, The Commonwealth, which was likely to do anything but spread peace and goodwill on the streets of Pittsburgh. It lampooned Bates and Baldwin as "two of the most abandoned political miscreants that ever disgraced a state." It was the climax of a feud between Bates and Pentland that had been brewing since the latter founded his paper in 1805.
Jan. 2, 1806, Bates horsewhipped Pentland in Market Street. Pentland came back at Bates editorially and claimed he had been whipped, not by Bates alone, but by a gang.
Pentland challenged Bates to a duel, but the latter refused to meet the rival editor because of what he described as the latter's unworthy conduct in giving a false version of the cowhiding in his newspaper.
Jan. 7, 1806, Bates set forth in type why he refused to meet Pentland. Thomas Stewart, a young Irish merchant who had carried Pentland's challenge, believed Bates' article reflected on him, and challenged the Virginian in his own right, after first being refused a retraction.
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BATES HAD a premonition that he was doomed to fall before the fire of Stewart's pistol. He wrote his will before he went to the banks of Three Mile Run.
Dueling had been forbidden by an act of 1794.
But then, as now, it was difficult to legislate out of existence what public opinion condoned.
So Bates laid down the pen with which he had written his will, and turned to cleaning his pistols. He strolled out to the dueling ground near the Monongahela, and they carried him home with Stewart's bullet in his heart.
Bates had wanted no display at his funeral. But the whole town turned out when he was buried in Trinity churchyard.
It was two weeks before a courier, riding the mountain trails southward into old Virginia, carried the news to Belmont plantation in Goochland County, that Tarleton Bates had died according to the code of his ancestors.
