"Wet" Enterprise: Selected Saloons of the Old West

A sailor from boyhood in his native Scotland, Patsy Lenen in the early 1870s fetched up in busy seaside Port Townsend, Washington.    On its main wharf Lenen founded a saloon that for many years was a favorite hangout for thirsty mariners in a town where “shangaiing” hapless men for sea duty was a common and accepted practice. The son of Patrick and Mary Mekin Linnin. Patsy (probably a nickname for Patrick) was born in Greenock in March, 1846, a major seaport off the southwest coast of Scotland at the point where the River Clyde empties into an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean.  Shown here as it looked in the mid-19th Century with a mix of sail and steam powered vessels, Greenock was bustling port with a large customs house.  It was almost pre-ordained that youths like Lenen would go to sea, many forgoing an education. Patsy was among them and remained illiterate throughout his life.  According to his obituary,  “He deeply deplored his lack of ...

The glass paperweight at left bears the photograph of a man riding a buffalo and bears the legend:    “Bob Yokum’s Buffalo, Pierre, S.D.”    It provides a window into the feats of a South Dakota saloonkeeper in training buffalo — the American bison — to pull a wagon or sleigh, be mounted and raced, and, most famously of all, engage in bullfighting in Mexico. Details of the saloonkeeper’s life before settling in the Dakota  Territory are sketchy.    According to 1870 census records, Robert Lee Yokum, shown here in maturity, was born in California in 1866.    His father, Dennis, was a carpenter.    After his wife died the father initially was dependent on an older daughter to keep house and care for younger siblings.    After a move to Archer, Texas, where he was recorded working as a blacksmith,    Dennis Yokum married a woman almost half his age and started a new family.    Bob was recorded as sti...

On May 25, 1907, the Morning Oregonian newspaper headlined:    “ Billy Winters, Promotor of  Honesty.”    It told of how this Portland “saloon man,” while never posing as an model of propriety, had encouraged  “a higher grade of morality and honesty among certain men, and is actually paying a high price for the object lesson he is presenting to the public.”   Another  assessment of Winter’s story would substitute the word “honesty” with “tenacity.” Information about the early years of Billy Winter (sometimes given as Winters), likely the gent shown at right, is scant.    He seems to have avoided the census taker most of his life.    He emerged about the turn of the century as the founder and genial proprietor of a watering hole known as “Billy Winter’s Log Cabin.”    It was located on Third Street near Morrison in downtown Portland, Oregon.    The location was a prudent one as Third Street was a major co...

In 1889 a Kansas grocer headed for the newly opened Oklahoma Territory to seek his fortune.   It came to him initially through the sale of bananas to homesteaders and later when he started the first legal saloon in the Territory. His name was Moses (Mose) Weinberger and today he is counted by some among “Oklahoma State Greats.” We know a great deal about Weinberger, the central figure in the photo above, because of an interview he gave in August 1937 as part of a program by the Works Progress Administration (WPA).   He told his interviewer of his birth in 1859 into a poor Orthodox Jewish farm family in Hungary.  In search of a better life he left his little village when he was 18 and took the steamship “Fresia,” to New York City.  He settled there for several years, working as a butcher.  Then he made the mistake of returning to Hungary, at the time under Austrian rule, to visit his parents.  Over his protest about now being an American, he pro...