"Wet" Enterprise: Selected Saloons of the Old West

John Treber, Deadwood, Dakota Territory In May 1877 when John Treber drove his team of oxen and a stock of liquor from Leavenworth, Kansas. into Deadwood neither he nor the residents who watched him drive down the dusty main street could know the impact this 24-year-old immigrant from Germany would have on the often-rowdy, frontier Dakota Territory town. Shown here in maturity, Treber was born in Hochheim-on-the-Main, Germany, in March 1853, the son of Philip and Margaret (Hofmann) Treber.  His father farmed grapes and manufactured wine, early on training his son in the trade.  As he reached his majority, however, perhaps to avoid the Prussian army draft, John left for America with an uncle.  They landed in New York in September 1874. The young Treber is said to have traveled almost immediately to Leavenworth, Kansas, where he found employment, also reputedly spending some time working at a St. Louis brewery.  Why he chose to relocate to Deadwood is unclear.  In Apri

Bill McPhee of the Yukon The contention that “every bottle has a story,” is fully borne out by the small ceramic flask shown here.    It tells the story of W. H. (“Bill”) McPhee, a figure in the frozen North whose role in the Yukon Gold Rush was not to moil for the shiny stuff in the earth but to get it in payment for whiskey in his saloons.    Said the Daw son  Yukon Sun :    “The memory of man runneth not back to the time when Bill McPhee first came to the Yukon.” According to his response to the 1910 census, McPhee was  born in Eastern Canada in 1841 of Scottish ancestry.    Shown here, he came to the United States in 1870 and eventually became a citizen, although equally at home in Canada.    Of his early years, information is scant.    He appears to have had some early employment in the whiskey trade, likely spending a period employed in a saloon.  He is shown here in middle age. Although he indicated he had arrived in the Canadian Yukon in 1888, McPhee first sho

Billy Wood and Death by Fly Paper Foreword:   Given the easy access to strong drink, I find it somewhat surprising that of the some 680 whiskey men I have profiled, only two definitely have been identified as becoming alcoholics.The saloonkeeper whose short biography appears below is one of them.  In his case, the outcome was tragic in the extreme. William H. “Billy” Wood was well-known and for a time well-respected in Eureka, Utah, a pioneer settlement that grew from a mining camp to become the largest city and the center of commerce for an entire region. Billy Wood contributed to that development as well being a popular saloonkeeper whose Oxford Resort, according to press reports:  “…Had the best business in town.” Billy was born about 1866 in Pleton, Ontario, Canada, the  son of David and Deberiah (Welbank) Wood.    His early life, education and immigration into the United States have gone unrecorded. By his early twenties he was working in the general merchandise

How Ed Hughes Helped Tame a Rowdy Town "Starting in life with nothing, and by steady industry and thrift, coupled with skill and inventive genius, building his own fortunes to good proportion and permanent substance of magnitude, Edwin S. Hughes, of Glenwood, is not only a self-made man but one of the leading business men on the Western slope of this state.” Thus did the 1905 volume, entitled  “Leading Men of Colorado”  describe Ed Hughes, a whiskey man, in a biography.  It described in some detail his multifaceted business and community activities but failed to capture how Hughes, the dapper gent seen right, helped transform a Colorado town from a frontier haven for gamblers and gunmen into a tourist destination for the gilded gentry. Hughes was an Easterner, born in April 1856 at Flemington, New Jersey.  He was the son of Jared and Rhuhama (Hartpence) Hughes, both native Pennsylvanians.  Father Jared was a farmer and livestock dealer who was successful in busines