"Wet" Enterprise: Selected Saloons of the Old West

It is an historical fact that almost a quarter of the troops fighting for the Union in the Civil War were foreign born, among them some 216,000 from Germany.  Less well known were the thousands of immigrants who stayed in the military, moved West and fought in the Indian Wars.  Among them was Fritz Jessen who eventually found a permanent home in Prescott, Arizona, running a popular saloon and earning praise as  “a good citizen in every sense of the word.” Jessen was born in Hamburg, Germany, in November 1842.  When he was eight years old, he arrived in American with family members who settled in Massachusetts.  The youth continued his education in American schools but I find no record of an early occupation.  He was 19 when the Civil War broke out, joining the 29th Regiment Massachusetts Voluntary Infantry in December 1861, the only non-Celtic regiment in the famed Irish Brigade. Over the next four years the young German would experience con...

Nautically named, for more than 55 years the Ensign Saloon was a favorite watering hole for seafaring populations along San Francisco’s waterfront.    While the proprietors knew, few patrons likely were aware that the Ensign, on the ground floor of one of city’s then taller buildings, sat on top of a sunken ship.    Not even the 1906 earthquake and fire could shake the saloon from its moorings. The Ensign story began when a Russian-made three masted sailing ship called the  Rome, shown here, rounded the Horn and docked at San Francisco with a load of coal.  The vessel was stripped and purchased by Captain Fred Lawson for $1,000.  Known as the “hulk undertaker,” Lawson was engaged in scuttling abandoned ships in the shallows of San Francisco Bay to create landfill platforms for developers. In 1890, Capt. Lawson told the  San Francisco Examiner  the  story of the  Rome .    In 1852 he was approached by a develop...

Between 1860 and World War I as many as 300,000 individuals are estimated to have left areas than now are part of Slovenia for the United States.  Early waves of migrants from that Balkan country were predominantly single men, many of them miners by occupation.  Among them was a six foot, two inch, 250 pound future saloonkeeper and liquor dealer destined to impact a Colorado mining town in multiple ways.  His name was Frank Zaitz.  Zaitz was born in 1868 in a small village in the Gorica District of Central Slovenia, shown above.    His family appears to have been fairly prosperous, one brother becoming a doctor, another a priest.    At the age of 17, whether to avoid compulsory military service or a sheer sense of adventure, he left home for America, stopping first in Cleveland where some 30,000 to 40,000 Slovenians lived and worked.    Within a few months, hearing of a booming mining business in Colorado, in 1886 Zaitz heade...