"Wet" Enterprise: Selected Saloons of the Old West

In 1903, the  New York Sun  proclaimed Jerome, Arizona, to be  "the wickedest town in the West.”   As the proprietor of the Fashion Saloon, Johannes “John” Keller knew that his establishment, advertised as “The Leading Sporting House in Northern Arizona,” was an important element in that reputation.  There is no reason to believe Keller cared. Shown here in a passport photo about age 40, Keller was born in Oberlengingen, Wurttenburg, Germany, in 1880.  When he was just thirteen, likely with family members, he came to the United States, embarking from Bremen, Germany, aboard the steamship  Darmstadt , shown below.   Keller seems almost immediately to have headed for the Arizona Territory, settling for a time in Prescott, a town noted for its “Whiskey Row.”  He may have learned the saloon keeping in one of those drinking establishments. What would have brought the German youth to Jerome is unclear.  The 1890s had been...

With its label in tatters the whiskey bottle shown right would  have little interest except for the name in the smallest print:    “Tex Rickard,” an artifact from one of his early drinking establishments.    Born in Kansas City in January 1870, George Lewis “Tex” Rickard parlayed operating saloons into a career promoting boxing matches that made him famous throughout the United States and, indeed, the world. While a  toddler, Rickard and his family moved to Texas, where soon after his father died.  Forced to truncate his education to help with family finances, at eleven years old he went to work as a cowboy on the Texas frontier and took part in several long cattle drives.  By the age of 23, having indicated unusual abilities and earned the nickname “Tex,” Rickard, shown right as a youth, was elected town marshall of Henrietta, Texas.  He married in 1894 and had a child but both his wife and baby died within a year. Perhap...

Tom Kelly and His Nevada Bottle House   When Saloonkeeper Tom Kelly found obtaining good timber too difficult to allow him to build a house, he turned to something he knew well — beer bottles.    Kelly    collected and used an estimated 51,000 bottles to construct a house of glass and adobe in Rhyolite, now a ghost town, in the Nevada desert near the eastern edge of Death Valley.   Rhyolite was a perfect example of a boom town.    When gold was discovered in the vicinity in 1905, the rush was on.    By the following year the town, initially called “Bullfrog” after an area mine, had 10,000 residents.    Shown above in its heyday, Rhyolite reputedly was so wealthy that serving the community were three stage lines, among them the first automobile stage, and three railroads, including the Tonopah & Tidewater, the Bullfrog-Goldfield, and the Las Vegas & Tonopah.  “As many as a h...