"Wet" Enterprise: Selected Saloons of the Old West

  The whiskey jug shown here unfolds the story of Emanuel A. Mitterer, who as a youth who left his Austrian homeland for the gold lands of Colorado.   Amid the wild scramble for wealth and labor tumult of the times, Mitterer successfully ran saloons catering to miners, got married, and fathered four children.   Emerging unscathed by the violence all around, he later moved to Denver and lived to “a ripe old age.” Mitterer was born in December 1873 in the Tyrol region of the Austrian Alps, in a bucolic village in the shadow of snow-covered mountains.   Arriving in America sometime between 1887 and 1889 (records differ), he found his way to a gold strike boomtown in the Colorado Rockies call Altman. It was one of the highest communities in America at 11,000 feet.   Despite the mountain backdrop it bore no resemblance to Mitterer’s homeland.   Shown below as it looked in 1897, Altman was a ramshackle settlement, houses and commercial buildings thrown together of rough timbers.  

  Beginning on the East Coast as a merchant seaman, Jacob Lorillard Van Bokkelen,  shown here, found his way to San Francisco where he rapidly gained a reputation for leadership in ridding the city of criminal elements.   Moving to Virginia City, Nevada, while still in his thirties, Van Brokkelen played a pivotal role in the early history of the state while becoming the proprietor of a beer garden and saloon.   Nothing in his event-filled life, however, matched the impact of his departure from Virginia City. Van Bokkelen’s drinking establishment attracted the “better sort” of Virginia City residents, mine owners, merchants, and professional people.   He located the place a mile or so outside the bustle of town, amidst the sagebrush and trees of Six Mile Canyon.   In that peaceful setting customers could sip their beer and whiskey while admiring the antics of the bachelor proprietor’s pet spider monkey while likely gossiping about the man himself. Tales would be told of Van