"Wet" Enterprise: Selected Saloons of the Old West

Shown here standing behind the bar of his saloon, Solomon “Sol” Weinberger was a diminutive five feet, three inches, tall.    His height had little to do with his reputation in Idaho Springs, Colorado, as a genial proprietor and civic-minded citizen of his adopted country.  The diminutive Sol was born in July 1864 in a part of Europe then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the son of Abraham and Henche Weinberger.    At the age of 17 he emigrated to the United States, arriving in June 1881 aboard the steamer   Normannia,  shown here.     In that move Sol apparently had been preceded by an elder brother, Simon, and two half-brothers, Herman and Nathan, all of whom had settled in Colorado, Simon in boom town Cripple Creek where he was running a saloon. Records indicate that Sol, a bachelor, may have been working in Simon’s saloon and living with Simon’s family that included his wife, Bettie, and son Bernard.  In Cripple C...

             It has always been somewhat of a mystery to me how Western saloons, often in isolated mining camps or other communities with no easy access to the outside world, managed to get the liquor needed to satisfy their thirsty clientele.    For many “Old West” locations, railroads were distant, stage coaches sporadic, and mule trains infrequent.    The answer may lie with Samuel Jaggers, a saloonkeeper and liquor dealer in the mining town of Bannack, Montana, during the 1860s.    In a 1903 newspaper interview Jaggers told all. Sam Jaggers was an Englishman, born in March 1832 in Beulah, a small town in Wales, the son of Joseph and Elizabeth Jaggers.  He was baptized into the Church of England.  When he was 16 he emigrated to the United States along with other family members and settled in Illinois near Galena, a town on the Mississippi River, famous for being the home of Ulysses S. Grant and oth...

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...