"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 th...

  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. ...

  The Demise of “Tom Dunn,” Montana Saloonkeeper Shown above is a letterhead for the The Valley Saloon, a drinking establishment in the small but violence-ridden town of Saco, Montana.    It identifies as the proprietor a man named “Tom Dunn.”    In January 1897 he was writing to a wholesale liquor dealer to complain about shipping charges on his recent order.   But “Dunn” never existed nor would the saloon owner using that alias live beyond the following year. When the man calling himself Tom Dunn about 1893 rode horseback into Saco, no one in that ramshackle town, shown above, knew who he was.  He had sufficient money to buy a local saloon, became known as its genial proprietor, and even, some said, got married and settled down.  “At the time of his death,” reported one Montana newspaper:  “He had a fairly good reputation among his neighbors and others who knew him.” “Tom Dunn” was, in truth, Ed Starr, a member of several well known outlaw ...

  William Brown: Black Saloonkeeper on the Comstock Lode In 1862 two men who found themselves in Virginia City,  Nevada each made that Comstock Lode mining town the launching pad for their careers.    One was Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, the Nation’s most famous author.    The other was William A.G. Brown, shown here, an African American saloonkeeper who languished in obscurity until Nevada archeologists excavated the site of his drinking establishment.   Details of Brown’s life before arriving in Virginia City are scant.  Local records list his death there in April 1893 and give his age as 63.  This would put his birth at 1830 in Massachusetts and likely in or near Boston, the name he gave his saloon.  Although Brown was not born in slavery, his education would have been in segregated schools.  Although Boston was the first city in the U.S. to desegregate its public schools, that did not occur until 1855, when Brown...