Imbibe! (3 page)

Many excellent books have been written on the social history of drinking in early America. I will therefore dispense with the traditional lengthy description of the general bibulousness that prevailed; on the Slings and Juleps that, raised in honor of rosy-fingered dawn, eased men onto the proscenium of day; on the eleven-o’clock spark-quenchers of gin and the noontime whiskey drams; on the Celt and his ball of malt and the Good Old ’Nongohela of the Pennsylvanian; on Kentucky corn and Medford rum and the true purpose of the Georgia peach (like Johnny Appleseed’s stock-in-trade, it was destined for the stillhouse, not the table).

Whether or not Americans ingested more absolute alcohol than their European forbears is open to debate. There’s no question, though, that a much greater percentage of that alcohol was in the form of distilled spirits, and that these spirits were consumed in an unprecedented variety of mixtures. Nor can it be disputed that this facility with mixing drinks was the first legitimate American culinary art, and—along with the minstrel show, but that’s another book—the first uniquely American cultural product to catch the world’s imagination. In the century and a half between the American Revolution and Prohibition, this art was born, reached maturity, and spread to every corner of the globe, in the process establishing the principles, techniques, and even a surprising number of the tools and formulae that still characterize the art today.

Arts don’t invent themselves. Someone had to mix the first Rum Punch, stir the first Cocktail, shake the first Sherry Cobbler, and invent the shaker to do it with. But when it comes to these early Titans of the bar, we run into the condition lamented by the Roman poet Horace, two thousand years ago:

Unfortunately, there was no Homer to record the names and deeds of bartenders. Other disciplines of similarly louche character found their poets—e.g., the Anglo-Irish journalist Pierce Egan’s remarkable 1819
Boxiana
, a four-volume anecdotal history of British pugilism and the culture that supported it, or its companion piece, Patrick Timony’s
American Fistiana
from 1849—and there was no shortage of what was known as “convivial” or “jovial” literature, books about social drinkers and their conversation. But the nineteenth century brought forth no
American Bariana
, no chronicle of the men behind the bar, their sayings and their doings. For the most part, as far as history is concerned the great bartenders of the Heroic Age—men like Cato Alexander, a freed slave who kept a coaching inn in upper Manhattan and who, in the Federal Era, was second only to Willard in his reputation as a mixologist; or Sherwood “Shed” Sterling (alias “Napoleon II”), who presided over the grand circular bar at the Astor House; or William Pitcher, the Greek-spouting deity of the Tremont House bar in Boston—carved their deeds in ice. We might catch occasional glimpses of them in the murk, tossing drinks from cup to cup before a bewhiskered and thoroughly appreciative crowd, but beyond that they are enigmas. And they were the famous ones. Even the mighty Willard left behind no book of recipes or biographical sketch. We don’t know when or where he was born or when or where he died. We don’t even know his first name.

But if the vast majority of the bartenders of the period have been condemned to obscurity, there is one, anyway, who has not; one about whom a good deal has long been known and a great deal more will be revealed herein. In large part, this is because, not content to wait for a poet, he was his own Homer, telling his story to anyone who would listen and getting his deeds, his recipes between the covers of a book before anyone else. In this book, he will stand in for the countless ranks of his colleagues whom history overlooked; his character and actions for those of all bartenders. Fortunately, if there was one old-time bartender whose shoulders could support such a burden, it was Jerry Thomas.

Oh, to have seen him as Edward Hingston saw him in 1863, presiding over the luxurious marble-and-gilt barroom of the Occidental, the newest and best hotel in San Francisco:

 

When Hingston encountered him, Thomas was, as he noted, “one of the most distinguished, if not the chief, of American ‘bartenders, ’” his name “as familiar in the Eastern States as it now is out here in California. . . . In the manufacture of a ‘cocktail,’ a ‘julep,’ a ‘smash’ or an ‘eye-opener,’ none can beat him, though he may have successful rivals.” This “Jupiter Olympus of the bar,” as the preface to his book had dubbed him the year before, was thirty-three years old and he was pulling down a cool hundred dollars a week, more than the vice president of the United States.

Jerry P. Thomas—alas, we may never know what the “P.” stands for—was “an American . . . and a sailor too,” as he told a reporter from the
New York Sun
in 1882. He was a gold miner, a Broadway dandy, a (minor) theatrical impresario, an art collector, an artist himself (of sorts, anyway), an inventor, an author, and a gambler. A footloose type, at one time or another he tended bar in just about every place where conviviality was at high ebb, from London, England, to Virginia City, Nevada. And wherever he was, he was a man as good as any who stood before his bar, and a damned sight better than most.

Jerry Thomas was born on or around November 1, 1830. Or maybe it was 1829—things like strict chronological accuracy don’t seem to have been a primary concern of his (the 1830 date comes from his death certificate and seems like the best bet). In any case, the place was Sackets Harbor, New York, a garrison town on the chilly waters of Lake Ontario not far from the Canadian border. About his parents, Jeremiah and Mary Morris Thomas, we know nothing. We know he had a younger brother, George M., because they ran saloons together, but of other siblings we also know nothing. His early childhood is a blank. We can deduce that his social class wasn’t the highest, but only from his career choices. On the other hand, Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville came from “respectable” families, and they shipped out as sailors, too, and George M. Thomas ended up as a bank director. At some point in the mid-1840s, Jerry ended up in New Haven; whether he moved there with his family or by himself is another open question.

Here’s the problem: Jerry Thomas was a bartender, not a poet or a politician. Bartenders were important men in their milieu, but that milieu—discussed below—compiled its historical record by anecdote and barroom reminiscence, not systematic investigation backed by documents. That doesn’t mean that we’re without resources to reconstruct his life, but they tend to be catch-as-catch-can, giving us intermittent, if often vivid, glimpses of the man as he moved through his world. These don’t extend to the part of his life before he learned how to mix drinks. According to the unusually accurate obituary published in his hometown paper, this occurred “at sixteen years of age, [when] he began life as a New Haven barkeeper.” New Haven, which was both a seaport and a college town, would have been an excellent place to pick up the rudiments of the craft. In 1846, though, it was a craft still transmitted by long apprenticeship, and his duties in the bar would far more likely have involved sweeping, polishing, and carrying than mixing fancy drinks for customers.

In any case he didn’t stick with it long: At seventeen or eighteen, as that same obituary states, “he went to Cuba as a sailor.” We don’t know what ship that was on, but soon enough he joined the
Ann Smith
of New Haven (William Henry Bowns, Captain) and, as he told the
Sun
in 1882, “sailed all around the world before the mast,” or if not all around the world, at least to California (as he told the
New York Dramatic Mirror
writer Alan Dale around the same time). Whatever his previous sailing experience, his berth there wouldn’t have been a soft one. Life before the mast was a deadly serious business, even for a lakeman like Thomas—“though an inlander . . . wild-ocean born,” as Melville put it in
Moby Dick.
Not that Thomas could complain, since “whatever your feelings may be, you must make a joke of everything at sea” (so Dana). And there would have been plenty for him to joke about. Even for a boy from Sackets Harbor, who presumably knew something of knife-sharp winds, ice-glassed decks, and waves that topped the masts, rounding the Horn in Antarctic winter, as he did in 1849, must’ve been an ordeal: When he wasn’t climbing aloft to the skyscraping top-gallants, a hundred feet and more above a pitching deck, or edging out to the ends of the yards to furl canvas stiff with ice while standing over nothing but the roiling South Atlantic, there was the constant scrubbing, scraping, and swabbing; the picking and the pounding; the stitching and the mending. And all for twelve dollars a month and rations that made prison food look wholesome.

The drinks must’ve helped. Now, while the Royal Navy might have had its daily rum ration, this was by no means a universal practice in the American merchant marine. Whether out of moral concern or just plain Yankee thriftiness, most ships were dry (or, more properly, like Dana’s
Alert
, where “the temperance was all in the forecastle”—in other words, the officers could drink their Brandy-and-Water or Punch, while “Jack . . . can have nothing to wet his lips”). The
Ann Smith
, however, was no temperance ship. We know this because James Minor, one of the passengers on that trip around the Horn, kept a journal. A strict temperance man himself, Minor was dismayed to see his fellow passengers divide themselves into a “Temperance Party” and a “Rum Party.” The latter boozed and caroused the days and nights away with Bowns not only doing nothing to rein them in, but actually joining them. If only it stopped with the captain—“many of the Rum party,” Minor wrote, “have made themselves to [sic] free with the sailors by treating them, a poor policy to gain friends.” Things soon reached the point that the (dry) First Mate was duking it out with drunken sailors, and the cabin boy and the captain’s son were getting tanked with one of the passengers and pitching the poor ship’s dog overboard. Finally, Minor concluded that “Our Captain is devoid of Order + Sobriety.” (To be fair to Captain Bowns, there are other sources that recall him as a man of honor and talent.)

Minor doesn’t implicate Thomas by name in any of this shipboard saturnalia. But whatever the extent of his bartending experience, one can certainly see it coming in handy on the
Ann Smith
. Herbert Asbury, in the biographical sketch he attached to his edition of Thomas’s book, has him hoping that he could use the captain’s “excellent grog” as a basis to “invent something which would relieve the sailor’s life of much of its hardship,” and the captain looking “with vigorous disapproval upon all attempts to improve the grog and drinking habits of the crew.” Stripped of its circumlocution, this sounds very much like Thomas was mixing up drinks for his fellow Jack Tars above and beyond some sort of regular rum ration and the captain put a stop to it. Unfortunately, Minor’s journal, which would have certainly made much of such an occasion, peters out somewhere between Rio (where there had been a lengthy layover and much booze purchased) and the Horn. In any case, this voyage, which left New Haven on March 24 bound for San Francisco, would be the last one Thomas made before the mast. When he returned east, it would be as a steamship passenger.
¹

On November 4, only a few days after Thomas’s nineteenth birthday, the
Ann Smith
reached San Francisco, whereupon he jumped ship and, as he put it, “ran off into the mountains after gold.” Nor was he alone: The harbor in San Francisco was full of abandoned ships, their crews all having had the same approximate idea. The Gold Rush was on, and it was as great a spectacle as any human history has afforded. The San Francisco Thomas would’ve found when his boots hit the wharf is scarcely imaginable: a seething anthill of human greed, its streets yards-deep in mud, its sand hills poking their bald knobs over a sea of shacks, tents, tented shacks, flimsy one- or two-story frame houses, even prefab wooden huts from China—housing so temporary, so precarious, that one good blow and just about the whole city would be shaved clean off the face of California. Here and there, perhaps, a piece of the more substantial new construction that was just beginning to sprout up might be left standing, but everything else was as permanent as grass.

And the people—plow-callused Yankee farmers, pigtailed Chinese, “Kanakas” from Hawaii, Southern backwoodsmen, banker’s sons from Fifth Avenue, broad-hatted Sonorans, hard-bitten “Sydney Ducks” from Australia, Illinois dirt-farmers, Chileans, Peruvians, French whores (who charged a pound or more of gold dust a trick, thank you very much), Indians, and lots and lots of just plain Americans, all burning with gold fever. They created a society like no other on Earth. University professors would be frying eggs for a living—and making more doing it that they ever did lecturing on Aristophanes. Ditchdiggers were paying an unheard-of fifty cents a drink for straight whiskey, and none of the best at that, and sending their shirts to Hawaii to be laundered. Everything was topsy-turvy and hurtling along at railroad speed.

Then there were the saloons. According to Hubert Howe Ban-croft, the Gold Rush’s great early historian, the Argonauts, as those who sailed after gold were jocularly called, were a bibulous bunch: “If hot, they drank to get cool, if cold, to get warm, if wet, to get dry, if dry—and some were always dry—to keep out the wet.” The places they drank ranged from a tent outfitted only with a barrel of Cincinnati rectified or a few jugs of pisco to joints where three-thousand-dollar billiard tables stood on broken-up packing cases under crystal chandeliers. The city’s best and most popular gambling saloon, the El Dorado on Portsmouth Square, was simply four walls and a tent roof, but “it had an orchestra of fifteen persons,” as one old Forty-Niner later recalled. “It was run all night and day, with two sets of hands. It was gorgeously fitted up. What they used to stir up the sugar in the drinks cost $300. It was solid gold.” If Asbury is to be believed, one of the hands wielding that golden toddy-stick was Jerry Thomas’s. “The Professor,” he writes, “. . . became First Assistant to the Principal Bartender of the El Dorado.”