Imbibe! (4 page)

If only there were some scrap of evidence for this; the El Dorado is almost as central to the myth of the Gold Rush as Sutter’s Mill or “Oh, Susannah!” and to have Jerry Thomas firmly placed behind the bar would be quite something. But not even Thomas himself claimed that he worked there, at least not in the autobiographical sketch he dictated to the
Sun
. And even if he did find a berth on Portsmouth Square, it couldn’t have been for long, since the El Dorado had a distressing habit of burning down, along with much of the rest of the city. In any case, whether he stopped to tend bar or not, before long Thomas was in the mountains, trying to get rich. (Mixographer and collector of bariana extraordinaire Brian Rea believes, based on his research, that Thomas did indeed work at an El Dorado—but in Sacramento, on his way to the diggings, not San Francisco. This would make much more sense.)

Piecing together sketchy and often contradictory anecdotes, which are all we have to go on for this part of his life (a thorough combing of census records, city directories, miner’s memoirs, membership rolls of Forty-Niners’ societies and suchlike has turned up no trace of him whatsoever), it seems that he betook himself to the goldfields along the Yuba River, in the northern range of the diggings, and set to shoveling. He didn’t last long at that, either. Of all the ways to get rich in California, digging for gold was the most spectacular—one lucky stroke of the pick, and you could be set for life. But it was backbreaking, dirty work, and few of the men who did it made enough to more than cover expenses, particularly since those expenses were so very high. Pretty quickly, it seems, young Jerry gave mining up for a mug’s game and went where the sure money was: collecting those expenses. He installed himself at the big saloon in nearby Downieville run by John Craycroft, ex-mate of a Mississippi riverboat, and his silent partner, a Mexican whore by the name of Chavez. One must assume that Thomas took up his proper station behind the bar and set to doling out horns of panther-sweat to the begrimed and hairy multitude.

Whether it was in San Francisco, Sacramento, or Downieville (or all three), wherever Thomas tended bar in California he would have been making serious drinks. Even Hinton Helper, who was there from 1851 to 1854 and went back East full of grump and gripe at what he had seen, was compelled to admit that the raw new civilization then a-building on the Pacific coast did not stint when it came to the quality of its liquid refreshments. At one San Francisco saloon, he wrote, “We find the governor of the State seated by a table, surrounded by judges of the supreme and superior courts, sipping sherry cobblers, smoking segars, and reveling in all the delights of anticipated debauch.” The two bartenders, urbane fellows, when they are not “deal[ing] out low anecdote to vulgar idlers,” are mixing drinks using “the choicest liquors and artificial beverages that the world produces.” Ultimately, he concludes,

 

Even Virginia, the state long considered the heartland of epicurean tippling in America, was forced to concede its place, as the
Southern Literary Messenger
acknowledged in 1852 when it noted, not without regret, that the cradle of presidents,

This is perhaps true more in the metaphorical sense than the literal one—it’s hard to make a case for the Cobbler as a Western drink, and the “snake and tiger” is otherwise unknown—but it’s true nonetheless.

But Jerry Thomas was a restless young man, and at some point in 1850 or 1851, “getting tired of whiskey and sixshooters” (to pinch a phrase from one of his obituarists) he downed his bartending tools and organized what he recalled in 1882 as “the first band of minstrels in California, the bills being written out by hand and posted up with pitch pine gum for want of tacks.” The blacked-up, fiddle-banjo-and-percussion minstrel bands were the rock and roll bands of their day, only with the racial politics right out in the open for anyone to see. They were enormously popular in California, as one might imagine, and Thomas and his crew (although not actually the first, or anything like it) evidently made a killing touring the towns up and down the Sacramento River. But he didn’t last long in that business, either. This time, though, the reason for bagging it might have been more than simple boredom or twitchy legs. If one of his obituaries is to be believed, while on the Sacramento he ran afoul of one of the great scourges of the age:

 

Whether it was the cholera or some other reason, in early 1852, as nearly as we can determine, Thomas decided he’d had enough of El Dorado and headed back East.

This time, he could travel the easy way. Somehow or other, he had managed to amass the sum of $16,000; at least, that’s what he told both the man from the
Sun
and whoever it was Asbury got his information from. Whether it was by minstrelsy, mining, which Asbury says he continued doing while bartending, or—as Brian Rea has suggested to me—by using some of his bartending money to stake other miners and taking a share of their “earnings” in return, we’ll probably never know for sure. But however he got it, it was a staggering sum (equivalents are always approximate, but it’s well over $300,000 in today’s money). With that kind of money, Thomas could afford to take a steamboat to Panama, cross the isthmus (an arduous journey, but less so in 1852 than a couple of years earlier), and take another steamboat to New Orleans or New York. Where his journey out took him eight months of backbreaking labor, his journey back would’ve taken a little more than a month, during which time he could be sitting with his feet up and a steady supply of Mint Juleps from the bar.

Not that the trip was entirely without its own hazards. One of the anecdotes circulating after Thomas died maintained that

 

The
San Jose Mercury News
, where this was printed, gives no date or exact place for this, but the steamboats called at Acapulco on their way to Panama. There was a British Consul there, and this sounds like the behavior of a twenty-one-year-old on his way home with a medium-sized fortune in his pocket and a surfeit of Mint Julep (or mezcal) under his belt. At any rate, he seems to have made it back home without further trouble.

When Thomas got back East, he may have opened a bar in New Haven; that’s what Asbury says, at least, although no Jerry Thomas appears in the New Haven City Directory at the time (there is, however, an A. J. Thomas listed in the 1852-1853 directory as a barkeeper at the City Hotel). In any case, before long he was drawn into the mad vortex of light and shadow that was New York, where he took his $16,000, as he later recalled, and “walked about with kid gloves for some time, to the great delight of myself and a select company.” I won’t even speculate as to what that involved or who the company was. But when the money was gone, or most of it, he quit perambulating and “started a bar with George Earle under Barnum’s Museum, where the Herald building is now.” While he and Earle managed to miss the New York City Directory, there’s nonetheless a painting of Barnum’s Museum from 1852 with a sign reading “Exchange” on the ground floor; this being one of the many synonyms for bar, we’re on reasonably firm ground here. This bar appears to have been a popular one (see the note on Brandy Punch in Chapter 3). It certainly had location going for it—Barnum’s Museum was one of the most popular attractions in the city, and at the time that stretch of the unregulated maelstrom of horses, wagons, carriages, and darting, weaving pedestrians that was Broadway was as busy as any stretch of road on Earth. It’s hard to imagine he wasn’t making money there. No matter. Within months, Thomas was pulling up stakes again.

Let’s not worry too much about the next four or five years. Almost all we know about how he spent them can be summarized in a brief sentence he dictated to the man from the
Sun
: “In ’53 [I] went as bartender to the Mills House in Charleston; followed that up by similar professional efforts in Chicago, St. Louis, and along the Mississippi.” One of his obituaries has him briefly running a saloon in the busted-flush boomtown of Keokuk, Iowa. The preface to his book adds that he was “proprietor of one of the most
recherche
saloons in New Orleans” and that the stint in St. Louis was as “presiding deity” over the bar at the Planter’s House hotel, generally regarded at the time as the best in all the West. Beyond that, there’s nothing. Not a single document, directory entry, reminiscence, nothing. But itinerant young bartenders are hard to track even in the Internet age, at least until they become stars and get located—which is precisely what happened to Jerry Thomas in 1858, when a job brought him back to New York. It was a good one: principal bartender at the large and very fashionable Metropolitan Hotel, perched at the corner of Prince Street and Broadway, in the heart of the city’s shopping district.

Before telling the rest of Jerry Thomas’s story, it’s worth pausing for a moment to discuss the so-called sporting fraternity, as the loose association of individuals whose avocation was the life of sports and games was known. It didn’t look at sports the way you or I might. While it might maintain a general, conversational sort of interest in all species of contests of man against man, man against beast, beast against beast or anything against the clock, when it came right down to it there were only two sports that really counted, and you didn’t actually play either one of them. You watched them from a safe distance, limiting your participation to the realm of speculative finance. The Turf and the Ring. Now, if the extent of Thomas’s interest in the Sport of Kings is unknown (although at one point he did have a racing book operating out of his saloon), by his own testimony his acquaintance with the squared circle was more than a passing one: As he told the
Sun
in 1882, he had been present at
twenty-nine bare-knuckle prizefights, including the epic 1860 battle between the American John Carmel Heenan and the Englishman Tom Sayers for the first heavyweight championship of the world.

But to be a member of the sporting fraternity involved far more than merely taking an interest in sports. In the nineteenth century, there were really two Americas; two kinds of Americans. There were the ones to whom the freedom upon which the country was founded meant something like, “If I work hard, avoid temptation and play by the rules, I will be unmolested in my enjoyment of the fruits of my labors,” and the ones to whom it meant “Nobody can tell me what to do.” The Victorians, and the sporting fraternity. Where the first group tried to lead a measured life, centered on work and the home with a weekly detour through church, the Sports (who came from all degrees of society) hung around in saloons and gambling halls, avoiding their civic duty to act all responsible and work long, sober hours for peanuts to increase the profits of other men. If they had hearths to go home to, you wouldn’t know it. If they belonged to a church, you wouldn’t know that, either. And as for money, when they had it they had it and when they didn’t you wouldn’t know it by looking at them—the sporting life was all about maintaining a “front,” and a true sport would spend his last fifty cents on a cognac Cocktail and having his coat brushed, with a ten-cent tip for the boy who brushed it. You were rich, you were broke, you were rich again—sometimes all on the same day. For the Victorians, money was an object; for the Sports, it was a process.

Some parts of America were more congenial to the fraternity than others. Small towns were bad, big cities were good, and some—New York, New Orleans, Chicago—were exceptionally good. New England was lukewarm at best; California, Nevada, and anywhere along the Mississippi were very good. Some professions were sportier than others, too. Some of them were even legal: actor, musician, newspaperman, politician. And, of course, saloonkeeper. In fact, as Mark Twain wrote in
Roughing It
, “I am not sure but that the saloonkeeper held a shade higher rank than any other member of society. . . . Youthful ambition hardly inspired so much to the honors of the law, or the army and navy as to the dignity of proprietorship in a saloon. To be a saloon-keeper . . . was to be illustrious.” He was talking specifically about Nevada, but his words could have applied equally well to anywhere the fraternity congregated.