Drink (43 page)

In 1847 the laws against selling ardent spirits in Indian country were revised again. For the first time, offenders could be punished with a prison sentence, and as a further innovation, Indians were permitted to appear as witnesses in court. The 1847 legislation also allowed for the payment of annuities direct to Indian families, as opposed to the prior practice of making them to tribal chiefs. Finally, no payments were to be made to drunken Indians, and annuities could be withheld if tribal leaders refused to “pledge themselves to make all proper exertions to prevent the introduction and sale of liquor in their country.” The new legislation had as little effect as preceding acts. The sale of liquor in Indian country went on as ever before. The few prosecutions attempted were unsuccessful. The majority of cases were discontinued because the defendant or the witnesses had disappeared into the depths of the Far West. Moreover, juries were biased in favor of liquor sales—they did not see why Indians should not be allowed to drink themselves to death and, given the prevailing level of prejudice against the tribes, considered the facilitation of such an end desirable rather than criminal.

Native Americans were not the only market for whiskey in the West. It had long been penetrated by fur trappers, known to posterity as mountain men. They were followed by fur traders, who set up posts within striking distance of the Missouri River, by boatmen, who plied an intermittent service along the river, by soldiers, and finally by settlers. Each class of migrant had a demand for or brought with them a supply of alcohol, invariably spirits, as the distances were too great to transport any other kind of drink.

As forts and settlements were established along the trails west, so opportunities for drinking increased. The soldiers posted to remote stations killed time with boozing, and the migrants traveling overland to Oregon or California carried a supply of liquor with them intended to last them through the trek. Whenever a group assembled there was usually drinking aplenty—it was a way of forming bonds with strangers, a cultural bridge that united them so far from their places of origin. A picture of such an assembly has been left to us by Francis Parkman, who spent the summer of 1846 on a buffalo hunting trip to the Far West:

Three years after Parkman’s excursion, the California gold rush commenced. The prospect of digging a fortune out of the distant hills fired the imagination of all America, and much of Europe. People set off in their thousands, and then their tens of thousands, all animated by the dream of filling their pockets with nuggets that rumor had scattered across the Far West. On one day in August 1850, 39,506 emigrants were counted passing Fort Laramie, and though this flood subsided over the following decade, sufficient numbers of people were crossing the country to change its face forever. The trails west, while arduous, lost some of their notoriety as they were spanned by stage coach services, which ran to fixed timetables and enabled regular communication across the breadth of the continent. The stage routes were supported by long strings of post stations, which, in the case of the central California route, stretched from the Missouri River to San Francisco.

According to the accounts of travelers on the stagecoaches, alcohol was the lifeblood of the service, animating the drivers and tranquilizing the passengers. These two functions were complementary and formed a kind of dynamic equilibrium: The drivers took whiskey for breakfast and drove their teams like furies, the passengers took fright at the pace and calmed themselves with drink. The typical stage driver could “do nothing without whiskey, which he loves to call tarantula juice, strychnine, redeye, corn juice, Jersey lightning, leg stretcher, ‘tangle leg’ (said to be made of diluted alcohol, nitric acid, pepper, and tobacco), and many other hard and grotesque names.” As a consequence, the ordinary passenger suffered a via dolorosa—“twenty-four mortal days and nights . . . through the vilest and most desolate portion of the West”—so that, “becoming crazy by whiskey; mixed with want of sleep,” many were “obliged to be strapped to their seats.”

While heavy drinking was the norm along the stagecoach routes, it was eschewed in the largest single community in the Far West—Salt Lake City. Founded on July 24, 1847, on what was then Mexican soil, Salt Lake City was intended to be the sacred capital of a new sect of Christians, the Latter-day Saints, known colloquially as
Mormons
. The sect had originated in New York State under the leadership of Joseph Smith, who claimed that Jesus Christ and various angels had directed him to a set of buried golden plates, on which were inscribed a series of revelatory texts. The texts identified the Native Americans with a wandering tribe of Jews and provided a history of their settlement in the New World. They also offered a revised version of Christianity, which permitted polygamy, among other unorthodox practices. After attempting to settle in Missouri, Ohio, and Illinois, and suffering persecution in each place, the Mormons removed to Salt Lake, where they established a community that was distinguished by its order and unity from every other settlement in the West.

The desire of the Mormons to found an independent nation and to insulate themselves from other Christians, whom they termed gentiles, resulted in a brief and nasty conflict with American settlers and soldiers in 1857, at the conclusion of which the United States confirmed its sovereignty over Utah. While nominally under the jurisdiction of an American governor, Salt Lake City was controlled by Brigham Young, the Mormon leader, in accordance with Mormon principles. Since these differed from standard Christianity, the settlement acquired a notoriety, not only in America, but throughout the world. Lurid stories circulated of aging and lecherous Mormon men marrying several generations of related women. They were also rumored to abstain from drinking in their holy city of the West.

Come the hour, come the man. Sir Richard Burton, one of the greatest explorers of the nineteenth century and world authority on sacred places, decided to investigate the sect for himself. Burton had visited Benares in India in his youth, had infiltrated Mecca disguised as an Arab, had “discovered” Lake Victoria in Africa on the expedition that established the true source of the river Nile, and had traveled to and written about a host of other spots noted for their difficulty of access and hostility to unbelievers. Soldier, scholar, linguist par excellence, a man of tested stamina and courage, Burton was the perfect individual to examine the goings-on at Salt Lake City. He even had form, loosely speaking, on polygamy. While only married to one woman, he was a noted philanderer, and his second field of expertise after comparative theology was pornography.

Burton arrived in America in May 1860. It seems that the idea of visiting Utah came to him some time after landing, for according to his diaries, his original reasons for crossing the Atlantic were to escape the controversies surrounding his recent African expedition, to recover his health, and to drown his sorrows: “I’ll drink mint-juleps, brandy-smashes, whiskey-skies, gin-sling, cocktail, sherry cobblers, rum-salads, streaks of lightning, morning-glory . . . it’ll be the most interesting experiment. I want to see whether after a life of 3 or 4 months, I can drink and eat myself to the level of the aborigines.” Experiment over, Burton set off for Utah via the stagecoach.

Inspired, perhaps, by the cocktails he had tested in the East, Burtonpaid the keenest attention to the alcoholic and other stimulants he came across while en route. He tasted whatever the staging posts had to offer and also gathered data on native intoxicants. He was fascinated, for instance, by the potential of a “kind of cactus called by the whites ‘whiskey-root’ and by the Indian ’peioke,’” which was said to act on the system just like whiskey, “only its effects are what I might term a little k-a-v-o-r-t-i-n-g, giving rather a wilder scope to the imagination and actions.”

Burton enjoyed his first taste of Mormon liquor while still some distance from Salt Lake City. The beverage in question was Valley Tan whiskey, which Burton, in his mania for comparative analysis, equated to “the korn-schnapps of the trans-Rhenine region.” He proceeded to pass three weeks in the City of the Saints, where alcohol, contrary to gentile rumor, was easy to obtain. There were, however, unlike most other American settlements of a similar size, no public bars and no drunks. The principal drink produced and consumed in Salt Lake was lager: “There are two large and eight small breweries in which a palatable Lager-bier is made. The hop grows wild and luxuriant in every kanyon; and there is no reason why in time the John Barleycorn of the Saints should not rival that of the sinners.” There seems to have been no stigma attached to the consumption of beer—even Brigham Young took a glass from time to time.

The Mormons were also fond of wine. They had planted Mission, Catawba, and other varieties of grape with the aim of ensuring a supply of communion wine, and imported vintages while they waited for their own vines to bear fruit. Spirits, however, were a different matter, and although the city had a single distillery, the source of Valley Tan whiskey, there was a heavy tax on imported hooch, which when coupled with pressure from the pulpit, meant that few Mormons touched “essence of corn.”

In consequence the population of Salt Lake City was, as far as Burton could judge, in a constant state of sobriety and health. Indeed, he was impressed by the general level of well-being, in particular among the British saints who formed a majority of immigrants at the time: “Children and adults have come from England apparently in a dying state, and have lived to be strong and robust men.” He attributed their vitality to both the altitude and temperance: “The atmosphere is too fine and dry to require or even to permit the free use of spirituous liquors.”

That a colony founded by a religious sect, and intended to be independent from the United States, should be the only place in the West where temperance reigned was a source of irritation to the dry bodies back East and, indeed, in the old West. Why was it that the newest parts of their country were reviving colonial-era attitudes to drinking, instead of choosing contemporary American abstinence? The matter was addressed by the
St. Louis Reporter
in 1858, which concluded that “this state of things is brought about by a variety of causes, not the least of which is the fact that a young man . . . feels that in order to be a true Westerner, he must adopt the free and easy way, and drink whenever asked, throw off all restraint, and ‘go it blind,’ for the sake of being a ‘clever fellow’ which means, in these times, a natural fool.”

21 THE KING OF SAN FRANCISCO

After refreshing himself in the pure mountain air of Salt Lake City and taking a last “liquor up” with his traveling companions, Sir Richard Burton exited the United States via San Francisco. He paused on his voyage home in Mexico, where, even after eight months on the road through a nation in the making, he was shocked by the chaos and took “philosophical consolation in various experiments touching the influence of Mezcal brandy, the Mexican National drink, upon the human mind and body.” The tumult of Mexico, exaggerated by mescal, sweetened Burton’s perception of America, and in particular the last portion of its soil that he had touched. San Francisco, true to Richard Henry Dana’s prophecy, had become a considerable place, thanks to the gold rush.

It is hard to overstate the impact of the California gold rush on the American and global economies. America had always been short of specie; and now its citizens were digging it by the sackful out of the California and Nevada mountains—$550 million worth, in 1850s prices, in the first decade alone. The rumor that America had not just free land but free gold, too, spread around the world, and people from Pacific and Atlantic nations set out for the new Eldorado. Hundreds of ships of all descriptions piled into San Francisco Bay, where they were abandoned by their passengers and crews, who set off for the mines. Some boats were converted into bars and bunkhouses for the next wave of arrivals, others were stripped of their timbers, which were used to construct shanties in the sand dunes ashore. By 1850, a city of twenty-five thousand people had arisen, which had already won itself an international reputation as being the most expensive and lawless place on earth. Prices for accommodation, food, and clothing were between ten and a hundred times the prevailing rates in New York. A boiled egg cost a dollar, a quart of whiskey thirty dollars, “the rent of a tiny cigar store barely large enough for one man to stand in was $4,000 a month,” and it was cheaper to ship laundry to Honolulu or Canton than to have it done in situ.

The inflated prices were paid without a murmur by miners returning from the Sierras with their pockets full of nuggets and gold dust. Many were rich for the first time in their lives and wished to celebrate by spending their new wealth. Facilities were constructed in San Francisco to accommodate this desire—principally bars. Like the sailors of Dana’s generation, who, after months afloat, passed their hours ashore in drunkenness, the miners recovered from a stint in the mountains with a spree in San Francisco. Indeed, the city could be said to have arisen solely for the purpose of encouraging binge drinking, and as it grew it remained faithful to its original spirit.