Drink (42 page)

Notwithstanding the general limitations Spain had imposed on the production of wine in its colonies, the religious institutions it founded in Mexico had been permitted to plant vineyards so as to ensure a supply of wine for the altar. These introduced the grape to the country’s largest and emptiest province—California. Spanish California was a sleepy kind of place. While it had been explored in the sixteenth century and named after an imaginary island in a romantic tale, the Spanish had only begun to colonize it in the eighteenth century, and then in a dilatory manner. Settlement had proceeded via a string of military strongholds, or
presidios,
usually coupled with a Franciscan mission. The first of the latter was founded in 1769 at San Diego, followed by (traveling northward) San Juan Capistrano, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Monterey, and, in 1776, San Francisco.

San Juan Capistrano, in what is now Orange County, was the first Californian mission to make wine. The man responsible for tending its vines was a young friar named Pablo de Mugártegui. The vines under his care had been delivered by sea in 1779, aboard the
San Antonio,
under Don José Camacho. The first vintage produced at the mission was probably the 1782, for in December 1781, Fra Junipero Serra, the supervisor of the Californian mission chain, had written to it expressing the pious hope that “your vines will survive and bear fruit” as “the lack of wine for the mass is becoming unbearable,” thus implying no grapes had been harvested that fall. By 1783, however, Fra Serra’s prayers had been answered. Writing from the mission at San Gabriel, once again to regret a dearth of communion wine, he revealed that the shortage had resulted from an accident. When a barrel “was being brought here from San Juan Capistrano it fell off the mule, broke into pieces, and all the wine was lost.” There was, however, sufficient wine from the same source at neighboring missions to avert a crisis.

Enthused by the success of San Juan Capistrano, the Franciscans planted vines at every step as the mission chain was extended northward. They were also cultivated by the laity: Don Pedro Fages,
commandante
of Alta California, was growing them in his garden at Monterey by 1783. The vines in question were all the same variety—the
black País
, which became known as the
Mission,
in recognition of the pioneering work of the friars. The principal appeal of its grapes was their fecundity. According to a modern expert, the average example is “an early maturing dark-skinned bag of sweet juice: no more.” Few tasting notes on primitive Californian wine exist, and none of them are positive. According to an Englishman who traded for furs on the coast, “with the exception of what we got at the Mission of Santa Barbara, the native wine that we tasted was such trash as nothing but politeness could have induced us to swallow.” The shock to the palate may have resulted from the production processes. The wine was trodden by foot and fermented in cowhides slung from poles. It was stored in barrels acquired from the coastal trade, whose prior contents ranged from salted penguins to pickled sardines. Often it was stabilized with the addition of brandy—the friars ran stills at some missions for the production of medicinal
aguadiente,
which also was employed to improve the flavor of the contents of their daily chalice.

However, by 1835, when a Harvard student named Richard Henry Dana visited California, even such unappetizing fluids were in short supply. Postindependence, the Mexican government had expropriated the assets of the Franciscans, and since the missions were the economic as well as spiritual center of each settlement, entropy followed. Dana’s account of his visit depicts a vast, almost empty coastline, washed by the long Pacific swells and dotted with occasional settlements, which were falling into ruin. Weeds grew up through the courtyards of their missions, and they were peopled with a few aging friars and their native slaves, and poverty-stricken hidalgos. The only really vibrant places ashore were the bars and grog tents set up by Yankees to cater to the coastal trade.

The principal article of commerce in California was cattle hides, which were taken from the immense herds that roamed free across the unfenced land. Despite the distances (California was as far by sea from the United States as India) and the dangers of doubling Cape Horn, the trade was lucrative, as Dana explained: “The Californians are an idle, thriftless people, and can make nothing for themselves. The country abounds in grapes, yet they buy bad wine made in Boston and brought round by us, at an immense price, and retail it among themselves at a
real
(12
¹
⁄2 cents) by the small wine-glass. Their hides, too, which they value at two dollars in money, they give for something which costs seventy-five cents in Boston; and buy shoes (as like as not, made of their own hides, which have been carried twice around Cape Horn) at three or four dollars.”

Dana had, however, prophetic words for one place in this dilapidated and sparsely populated part of Mexico. San Francisco, which in his day consisted of a ruined fort, a tumbledown mission, and a grog tent on the beach at Yerba Buena, was blessed with a first-rate natural harbor, and in his opinion, “if California ever becomes a prosperous country, this bay will be the center of its prosperity. The abundance of wood and water, the extreme fertility of its shores, the excellence of its climate, which is as near as to being perfect as any in the world, and its facilities for navigation, affording the best anchoring grounds in the whole western coast of America, all fit it for a place of great importance.”

While Mexican California slumbered, another of the country’s provinces, Texas, attracted hordes of Yankee settlers. They were drawn by the size of the land grants offered by the Mexican government, which came in 4,428-acre blocks. By 1830, three-quarters of the population of Texas was American-born. This influx alarmed the Mexicans, who closed its borders to newcomers and tightened up their political control over the province. Moreover, existing immigrants were required to convert to Roman Catholicism. Texan Americans resented both the autocratic style of government and absence of religious freedom and in 1835, led by Sam Houston, a former governor of Tennessee, they declared independence and the foundation of their own republic.

Mexico responded by sending an army over the Rio Grande that surrounded and massacred a band of settlers who had taken refuge in a fortified mission at the Alamo. Its victims included such luminaries of frontier life as James Bowie and Davy Crockett, who sank his last “horn” of spirits during the siege. They were revenged by Houston, who captured Mexico’s dictator, General Santa Anna, and forced him to recognize the new republic. Houston, true to his place of origin, was a renowned drinker, reckoned to consume, in the hyperbolic language of the age, “a barrel of whiskey a day.” The American Texans who comprised his forces were as fond of whiskey as their leader. Indeed, the habit of hard drinking was a distinguishing feature of their society and one that bound them together in a new land. As a Texan periodical observed of its readership, “Drinking was reduced to a system, and had its own laws and regulations. Nothing was regarded as a greater violation of established etiquette than for one who was going to drink not to invite all within reasonable distance to partake; so that the Texians, being entirely a military people, not only fought but drank in platoons.”

Texas continued as an independent republic until 1845, when it was annexed by the United States to become the twenty-eighth state. The following year, a territorial dispute between Mexico and the United States over their borders led to war. American settlers in California took advantage of the conflict to declare independence in the Bear Flag Revolt of June 1846. The fighting ended quickly with a comprehensive victory for the United States. Peace negotiations and compensation claims took time to reconcile, but in February 1848 Mexico accepted the Rio Grande as its northern frontier and ceded California and New Mexico to the United States.

These territorial gains coincided with the peaceful settlement of the border between British Canada and the United States at the forty-ninthparallel of longitude, effectively extending the existing line between them all the way west across the continent. With the northern and southern limits fixed, and the Pacific fringe in Yankee hands, Americans hurried to occupy the places in between. Their mantra was “Manifest Destiny,” for they believed that God had selected them to rule: “This continent was intended by Providence as a vast theater on which to work out the grand experiment of Republican Government, under the auspices of the Anglo-Saxon race.” When gold was discovered in California in 1848 it was taken as further proof of divine backing. A stream of Americans and European immigrants flowed west, some of them to settle, others in transit for the gold diggings. They carried copious amounts of alcohol with them, for the spirit of temperance that had possessed people in the eastern states seems to have had little influence west of the Mississippi.

The terrain the migrants crossed was not entirely empty. The United States recognized much of it as belonging to various Indian tribes, seventy thousand of whom it had removed there from their traditional homes. The Indians had been compensated with cash payments and annuities, and assurances that their titles to their new domains would be respected in perpetuity. In the event, few of the transported tribes enjoyed them for more than a generation. The migrants were hot on their heels, and the booze they carried with them contributed to the devastation of Native American culture in the West. Its tribes still exhibited the dipsomaniacal tendencies that had so alarmed white settlers in prior centuries and drank themselves to death with the same abandon. In 1842, for example, David Mitchell, the superintendent of Indian affairs at the St. Louis Agency, advised Washington that over five hundred transported Indian males had been killed by drinking within the past two years and that alcohol was “as destructive and more constant than disease” to the health of his charges.

These casualties had occurred notwithstanding the existence of federal legislation intended to place alcohol beyond the reach of the tribes. In 1802, the government had made it a criminal offence to sell liquor in Indian Country. The laws had been amended, supplemented, and restated in 1822, and again in 1832 and 1834, all to no avail. They were ineffective because liquor was already in Indian country; indeed it had gone west before both the Indian removals and the wagon trains. Lewis and Clark had included whiskey in their rations on their pioneering mission across the continent in 1804. The Yellowstone expedition of 1819-20 found that its taste had not been forgotten. Well west of the Missouri, they had come across a Pawnee warrior who had dropped to his knees in front of them, grabbed his throat with his hands as if dying of thirst, and called out, “Whiskey, whiskey!”

Drink trickled into the Indian lands at the heart of the American continent from all points of the compass. It was introduced from the north via the fur trade, which still considered alcohol to be absolutely necessary to its business. Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company, the principal operator in the region, showed a blatant disregard for American law in supplying all its agents with whiskey to exchange for pelts and, when challenged, revived the defense of the seventeenth century— that if it did not offer spirits, the Indians would take their furs to British Canada, which did. Meanwhile, a regular supply of drink arrived from the south, along the Santa Fe Trail, and this trade mushroomed after Texan independence. Distilleries were constructed along the upper Rio Grande and their product soon made a name for itself in the interior. This was the notorious
Aguadiente de Taos
, aka Taos Lightning, renowned for both its potency and its alleged efficacy as an antidote to rattlesnake venom.

However, the principal supply of whiskey to Indian country came from the east, in the wagons of migrants, and courtesy of dedicated merchants. Even after taking into account the dangers and distances involved, ardent spirits were wonderfully profitable trade goods. In the early 1830s, a gallon of whiskey cost twenty-five cents in St. Louis, thirty-four dollars in Fort Leavenworth (thirty miles from Kansas City), and sixty-four dollars by the mouth of the Yellowstone. Anyone willing to risk a few months on the plains could make serious money from selling it. Profit was maximized by dilution. According to one estimate, a barrel of “Pure Cincinnati” could be converted into a hundred barrels of “good Indian liquor.” The process was as follows: “A small bucketful is poured into a wash-tub of water; a large quantity of ‘dog leg’ tobacco and red pepper is then added, next a bitter root common in the country is cut up into it, and finally it is colored with burnt sugar—a nice recipe for a morning’s headache!”

At the time of the Indian removals, the American population along the then-frontier had been sparse. However, over the following decades it exploded: The old west in Missouri became a fully developed center for agriculture, with hundreds of thousands of acres under the plow, steam-powered flour mills, and numerous distilleries, which, by 1840, produced over half a million gallons of whiskey per annum among them. Indians living in Indian country close to so much temptation were a natural market, not least of all because they were cash buyers. The federal government paid them their annuities punctually every year, and much of this money was spent on alcohol, resulting in violent, drunken orgies whenever a tribe received its Yankee gold. In consequence, Yankee whiskey traders were blatant in their disregard for the laws. An English traveler was amazed at the flagrant way they went about their business: “The alcohol is put into wagons, at Westport or Independence, in
open daylight
and taken into the territory,
in open daylight
. . . . Two government agents reside at Westport, while six or eight companies of Dragoons are stationed at Fort Leavenworth, ostensibly for the purpose of protecting Indians and suppressing this infamous traffic,—and yet it suffers no diminution from
their vigilance
! What
faithful
public officers! How prompt in the discharge of their
whole
duty!”