Drink (44 page)

The population of San Francisco was overwhelmingly male. In late 1849, its female residents were reckoned to number fewer than three hundred, the majority of whom were Hispanic prostitutes. This imbalance could not persist, and from 1851 onward single women arrived in droves:

The presence of women did not distract the miners from their drinks: Most of the former were employed gold-digging in bars and brothels, where they were expected to encourage drunkenness in order to facilitate the process of extraction. If their prey showed signs of reluctance, their glasses were spiked with pure alcohol, opium, tobacco juice, or Spanish fly.
⁴²

As San Francisco sprawled inland from the waterfront, its places of entertainment became concentrated in an area around the base of Telegraph Hill known as Sydney Town, in tribute to the Australian im- migrants who had settled there, and who came to dominate the San Francisco underworld. Many of these were ex-convicts, or men with experience of exploiting miners that had been gained in the Australian gold rush of 1851. They set up grogeries with colonial names—the Noggin of Ale, the Tam O’Shanter, the Goat and Compass—where they led by example in the art of binge drinking. Their champion was Dirty Tom McAlear, “who for a few cents would eat or drink any sort of refuse offered to him.” When arrested in 1852 for “making a beast of himself,” Dirty Tom confessed to have been continuously drunk for seven years and not to have washed for at least fifteen. The
San Francisco Herald
has left us a contemporary portrait of Sydney Town in its prime: “crowded by thieves, gamblers, low women, drunken sailors, and similar characters, who resort to the grogeries that line the street, and there spend the night in the most hideous orgies. . . . These ruffian resorts are the hot-beds of drunkenness, and the scenes of unnumbered crimes. Unsuspecting sailors and miners are entrapped by the dexterous thieves and swindlers that are always on the look-out, into these dens, where they are filled with liquor—drugged, if necessary, until insensibility coming upon them, they fall an easy victim to their tempters.” In addition to doping, robbing, and murdering their clientele, the
Sydney Ducks,
as the expatriate Australians were known, regularly set fire to other parts of the city, so that they might loot with impunity after the blaze. Their lawlessness resulted in the formation of a Vigilance Committee, which lynched several of the most flagrant offenders and succeeded in imposing order of a sort on San Francisco.

The city expanded at an undiminished rate throughout the 1850s and meanwhile oscillated between calm and chaos. During this period alternative entertainments to drinking appeared, including a circus and a theater, and some of the watering holes upgraded their facilities to cater to a clientele that wished to indulge its vices in respectable surroundings. Foremost among such institutions was the
Eldorado,
which had begun life in 1849 as a grog tent but by the mid-1850s had metamorphosed into an elegant casino, with a resident orchestra and nightly shows featuring well-known entertainers. The Eldorado was further distinguished by the skills of its head bartender, Professor Jerry Thomas, the inventor of numerous cocktails, including the
Blue Blazer
.

The miners who retreated to San Francisco for some R & R, or to dispose of a portion of their newfound wealth prior to shipping for home, also drank at their places of work. Despite the isolation of most of the gold mines, and the high cost of transportation to them, alcohol formed a major component of the loads of the mule trains that picked their way through the forests and over the mountains to the camps inland. Here it served principally as a sedative after heavy labor. Most of the early California mining was carried out on placer deposits—sedimentary pockets of gold that had collected on riverbeds and water courses. The miners either spent their days knee-deep in frigid mountain torrents, washing pan after pan of sediment, or feeding tons of dirt into a sluice box, one shovel-load at a time. The changeable mountain weather made their work all the more arduous. In spring and autumn, they might face blizzards and blazing heat in the same week, in winter they were snowed in for extended periods, and in summer, when the rivers ran low and the miners labored fourteen-hour days to install flumes and dams, flash floods arrived without warning and washed away their handiwork.

The drinking habits prevalent in the California Sierra are depicted in
The Shirley Letters
(1855) by Louise A. K. S. Clappe, who spent 1851 and 1852 at two mining camps in the headwaters of the Feather River.
The Shirley Letters
provide a rare perspective on that isolated and masculine environment, for their author was a respectable woman in a region where such persons were almost unknown. Her appearance at the Indian Bar camp, where her husband worked as a doctor, caused consternation. On the day she arrived she was introduced to one of its founders, who “had not spoken to a woman for two years, and, in the elation of his heart at the joyful event, he rushed out and invested capital in some excellent champagne, which I . . . assisted the company in drinking, to the honor of my own arrival. I mention this, as an instance, that nothing can be done in California without the sanctifying influence of the
spirit;
and it generally appears in a much more ‘questionable shape’ than that of sparkling wine.”

The pervasive influence of alcohol over camp life was reflected in its material culture. The packaging used to carry alcohol to the miners was converted into furniture and decorations. Claret cases were transformed into tables and linen chests, and empty bottles served as window panes, or lamps. On occasions, the ubiquity of used drinking receptacles and associated paraphernalia had a poignant side: Clappe recorded that when she tried to comfort a six-year-old girl whose mother had died, by giving her some little glass scent bottles to play with, the child called them “baby decanters.”

On festive occasions, the intensity of the drinking in the mining camps matched or exceeded that which prevailed in San Francisco. Clappe spent Christmas 1851 at Rich Bar, which was cut off by snow-drifts from the world beyond, during which period she was privileged to witness intoxication on a classical scale:

Clappe further noted that this culture of excess did not admit by-standers. Anyone trying to remain sober during the holiday season was hauled up before a mock vigilance committee, which sentenced them to “treat the crowd.” The drunken antics of the miners en masse were sometimes repellent rather than entertaining. Clappe witnessed racially motivated violence against the Chilenos—the South American miners, who were among the first to the gold fields, and who were forced off their claims on the grounds of patriotism by “American,” i.e., Anglo-Saxon, newcomers. She was also sickened by examples of frontier justice. At the first trial she attended, the magistrate halted the hearing several times to “treat” the jury to a glass of spirits. At a hanging, the condemned was already nearly lifeless through drink, and the crowd of spectators very close to the same condition, so that their behavior degraded the solemnity of the occasion: “Many of the drunkards . . . laughed and shouted as if it were a spectacle got up for their particular amusement. A disgusting specimen of intoxicated humanity, struck with one of those luminous ideas peculiar to his class, staggered up to the victim, who was praying at the moment, and, crowding a dirty rag into his almost unconscious hand, in a voice broken by a drunken hiccough, tearfully implored him to take his ‘hankercher,’ and if he were
innocent
. . . to drop it as soon as he was drawn up into the air, but if
guilty,
not to let it fall on any account.”

Clappe left the Sierras in the fall of 1852. The miners at Rich Bar had spent all summer constructing dams and flumes to divert the river from its bed, only to find it held no gold. The camp broke up, and she returned to San Francisco on the last mule train out of the mountains before snowfall closed their passes until spring. As she had observed upon her arrival in the hills, “Gold-mining is nature’s great lottery scheme,” and the members of the community to which her husband had served as doctor were among its many losers.

In both metropolitan and rural California, heavy drinking was central to the nascent culture. The eastern temperance movement had some western prophets, but their impact on the habits of Californians was minimal. They were received as curiosities rather than crusaders, and their message that drinking was unnecessary and ungodly was a matter of amusement, as opposed to one that inspired sober reflection. Their number included Henry D. Cogswell, the first dentist to set up a practice in San Francisco, who retired a millionaire after decorating gold miners’ molars with a portion of their finds. Revolted by the general state of his clients’ teeth and their whiskey breath, Cogswell paid for the erection of seven drinking water fountains in the city, each topped with a statue of himself, all of which, in the absence of demand, were destroyed within a decade of his death. In the 1860s fresh attempts were made to limit public drunkenness by “Prayer Bands”— groups of respectable women who infiltrated Sydney Town
⁴³
in the hope of redeeming drunkards with evangelical Christianity. Their favorite tactic upon entering a grogery was to encircle an inebriate and demand in unison, “Have you seen Jesus?” They were not without success. San Francisco was home to many victims of delirium tremens, who suffered vivid hallucinations when deprived of alcohol for more than a few hours, and one Prayer Band even managed to convert Happy Jack Harrington, the manager of a notorious dive, “as he re- bounded from the fearsome realms of the pink elephant and the purple crocodile.” Sadly for the temperance movement, Happy Jack soon relapsed, and to mark his return to sanity as he knew it, he held a press conference at his bar to alert the world to the evils of sobriety.

“Oh, King Alcohol!” he commenced. “Great is thy sway! Thou makest meaner creatures kings, and the unfortunate fellow of the gutter forget his miseries for a while! . . . I was proprietor of one of those popular places of amusement known as dives, and all was serene and calm and I was happy, but they came down and took from me during the night my beautiful place. . . . My beautiful soubrettes and Spanish dancers have gone, and when I look back on the scenic effects of these beautiful melodramas,
⁴⁴
it is no wonder that I stand before you as a rightful example of the destructive effects of temperance. But though crushed to earth, I will rise again!”

The temperance cause in California was further impeded by the buoyant state of Californian viticulture. Within twenty-five years of the gold rush, the undrinkable trash of the Franciscan missions had been superseded by an eminently palatable fluid, and instead of importing wine from Boston, California had become an exporter. The first area of the state to produce pleasant wine in any quantity was the countryside around Los Angeles. The man responsible for the advance in quality was Jean-Louis Vignes, a native of Bordeaux, who fulfilled the promise of his surname when, in 1833, he planted a hundred-acre vineyard to the east of the town. Vignes introduced systematic production methods and experimented with imported varieties of grape. By 1851, his Rancho el Aliso
⁴⁵
had forty thousand vines and was producing a hundred thousand gallons of wine a year, some of which was noted as being not merely palatable but exceptional.

Inspired by the example of Vignes, other immigrants established vineyards in the vicinity of Los Angeles during the 1840s. Their number included a Swiss, an Irishman, an Englishman, a Scotsman, several Mexicans, and a Kentucky mountain man who reveled in the surname of Wolfskill. Prior to the gold rush, their customers were passing ships and locals, for a majority of the residents of Los Angeles were Hispanic and drank wine as their daily tipple. Post-1849, the flood of immigrants into the north of the state created a huge potential market for Southern California wines. The challenge of exploiting it was taken up by two German musicians—Charles Kohler (flute) and John Frohling (violin), neither of whom had any prior connections to the wine trade, but whose profession had given them plenty of opportunity to observe the spectacular thirst for booze in the bars of San Francisco. In 1854 they bought a small vineyard near Los Angeles. Frohling stayed south to supervise production while Kohler returned to the Bay Area to drum up sales. Demand for their wines very quickly outstripped supply, and in order to meet it, the duo purchased a block of land on the Santa Ana River, which they christened Anaheim and subdivided into twenty-acre parcels for sale to German immigrants. The parcels were offered complete with irrigation systems and vines. The venture was a success—by 1862 it was producing three hundred thousand gallons of wine annually and was sending it not only to San Francisco but also to New York.

Production in the rest of California, while widespread, was on a much smaller scale. Some of the mission vineyards continued in operation, and separate centers of cultivation grew up around them, notably in Santa Clara. Immigrants also made independent starts in the mother lode country itself. John Sutter, on whose ranch the gold rush had commenced after the metal was found in his mill race, retired from the ensuing pandemonium to a new holding on the Feather River to grow vines. Adam Uhlinger, a Swiss who had emigrated to California with the express purpose of making wine, established the D’Agostini Winery in Amador County in 1856. By 1860, the gold-producing region had 192,000 vines, or about three percent of the total for the state.