whiskey
With the Westward migration in the United States, came the cowboys, and with them came the “Old West Saloons,” so that those cowboys wound have a place to wind down after a hard day’s work. We have all heard of the “Old West Cowboys” and while they were a picture of the west, it was the movies that brought them to life for most of us today. As the people moved west, many of the men came on their own at first. That brought the saloon keepers to see if they could make a buck on these men who were hungry for a little socialization. Saloons were common in almost all cities, and a few areas also had Mexican-style cantinas.
When we think of the “Old West Saloons,” we usually picture the same style. “A common wooden front with a wooden boardwalk. There were always a few hitching posts to tie a horse. Often a water source would be located close by for horses to drink. The front doors always consisted of two swinging doors that would brush up against a cowboy as he walked into the main bar area. The bar itself was very long to accommodate many standing customers. The floor area consisted of wooden tables and chairs.”
There were usually a group of men at the bar, and some at the tables playing a friendly game of poker…at least it was friendly until someone thought they were getting cheated. You put a few drinks in a guy, add to it the fact that he is losing the poker game, and it a recipe for a fight. That was how most of the violence in the towns got started…right there in the saloon and then, at times it moved out into the roadway.
We all think of the first saloons in the typical way of the movies, but that really wasn’t the case. “The first 
saloons were mostly tents or square wooden structures with tent material thrown over the top. The material was enough to keep the rain off the heads of their customers. The floors were not made of wood. Tent saloons never had floors of any type. If it rained, the floors were muddy, and if it was dry, they were dusty. The only thing the early saloon offered was whiskey and a place to sit and rest.”
The first whiskey ever served in a saloon was not the fine whiskey that we all think of. In fact, New Yorkers or those from Chicago would most likely cringe at the taste of the whiskey of the Old West. Whiskey in those days was “raw and made right in the camp or town. The simple ingredients included raw alcohol, sugar burnt, and a little pouch chewing tobacco. Whiskey with terrible names like ‘Coffin Varnish,’ ‘Tarantula Juice,’ ‘Red Eye,’ and others was common among the early saloons.” Later, when the trading with the Indians, the word “Firewater” was used to describe Whiskey. It got that name because they demonstrated its potency by pouring it over the fire. With a high enough proof, the Whiskey acted like gasoline on the fire. The name stuck, and Firewater it was!! Now, the Whisky of those days was not for the “lightweight” and was not to be sipped. The people of those days expected the patrons to drink it quickly. If they didn’t, they might find themselves “drinking a 5th of Whiskey at gunpoint.” Sipping was considered a weakness, and it was not tolerated!
Everyone thinks people of that era drank a lot of beer, but that was not common. Since pasteurization was not invented yet, the bear was warm, and if you didn’t drink it fast, it would get warmer and go flat. Whiskey kept its taste and potency no matter the temperature. “It was not until the 1880s that Adolphus Busch invented artificial refrigeration and pasteurization methods to the brewing process soon after Budweiser launched as a 
US national brand.”
The first saloon was opened in the late 1820s in Bent’s Fort, Colorado. “A few little towns already had cantinas, but they did not compare to saloons that would soon spread like wildfire throughout the west. Striking gold was a big indicator that a saloon would pop up in that town. In 1848, Santa Barbara, California, only had one cantina. Yet after the discovery of gold, the town soon grew to 30 saloons. Towns like Livingston, Montana, with its 3,000 residents, had no less than 33 saloons. Back in those days, it was easy to open a business. Innovation and growth were on the incline. Saloons were profitable and with a large customer base.”
When we think of structures that have stood the test of time, we think of stone structures or structures made out of hard woods that are able to weather the elements, but sometimes a structure defies the normal expectations, as stands the test of time against all odds. There is a house in the ghost town of Rhyolite, Nevada that is the perfect example of that kind of structure.
A local saloon owner named Tom Kelly decided to build a house in 1906. Unfortunately, lumber was scarce in the area at the time, so the innovative 76-year-old saloon owner decided to use the materials at hand to build his house…bottles. Not many people would have come up with such an idea, much less have the ability to carry out the strange design and actually make it a house. An estimated 50,000 beer, whiskey, soda, and medicine bottles were used to build the structure, and amazingly, it is still standing today. Tom Kelley was 76 years old when he built the house that took him almost six months to complete. Thankfully he didn’t have to drink all the alcohol in those 50,000 bottles. The bottle house also sports a “garden” of sculptures made of broken glass 
including miniature houses, bottle ropes, and a host of other “glass treasures” that would probably qualify as junk to most of us, but they seem to fit the bottle house perfectly.
There was a period of time when the house was in some disrepair, but amazingly it was things like needing a new roof that caused the disrepair, not broken bottles in the structure. In 1925, Paramount Pictures wanted to use the house in a movie, so as part of the deal, they restored and re-roofed the house. The house, which really is pretty cute, was given to the Beatty Improvement Association for maintenance as a historical site. That might be part of why it still stands today, but the work that went into it originally was a big part of the house’s ability to stand the test of time.
Louis J Murphy leased and maintained the house as a museum that he ran with a woman named Bessie Stratton Moffat until he died in 1956. Later, a man named Tommy Thompson and his wife lived in the house, while maintaining a museum and a relic shop. How unique it must have been to live in such a house. No, it’s not a big house, and probably doesn’t have a monetary value that would rival today’s market, but its value really lies in a different area. The house fit the Thompsons, however. Tommy was a musician, who worked 
playing the accordion in the saloons in Rhyolite back when it was a boomtown. Evan Thompson maintained the house for a while after his parents died. He is the last person to actually live in the house, but he finally moved on, living in Pioneer, Nevada now. Once again, the bottle house stands empty, no longer in use, but still as resilient as ever.
On January 17, 1920, the law prohibiting the use or sale of alcohol in the United States went into effect. Before long, illegal bars, called speakeasies were trying to pass off dangerous locally made industrial alcohol as the real thing, but customers were quickly rejecting the foul-tasting brew. The people were demanding quality, authentic Scotch and other liquor “right off the boat.” Within weeks, organized smuggling of imported whiskey, rum, and other liquor, called Rumrunning began. Among the customers for imported booze from Europe, Canada and the Caribbean were the nation’s bootleggers who ran and supplied thousands of speakeasies. Tops among them were Big Bill Dwyer (dubbed “King of the Bootleggers” by the press) and Mob bosses Charles “Lucky” Luciano in New York and Al Capone in Chicago.
Liquor was smuggled in from any country where it was still legal, and the Rumrunners would then have to find new and unique ways to get it to their buyers. Shipments of whiskey from Great Britain traveled to Nassau in the Bahamas and elsewhere in the Caribbean, before being smuggled to America’s East Coast and New Orleans. Whiskey distilled in Canada was smuggled by ship or across land to the West Coast from British Columbia, to the Midwest from Saskatchewan and Ontario, and to the East from Nova Scotia and the French island of Saint Pierre, a liquor smuggler’s hotspot off Newfoundland. Loads of rum from the Caribbean, imported champagne, and other alcohol also made it ashore. Captains of boats loaded with liquor bottles in false bottoms beneath fish bins anchored offshore at designated areas waiting for “contact boats,” small high-speed crafts with buyers who tossed aboard a bundle of large bills bound by elastic bands, 
loaded their liquor orders onto their boats and sped to shore to load it onto trucks headed for New York, Boston and other cities. One such stretch of ocean for liquor-selling boats, famously called “Rum Row,” ran from New York to Atlantic City, 12 miles out in international waters to avoid the U.S. Coast Guard.
The “golden years” of rumrunning were the early 1920s…before Bureau of Prohibition agents, local police and the Coast Guard knew just what liquor smugglers were up to. On the Detroit River, Detroit’s vicious Purple Gang used speed boats to run liquor into town from Windsor, Ontario. They also hijacked the loads their competitors. One infamous Western rumrunner was Roy Olmstead, who shipped Canadian whiskey from a distillery in Victoria in southwestern Canada down the Haro Strait, stashing it on D’Arcy Island on its way to Seattle. Olmstead was making $200,000 a month before Prohibition agents tapped his phone, leading to his arrest and end as a rumrunner in 1924. Individual bootleggers transporting booze by land to Seattle would hide it in automobiles under false floorboards with felt padding or in fake gas tanks. Sometimes whiskey was mixed with the air in the tubes of tires. To fool authorities at the border, a smuggler might have a woman and child inside his car with hidden liquor or even stow it inside a school bus transporting children. Out at sea or on the Great Lakes, rumrunners in schooners or motor boats contended with the Coast Guard, rough weather and frozen water. Even worse were the “go-through guys,” hoodlums armed with pistols and machines guns in speed boats who hijacked the ships, stole cargo, cash, and at times killed rumrunners’ crews and sank their ships.
The fast-moving rumrunners frustrated the Coast Guard so much by 1923 that Commandant William E. 
Reynolds asked the federal government for 200 more cruisers and 90 speed boats for patrols to catch up with the contact boats. The agency also added 36 World War I naval ships to enforce Prohibition and employ 11,000 officers and crew. On June 20, 1923, a large fleet of Seaplanes were to be mobilized in an attempt to catch rum smugglers off the Atlantic Coast, it was believed these would be more successful than current means of catching the rum runners who are equipped with very fast boats that are outrunning federal agents. The reality is that they never really stopped the smuggling of liquor into the United States, and in the end, prohibition proved to be a miserable failure. On December 5th, 1933, when the 21st Amendment was ratified, Prohibition was abolished in the United States.
As a young boy of just 15 years, Andy Schulenberg was hunting with a friend, Howard Stewart on an October day in 1921. He leaned his rifle against a tree and it fell over, discharging and hitting Andy in the leg. That event would begin a 2 year long stay in the hospital, and Andy would lose his leg about a year into that stay, in June of 1922. While devastated over this event, Andy dug deep inside himself and decided that he would not be an invalid. Fitted with a wooden leg, that had a simple table like rubberized end to it, Andy proceeded to live the rest of his life. This would not break him, because he was not a quitter. Andy did whatever he wanted to do. Throughout his life, Andy did things his way. He became quite competitive. For a time, his family hauled beets, and Andy could out load anyone when it came to loading the truck. His arms were so strong, by way of compensation for his lack of a leg, and the fact that Andy was a big strong man. Many times while loading those trucks, he could load the truck he was working, faster than two men on the other truck…and then he went over and finished loading their truck too. Nobody could beat Andy Schulenberg!
In 1955 Andy Schulenberg became the sheriff of Rosebud County, Montana. That was really an amazing feat for a man with a wooden peg for a leg. Andy became a sheriff who didn’t carry a gun. That is such an odd thing to think about. There might be a television show sheriff who didn’t need a gun, but the reality is that a real life sheriff carries a gun…at least any I knew of until Andy Schulenberg. You do have to recall that Andy maybe didn’t just love guns…making his decision to become a lawman a strange one, I suppose. I’m sure that most people must think that Andy lived in an area much like Mayberry on the Andy Griffith Show, but they would be wrong. Andy used different tools in his work as sheriff. He knew a lot of the Indian elders in the area, and they respected him. If Andy was looking for a specific brave, he would go to the elders and ask where he was. They would simply bring the young man to him. There are a number of young men who would be glad to tell you that had it not been for Andy Schulenberg, they would probably have ended up in prison. As I said, Andy was a different kind of sheriff. He believed in second chances, and he earned not only the respect of the elders, but of the young braves, and in fact all the young men and women in the area. He was honest and fair, and they knew they would get a fair shake from him.
There were some comical arrests, however. One in particular was the time Andy was called to Ashland, Montana. Two young Cheyenne Indians had decided to break into a liquor store. They made off with about a case of whiskey. They were down on the brush lined banks of Otter Creek when Andy caught up with them. On the reservation, Andy was known as Cottonwood, because of his wooden leg. When he found the young braves, 
they were a little tipsy from the whiskey. They had crossed a log bridge to get to an island to have a little party. Andy cuffed the boys and told them to wait by the car. He went back for the evidence. On his way back, with several bottles of whiskey, Andy slipped and fell into the water. Under normal circumstances that might not have been a big deal, but wood floats, and Andy’s leg was made of wood. As he struggled to get his leg back under him without losing the evidence, the Indian braves sat on the side of the creek bank laughing hysterically. They assumed that the evidence would be lost, and they would get off scot-free, but they were wrong. Andy managed to get his leg under him, and save one bottle of whiskey. Then he took the braves…who had not even considered running, by the way, back to jail. And he did it all without a gun.
