Sacramento's Gold Rush Saloons by Special Collections of the Sacramento Public Library

Author:Special Collections of the Sacramento Public Library
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2014-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

Lola Montez played nearly the entire American West but would never forget her time at the Orleans Hotel. Center for Sacramento History.

A notable change for the Orleans came in the summer of 1853 with the erection of a new wing, measuring some eighty-five by thirty feet. The addition—made entirely of brick and affixed to the north side of the building—was designed to host the hotel’s billiard tables, which had been located in the increasingly cramped saloon. It was also in this new section that a “gentleman’s private dining” area and “ladies’ ordinary, with private entrance” would be included.230 Concurrently, George B. Bidleman replaced Hardenbergh and Henarie as the Orleans’s manager. The Count, as Bidleman preferred to be called, christened his newfound control of the Orleans with a hearty celebratory meal of turtle soup. The 150-pound tortoise was transported from Mazatlan and transformed into soup that Bidleman and a bevy of friends took “no small portion of.”231

By mid-decade, most of the city’s saloons possessed at least one billiards table. Like boxing, the game’s primary exporter was England. Although the cost of a table and accoutrements made it primarily an aristocratic pastime in the first half of the century, the industrial revolution and consequentially lower production costs brought billiards to the American masses. Once introduced, the game’s popularity quickly blossomed. The earliest record of billiard play can be established as far back as October 1849 at the aptly named Billiards Saloon, located on K Street between First and Second Streets. Its first advertisement in the Placer Times guaranteed an environment “where an hour can be disposed of very agreeably.”232 One of the more intriguing billiard locations was inside the city’s Forest Theater. Opening in fall 1855, the theater offered a chance to enjoy a quick game of carom, sip a drink served up by proprietor Moses Flanegan, and then sit for a dramatization of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Sacramento’s earliest saloons imported their billiards tables from the east. However, as the city grew, so too did outlets for local production. A.H. Bening’s Sacramento Billiard Factory opened in 1855 with a location on K Street, between Fourth and Fifth Streets. In an effort to dissuade prospective buyers from opting for an imported table, Bening emphasized the value of a table made of local wood, stating that “the dry climate of this country seasons the wood better than any place in the world.”233 By 1858, Sacramento had three billiard-table manufacturers, collectively turning out seventy-five tables per annum, each at an average cost of $600 to $700.

With the Orleans’s new roominess, management decided to install a fountain in July 1854. Placed in the center of the barroom, it measured ten feet in diameter. The water was passed through a pipe and forced five to six feet into the air. The hope was that it would add “very much to the comfort of all who may be in the room, by cooling the atmosphere therein.”234 Who knew that Bidleman would soon opt to stock the

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