Scoundrels And Saloons by Rich Mole

Author:Rich Mole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Social History, HISTORY / United States / State & Local / Pacific Northwest (OR, WA), HISTORY / Canada / General
ISBN: 978-1-927051-78-8
Publisher: Heritage House
Published: 2012-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

They danced at nicht in dresses light,

Frae late until the early, O!

But oh! Their hearts were hard as flint,

Which vexed the laddies sairly, O!

The dollar was their only love,

And that they lo’ed fu’ dearly, O!

The daftest hour that ere I spent,

Was dancin’ wi’ the hurdies, O!

For Terpsychorean patrons, it was dancing and drinks—but nothing else. The gurdies weren’t prostitutes, as many saloon dancers and entertainers were in Seattle, Washington, and later in Dawson City, Yukon. That “degraded set,” according to Barkerville’s weekly Cariboo Sentinel, favoured “male attire and swagger through the saloons and miners camps with cigars or huge quids of tobacco in their mouths, cursing and swearing and look anything but the angels in petticoats heaven intended they should be.”

Meanwhile, accompanied by his Native wife and other members of her family, stout, bearded New Westminster saloon owner John “Gassy Jack” Deighton paddled a dugout canoe around today’s Point Grey and up Burrard Inlet. Deighton looked over at “Sue” Moody’s mill on the north shore and at Captain Edward Stamp’s sawmill and thought about all the men working the captain’s 30,000 leased acres of timber. There wasn’t much for mill workers do in the 1867 rainforest, unless they wanted to row three miles up the inlet to North Road, then make the long nine-mile walk through the rainforest over the Royal Engineers’ Trail (the route of which approximates today’s Kingsway thoroughfare) to emerge, finally, at New Westminster. Deighton knew only one objective would goad a man to undertake this trek and endure the agony of the long stumble back the next day. At New Westminster, he could drink ’til he dropped. There was nowhere to do that on the inlet.

Deighton, whose garrulousness earned him the “Gassy” sobriquet, recognized the opportunity and seized it. He approached mill hands and told them if they helped him build a saloon on the south side of the inlet, they wouldn’t have to walk too far to get a drink. The Globe Saloon was up within 24 hours. Other buildings were soon erected around the new watering hole, and the tiny settlement was named Gastown, after the man who started it all. Later, it was renamed Granville, and finally, in 1884, Vancouver.

Nothing Gassy Jack’s mill-worker construction crew could erect in a day could resemble the gambling and drinking palaces of that west coast metropolis, San Francisco, or even most establishments in little Victoria. The Deighton’s Globe was little more than a shack, not unlike other drinking establishments up and down the coast and further inland as well, where customer service could be as crude as the facility.

Inside a primitive Kootenay gold-camp saloon, a visiting Englishman surveyed the few bottles standing on the board shelves behind the rough wood counter. “I will have a dry martini,” he blithely informed the bartender.

“Like Hell you will,” the barkeep growled. “You’ll have straight Scotch out of a tin cup like everybody else.”

By the 1870s, the culture of the saloon was deeply entrenched in society from coast to coast and would remain so for decades.

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