The Social History of Bourbon by Gerald Carson

Author:Gerald Carson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky

Chapter 13

WESTWARD THE JUG OF EMPIRE TOOK ITS WAY

RED liquor accompanied the westering Americans in their occupation of the North American continent in such bounteous quantities—by bottle, jimmy-john, cask and barrel—that Mark Twain once suggested the line stamped on the back cover of Bancroft's History of the United States, “Westward the star of empire takes its way,” would better reflect the American experience if rendered “Westward the jug of empire…”

Bullwhackers, traders, trappers, hide hunters and soldiers, sod busters, gold seekers—they crossed the Mississippi, left behind the old civilization of the eastern forest region, settled the short grass plains, pushed on to the land of mesquite and buffalo grass, lugging with them at great labor and expense their ruby-hued comforter. Wagoners of prodigious thirst, who could train on whiskey and then move two tons of merchandise four hundred miles in a month's time; miners whose pack horses carried pan, pick, shovel, flour, salt horse and red-eye; mountain men and government surveyors: they all liked plenty of whiskey, agreeing with the semi-legendary Mike Fink, who declared, “I'm not the kind of man that's satisfied with washing his mouth out.” They took their whiskey straight the same as they did their quinine. As one leathery old Texan said, mixed drinks were to be rated with featherbeds, “the pleasure of payin' taxes” and other doubtful blessings of civilization.

And so the whiskey wagon jounced along, crossed the desert and threaded the passes of the Rockies and Sierras to the western ocean; and always, as Bernard De Voto wrote, “the honey bee flew ahead of us and there was a hooker of the real stuff at a day's end.” Whiskey made life endurable for men who lived with loneliness, ate beans, salt meat and gulped coarse coffee, slept in the wet with teeth chattering from ague, and who woke up, like as not, to find a small, companionable rattlesnake sharing a blanket. And so the tin cup passed around the campfire. After the fried beef and biscuit the stopper came out of the jug and the stories began to flow:

“I'd been hyar afore, tradin' liquor to the Utes.”

Or:

“Did I ever tell you of how I run five Injuns several miles, when I had no other weepin than an old single-bar'l shotgun loaded with bird-shot?…It was in ’72 when I was haulin' government stores from San Antonio to Fort Concho.”

Or:

“I jist fetched old Ginger up and drawed a bee line on his cratch, and, stranger, I giv him sich a winch in the stomach that he dropped straight in his tracks; he did! in five jumps I riz his har….”

In the flickering light of the campfire, bourbon softened the edges of a harsh environment, lent emotional color and lift to the booted and buckskinned group. Ranchers, railroad contractors, U.S. marshals and mountain men shared the faith that whiskey was of the highest therapeutic value in a long list of emergencies; that it strengthened the heart, improved respiration, cured hydrophobia even more effectively than a madstone. Whiskey was indicated for chills and fevers, general debility, kidney ailments, malaria and palpitation.

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