20 DISTURBING Secrets About Wild West Saloons That History Tried To Bury

PART 2:

They didn’t know what was causing it. The bartenders  did. They just didn’t care. Number two, the floors  were biological hazards. The romantic image of sawdust on the saloon floor exists  because of a specific and disgusting reality. Men spit tobacco  constantly. They vomited. They bled.

They urinated against the walls when they couldn’t make it outside. The sawdust  soaked it up, changed irregularly, sometimes weekly, sometimes less. In the summer heat of Arizona and Texas, the combination of alcohol, tobacco  juice, blood, vomit, and urine fermenting in sawdust produced a smell  that visiting journalists described with a consistency that suggests it was genuinely unforgettable.

One reporter from Chicago who visited Dodge City in 1878 wrote  that entering a saloon in July was like walking into a stable that had caught fire. Beyond the smell, the floor was a disease vector. Cholera,  typhoid, and tuberculosis bacteria survived in wet sawdust for days. Men who fell, which happened constantly,  had open wounds contaminated with whatever the floor contained.

The spittoons  were decorative. They were rarely used. The floor was the spittoon.    Number three, the gambling was rigged. Every saloon offered gambling.    Faro was the most popular game. Honest faro gave the house only a 3% edge, lower than almost any modern casino game. There was no honest faro in the Old West.

The dealing boxes used in professional games    could be rigged with internal mechanisms that let the dealer control which cards appeared. These devices were manufactured and sold openly in catalogs that called them advantage  tools. Advantage, not cheating. Crooked poker dealers used  marked cards, holdout devices that hid cards in their sleeves, and mirror rings that reflected the cards of other players.

The best cheats were professionals. They traveled from town to town  to take as much as they could without triggering violence and moved on. When caught, one of two things  happened. The cheater was killed, or he was the one doing the killing because professional gamblers in the Old West were also professional  fighters who had survived this exact situation before.

Doc Holliday  was a professional gambler. So was Bat Masterson. So was Luke Short, who killed two men in separate incidents  who accused him of cheating. The house always won. In the West,  the house was usually armed. Number four, the saloon  owner controlled the town. The most powerful man in most Old West towns was not the sheriff.

It was the saloon owner. The saloon was where the money was. Cowboys arrived after cattle drives with their  entire season’s wages. Miners came from the gold fields with gold dust. All of that money flowed through the saloon. The saloon owner saw who had money, who owed money, and who was making deals with whom.

In a town with no banks,    the saloon functioned as an informal financial institution. The saloon was also the only meeting place in most  towns. Political meetings happened there. Business deals were struck there. The saloon owner heard everything. Many saloon owners bought sheriffs directly.

  They paid the sheriff’s salary, which meant the sheriff served the saloon owner’s interests rather than the towns. When the owner wanted a competitor driven out, the sheriff looked the other way. When the owner wanted a troublesome customer removed  permanently, the sheriff found reasons to be elsewhere. The badge was  real.

The independence behind it was not. Number five, disease spread  through every glass. The Old West saloon had no germ theory. This is not a minor detail. A saloon served dozens to hundreds of drinks per night. The glasses  were rinsed between customers in a bucket of water kept behind the bar. One bucket, dozens of glasses, changed when the bartender remembered, which was  not frequently.

Tuberculosis was highly contagious and spread through saliva. An infected man drinking from a glass that was improperly  cleaned passed bacteria directly to the next customer. Cholera spread through contaminated water. The bucket used to rinse glasses was often filled from the same sources used for everything  else in town.

Some frontier doctors specifically identified saloon glasses    as transmission vectors for the diseases they treated. Their recommendations were ignored because cleaning glasses properly cost time and money, and the customers were going to die of something anyway. Number six, the bartender was the most powerful man in the room.

 Not the gunfighter, not the sheriff, the bartender.  In a room full of armed, drunk, volatile men, the bartender was the only person standing  between order and catastrophe every single night.    He remembered every man’s name, his drink, his debts, his enemies, and the particular way he got dangerous when he drank too much.

He knew which two men shouldn’t be seated near each other. He knew which  customer was three drinks from violence. He de-escalated dozens of situations every night that the customers never knew were situations. The ones who failed  at this didn’t last long. In Abilene in 1870,  a bartender was killed by a customer he had tried to cut off.

In Tombstone  in 1879, a bartender who watered down a customer’s drink was beaten so badly he lost  the use of his left hand permanently. The men who survived were extraordinarily skilled at reading people.  They had to be. The alternative was a bullet. Number seven, women had no legal protection inside.

The women who worked in Old West saloons  existed in a legal gray zone that amounted to no protection at all. A man who assaulted a dance hall girl could not be  prosecuted unless another man was willing to testify against him. Most men were not willing because the man who assaulted her might be their employer,    their friend, or someone they owed money to.

Women developed their own protection systems. Hat pins long enough to puncture an eye, small pistols worn under skirts, systems of communication with the bartender  who might intervene. The bartender might intervene. He might also be the problem.    Saloon owners regularly pressured female employees to provide services beyond  dancing.

Women who refused lost their jobs. In a town where a woman’s options were the saloon, the laundry, or marriage, losing the job was not a small thing. The choices were limited, and every choice had a cost. Number  eight. The fights were not like the movies. Hollywood saloon fights are beautiful. Men thrown  through windows, chairs splintering perfectly.

Everyone gets up. Real saloon  fights were fast, brutal, and often ended with someone seriously damaged  or dead. The average fight lasted less than 30 seconds. In that time, bottles were broken over  heads, eyes were gouged, men were kicked in the face while they were down, ears were bitten off.

There were no rules. Frontier doctors described the injuries from saloon fights    with a clinical consistency that suggests they were treating them every week. Fractured skulls from bottle strikes,  orbital fractures from boots, broken hands from men who punched walls in the confusion. The most common injury from saloon fights was not a gunshot.

It was a skull  fracture from a glass or bottle because reaching for a bottle was faster than drawing a gun. The gunfight was the exception. The bottle to the head was the rule. Number nine. The credit system was a trap.  Most saloons extended credit. This sounds generous. It was a mechanism for control.

A cowboy arriving with wages was a customer for one night. A cowboy who ran up a tab was  a customer for as long as the tab existed. Saloon owners tracked debts carefully. They charged  informal interest. They used the debt to pressure customers to return, keep spending, and perform  favors.

When a customer couldn’t pay, options included having him beaten, reporting the debt  to his employer to garnish wages, or selling the debt to someone whose collection methods were more direct.  Cowboys who arrived in Dodge City at the end of a 4-month cattle drive sometimes left owing more than they had earned.

They had come to celebrate for a few days.    They left indentured to a man they had never met before that week. The house always won. In the West,  it always collected. Number 10. The music was never romantic. Every Western film has a saloon piano. The reality was louder, cruder, and  considerably more chaotic.

 Most saloons had music because noise suppressed  conversations that patrons didn’t want overheard. You couldn’t eavesdrop over a loud piano. The musicians were not skilled  performers. They were men who could play loudly enough to be heard over the crowd and had accepted  they would be hit with empty bottles when the audience wanted something different.

One account from a Wichita saloon in 1873 describes a piano player shot in the hand by a drunk customer  who wanted a faster tempo. The piano player finished the song with his other hand. He didn’t stop  playing because stopping would have been worse. Number 11. The water was  making everyone sick.

This is the one nobody talked about. Not because it was shameful, because nobody understood it. The water  supply in most Old West towns was genuinely dangerous. Wells were dug without understanding  of contamination. Outhouses were placed without regard to groundwater flow. In Dodge City in 1876, the main water source was a well located approximately 40 feet from the primary waste disposal  area.

40 feet. Cholera bacteria travel through soil. Typhoid bacteria travel through soil. Dodge City had regular outbreaks of  both. The saloon used this water for everything. Rinsing glasses, mixing  drinks, making coffee for men sobering up before riding home. Customers were consuming whatever was in that water, concentrated and served with whiskey flavor.

Many frontier physicians suspected the connection between saloons and disease outbreaks. None could prove it because germ theory wasn’t widely understood until the 1880s.  The saloon owners weren’t poisoning their customers intentionally. They were doing it accidentally every night. Number 12. Tuberculosis  killed more cowboys than bullets.

The most lethal thing in any Old West saloon was not the man with the gun. It was the man with the cough. Tuberculosis spread through respiratory droplets.  Coughing, sneezing, talking at close range transferred the bacteria. A saloon was the ideal transmission environment. Enclosed space, poor ventilation, dozens of men packed together for hours, contaminated  glasses, spittoons full of infected saliva.

Historians now estimate that tuberculosis killed more people in frontier America than all the violence of the period combined. More than gunfights, more than Indian wars, more than hangings. Doc Holliday had tuberculosis. He came West because dry air was supposed to help. He spent his years in saloons and died of the disease at 36.

Billy the Kid’s mother died of tuberculosis. Bat Masterson’s  sister died of tuberculosis. The disease ran through frontier communities at a rate that saloon culture actively amplified. Every enclosed space where men drank together was a tuberculosis engine running every night. Number  13. The back rooms were worse.

The main floor was the public face. The back rooms were something else.  Every substantial saloon had rooms behind or above the main floor, used for high-stakes gambling,  private meetings, and whatever other commerce the owner was running. In many Western towns, the saloon back room was where every significant criminal transaction in the region happened.

Stolen  cattle were sold there. Stolen gold was fenced there. Wanted men were harbored there, fed, and pointed toward  the next town for a fee. Witnesses were bought. Lawmen were paid. Information was traded.  The back room was the criminal infrastructure of the frontier town operating in plain sight.

Everyone knew it was there. Everyone  knew what happened in it. Nobody talked about it because everyone was using it. The rancher who needed his neighbor’s  cattle to disappear used the back room. The politician who needed to arrange something that couldn’t appear in any record used the back room.

In some towns, the saloon back room was more important to how the  community functioned than the courthouse, the sheriff’s office, and the church combined  because real decisions weren’t made in buildings with windows. Number 14. The bartender knew who killed whom. In a frontier  town, the bartender was the single most informed witness to criminal activity in the region.

He saw who arrived together and left separately.  He heard conversations men thought were private. He knew whose hands shook too much the morning after a killing. He said almost nothing because survival required being trusted by every faction. The cattle baron using the back room, the outlaw passing through, the lawman who drank too  much and talked too freely.

All of them trusted the bartender because he had a financial interest in keeping  everyone’s secrets. A bartender who talked to the sheriff got his windows broken by outlaws. A bartender who talked to outlaws  got his license pulled by the sheriff. The only viable position was silence. In the court records of Old West cattle towns,  bartender testimony is almost completely absent.

Not because they weren’t subpoenaed,  because they had a remarkable consistency of amnesia whenever they were asked anything  that mattered. Number 15. The sheriff drank there, too.  The investigator of crimes committed in the saloon was a regular  customer of that saloon. He drank there. He gambled there.

In many towns, his salary was supplemented by the saloon owner. When a crime occurred involving saloon patrons,    the man investigating it knew personally every person involved and owed favors to the establishment at the center of it. This was not an abstract problem. The tensions that led to the gunfight at the OK  Corral were fundamentally about which faction would control the saloon economy of Tombstone.

   The Earp’s were aligned with the business establishment. The Clanton’s were aligned with the Cowboys who drove stolen cattle through the region.    Both factions used saloons as their operational bases. The gunfight was not a clean  confrontation between law and lawlessness. It was a business  dispute between two criminal enterprises over who controlled the most lucrative territory in town.

   The line between law and crime in the Old West was not a line. It was a bar. Number 16, the free food was a hazard.  Many saloons offered free food to keep men drinking longer. Bread,  hard-boiled eggs, cheese, cured meat. The theory was that men who ate stayed  and spent more.

The food sat out all day in unrefrigerated conditions  in buildings that reached extreme temperatures in summer. Hard-boiled eggs sat in open bowls from morning  to evening. 10 hours at temperatures that encouraged bacterial growth. The cured meat developed surface  contamination that was wiped off and served anyway.

One frontier physician in  Tucson documented a food poisoning outbreak traced to the free lunch counter at a Main Street saloon. 14 men affected. Three died. The saloon owner was not prosecuted because there was no law requiring him to serve food that wouldn’t kill people. The free lunch wasn’t a service.

 It was a tool.  And occasionally, it was a weapon. Number  17, Monday was the deadliest day. Most Western  towns had informal agreements that closed saloons on Sundays. This sounds like a safety measure.    It was the opposite. Men who had been drinking heavily all week faced Sunday  in enforced sobriety.

Withdrawal from alcohol produces anxiety,    tremors, and irritability. In severe cases, delirium tremens. A man in alcohol withdrawal is not  peaceful. He is looking for a drink. When he couldn’t find one legally, he found  one illegally. The illegal alcohol available on Sundays was even less  regulated than the regular saloon product.

Home distillation produced  beverages with dangerous methanol concentrations. Methanol causes  blindness. Methanol causes death. Frontier records document a consistent pattern. Monday mornings  brought more violence, more medical emergencies, and more deaths than any other day of the week.

   The day after the forced dry day. The blue laws didn’t reduce drinking. They concentrated its consequences  into a single day. And that day was Monday. Number 18, the spittoons were tuberculosis factories. A typical saloon had six  to eight spittoons positioned around the room. They were emptied daily.

Sometimes.  In busy periods, a single spittoon collected the expectorations of dozens of men across an evening. The mixture of tobacco juice and saliva from multiple men congealed at the bottom. Tuberculosis  bacteria survive in expectorated saliva for hours at room temperature. In the hot interior of a frontier saloon,    a spittoon was effectively a tuberculosis incubator.

Men leaning over the bar, sitting near  the spittoon, handling it when they knocked it over, were coming into direct contact with concentrated bacterial cultures. Frontier physicians documented  tuberculosis transmission in saloon workers at rates significantly higher than in the general population.

They called it the bartender’s  disease. Number 19, the closed saloon was more dangerous than the open one. Here’s the paradox that frontier health records reveal. Periods of forced saloon closure produced more deaths, more violence, and more medical emergencies than normal operating periods. The men who depended on alcohol as a daily chemical regulator did not stop needing  it when the saloon closed. They found substitutes.

Patent medicines with high alcohol content,    industrial spirits not intended for consumption. Anything fermented. The substitutes were  worse than the saloon product, which was already terrible. When the saloon reopened, men who had spent days on dangerous substitutes returned  in states of acute physical distress that made them more volatile, not less.

The pattern held across every documented  period of saloon closure in frontier records. The saloon was a public  health disaster, but closing it did not produce public health. It produced a different  disaster with worse ingredients. Number 20, the saloon outlasted everything. The church came to civilize the frontier, then the school, then the courthouse.

All of them were supposed to replace  the saloon. None of them did. The saloon survived because it did something no other institution could do. It required nothing from you. The church required your faith and your behavior. The school required your children and your taxes. The courthouse required compliance with a legal system that was  transparently unfair to anyone without money.

The saloon required only that you come in and  spend something. It didn’t care who you were, what you had done, or where you came from.  In a society deeply sorted by race, class, and origin, the saloon was the one place  that judged you less than everywhere else. The whiskey didn’t know if you were a cattle baron or a broke cowboy.

It destroyed  both of you equally. That was worth 25 cents a shot to men who had ridden four months through  dust and violence. The saloon didn’t just outlast the frontier. It outlasted everything the frontier  produced. The cattle drives are gone. The mining camps are ruins. The gunfighters are museum exhibits.

The saloon is still open. It just has a different  name now. 20 dark truths about Old West saloons. None of them are in the movies. Poison whiskey.  Killing men slowly over years. Water spreading cholera  through every glass. Tuberculosis running through packed rooms every night.

 A bartender who knew who killed whom and would never  tell. A system built to take everything from men who had almost nothing. And do it with a smile and a clean glass. The saloon wasn’t romantic. It was the most efficient extraction machine the frontier produced.    It took men’s wages, their health, their years, sometimes their lives.

And they came back the next night because the frontier was brutal and the saloon was warm and the whiskey made it quiet  for a few hours. That’s the real story. Not the swinging doors and the piano music.  Just men trying to put down what they were carrying for a little while. And a system built  to charge them everything they had for the privilege.

Subscribe if  you want the history they don’t put in the textbooks. The real version. The one that actually happened. More coming every week. Drop a comment. Which truth  hit you the hardest? I read every one. See you in the next one.