Addendum to First and Last Chance Episode

Since posting the show last night I've realized there were a couple omissions that needed correcting:

1) Almost the entire section on the Bay Area oyster industry was based on a 2006 in article in Pacific Historical Review entitled “Oyster Growers and Oyster Pirates in San Francisco Bay” by historian Mathew Morse Booker.  I footnoted this in the print script, but in the version I read aloud I had deleted Mr. Booker's name without replacing it anywhere else.  Considering I leaned so heavily on his work, he deserves much more than just a footnote.
In the section in which I refer to a "historian's socioeconomic argument" about the nature of oyster pirates, I should have added Mr. Booker's name because, well, it is one of the arguments of his article.

2) I missed an opportunity for a decent joke!  When talking about the authors who came into the Last Chance I listed the great Ambrose Bierce.  The next sentence clearly should have been: "Of course, it turns out Bierce had never been there at all, he had merely imagined coming into the bar when he was actually hanging from a bridge in Alabama."

3) When discussing the segregation of sexes I used the phrase, "separate spheres".  I maintain that is what I said, but it sure sounds like, "separate spears".  The correct word is "spheres".

- Mike B.

A Saloon, Of Course, For The Transactions Of Men- John Heinold's First and Last Chance Saloon in Oakland

You  can download and listen to this episode in iTunes or click on the red star logo to the right.  I would sorta prefer the iTunes path, because each download there makes it more searchable for other people to find.  I would also love reviews made in iTunes.  Thanks, enjoy the show.

I am sitting outside the joint people most often mention when I tell them I’m working on a project concerning California’s historic bars.  The Sun is going down at five o’clock so I know its time to switch from clear to brown liquors for the winter months and the sun has dipped below the coastal mountains on the west side of the San Francisco Bay, casting deep shadows over the Port of Oakland and painting a bluish hue upon the massive four legged cranes that services the container ships, which we’ve all seen lumbering into the bay, like floating citadels arrayed with brightly colored blocks, shipping containers, stacked like legos.  I’ve been told that George Lucas envisioned the Imperial AT-AT Walkers seen at the beginning of Empire Strikes Back, when he was driving over the Bay Bridge, looking at these monstrous cranes, but I have never looked this fact up because I would hate to find it’s not true.  

This entire bay is now synonymous with the technological innovations it produces, the ideas that offer ever-quicker routes to our needs and desires, and make the planet a smaller place.  But here, at this Western mouth of the world, one can still witness the slow, corporeal industry of the global mercantile exchange.  From here, the world still looks vast, laborious, unknowable, insurmountable.  This trade is all on a scale that would probably seem unimaginable to someone a hundred years ago, to someone like Jack London as he signed aboard the Sophia Sutherland schooner, leaving for Japan, leaving his childhood home for exploits in the cold, robust and wild expanse of creation.  But the process remains very much the same: longshoremen load, the ships spend weeks plowing across a desolate waste of rising and setting sunsets, and longshoremen unload.  But the time is gone when boys and young men like London looked at these deep voyagers and didn’t see a glut of consumer goods, but possibilities, adventure, a courageous life that forgoes modern comfort for the chance at something extraordinary.

London lived in a California, he more or less embodied a California, that was on the precipice of change, when the Wild West was becoming tame, manageable, docile, like everywhere else but with a great climate, angelic scenery and self-righteous bohemians.  The call had gone out the world over and been answered, of the promise of liberty and riches in California, the last stand of Thomas Jefferson’s rural Enlightenment vision of America, the Eden at the end of the Earth.  But the promised unmared and open vistas were becoming harder to find, those patches of land that a person could find and work and raise a family, free of time clocks and bosses and all the unforgiving demands of other people.  California was not only not impervious to the modern age that was dawning, in truth it would be at it’s forefront, rushing through all the growing pains societies typically engage, and going straight from being a shit-kicking backwater to beacon of progress and development. 

Jack London embodied this too; in his short life, going from a penniless oyster-pirate who refused to beholden to any master, to the nation’s first entertainment celebrity.  The most famous author in the world, tirelessly generating books, despite his ever failing health and the quality of writing which he little cared about, to pay off his debts.  He was an idealist and a socialist, but also a racist, a nationalist and sold his name to cigars, mints, and tailors in New York.  Yet somehow, drunk, bloated, jaded, bitter, dying, a life of hard living coming home to roust, he still produced masterpieces.  Generations would read his books and dream of the free wilderness that could be still found out there, somewhere.

Today we’re going to Jack London’s California.  There is no better guide to Western saloon culture at the turn of the twentieth century, so we’ll visit the bar the he himself declared as spot he gave up all things boyish for manly pursuits.  We’re at Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon in Oakland. And this is the Bear Flag Libation.

At age fifteen, Jack London had already had enough of mundane work a day life.  He’d gone from being a paperboy to working ten to eighteen hour shifts at a cannery in Oakland and could not contemplate spending the rest of life as a “work-beast”, treated with less value than a horse.   Since he had learned to read, young Jack spent nearly every free moment in books, traveling the globe and through time on the sails of his imagination, but was always forced to return to difficult, and worse yet, ordinary reality of the poor child obliged to quit school to earn money for his family.  Nearly everybody in the boy’s view seemed to toil endlessly without real purpose, dim to any air of romance and escapade- that is except for the oyster pirates.  The oyster pirates sped around the Bay in their tiny sloops, flouting the law, raiding the shallow water oyster farms, drinking and fighting and generally doing as they damn well pleased.  Young Jack wanted in.  So he borrowed money from his one-time wet nurse, and went to see a man called French Frank about buying his boat, the Razzle Dazzle.  Before the sale even became official Jack was caught up in the high drama, allowing himself to be seduced by Mamie, Queen of the Oyster Pirates, and earning the jealous hatred of French Frank, who would soon try to kill Jack.  But first, “We met by appointment, early Monday morning, to complete the deal, in Johnny Heinhold’s ‘Last Chance’- a saloon, of course, for the transactions of men.”

Rounds of drinks to celebrate the sale of the boat were bought for all present, men like Spider Healy, Whiskey Bob, Soup Kennedy, and even a glass for the barkeep, Johnny Heinold.  All aware of French Frank’s vengeful ire toward this new kid, but Jack remained completely naive of any reason a fifty-year-old man would be jealous of a fifteen-year-old boy.  Unfortunately for Jack, he was making few friends due his ignorance to the fact that when other men buy rounds of drinks; you too are expected to reciprocate with a round.  It was Heinold who finally leaned over the bar and whispered, “He’s got it in for you.  Watch out.”  Sure enough, some time later French Frank tried to ram Jack’s ship, but the young London held him off, cocking a double-barrel shotgun with his hands while deftly steering the Razzle Dazzle with his feet.  This event, coupled with Jack’s discovery of how to treat others to drinks, gained him a mighty reputation on the Oakland waterfront and after a drunken fistfight with Frank, the dropped his vendetta.  Such as life among the oyster-pirates of the San Francisco Bay and the men who drank at Johnny Heinold’s bar. [1]

At this point, you’re probably asking, what the heck is an oyster-pirate?  And, where do I sign up for this job?  So before we step down into First and Last Chance, let’s get out, on and under the famous bay because the rise and fall of the California oyster industry actually speaks volumes about rapid evolution of the state.  By 1890, when Young London embarking on his career as an outlaw, the San Francisco Bay was drastically different than it had been only forty years before, and by the time London died in 1916, it had undergone a whole other set of changes.

The native Ohlone Indians lived in the greater Bay Area for many centuries, with oysters and other shellfish being a steady part of their daily diet.  Archeologists have uncovered hundreds of huge mounds of shells all along beaches leading them to believe the amount of bivalves consumed by people every year could be measured in tons.  In drought or flood, if plants and animals were scarce for a season, shellfish were always abundant and accessible.  When Europeans showed up, they joined in the foraging; there was plenty for all.  But then the Gold Rush struck.  And even more important than the sudden explosion in population in Northern California, was a devastating environmental impact caused by hydraulic mining in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  We’ll talk more about the Gold Rush in future episodes, but most of the era was not lone miners wandering the hills with pickaxes and sifters, plucking up nuggets and dancing jigs.  Most of the mining was done by huge corporations using high-tech machines that would redirect entire rivers into pumps and hoses with so much pressure they could blow entire mountainsides.  Meters of topsoil washed away in seconds.  This is a very effective way to find gold and the clear the area, but the problem is, what happens to all that topsoil?  This is the mid-ninetieth century, so the answer is, who gives a damn what happens to dirt?  We’re getting rich over here.  And all that dirt simply entered the streams and rivers and flowing downhill.   The Sacramento River bed rose a thirteen feet around that capital city in the 1860s.  By the 1880s, it is estimated that eight times more earth was moved along the Northern California watershed than was moved during the entire construction of the Panama Canal.  Let me say that again, eight times more earth moved than when they built the Panama effing Canal!

Eventually, all that sentiment ended up in the San Francisco Bay and utterly paved over entire populations plants and animals.  The entire shape of the bay, both the bottom and the coastline were completely and permanently altered.  Suffice the say, the native oyster population was nearly wiped out, but we Americans are an industrious bunch if we want oysters, we’re going to find a way to get some oysters.  So special aquarium train cars were made to ship all kinds of sea life from the Atlantic Ocean, all the way across the continent to the Pacific Ocean.  Much of it died on the trip, but oysters are pretty burly little bivalves and the large east coast oysters made the trip, thrived in their new home and became big business in California.  In no time, oysters were being shipped all over the West, as far as Wyoming and Colorado, which was great for some someone like a Rockies miner who didn’t have access to a lot of fruits and vegetables because oysters are chalk full of vitamins and minerals.  Today, we consider oysters to be something of a delicacy, but in the late nineteenth century, they were common and considered a workingman’s super food.

The tricky thing about the oyster industry is how to privatize and protect the shallow tidal land where they grow.  Typically, nobody owns the ocean and when somebody wanted oysters they just go down and scoop them up.  The state made a dispensation and sold plots of tidal land to oyster farmers, it was legally their property, but there wasn’t really any way at the time to fence the area off without effecting the growth of the animal.  Enter the oyster pirate.  Now a historian’s socio-economic argument could be made that these were proletariat foragers traditionally surviving in urban areas by mining the sea and they were refusing to conform with modern and legally novel idea of private property in areas that had always been common-use, but I suspect most oyster pirates were men of a flexible moral code who preferred to spend their time drinking whisky and gallivanting with teenage girls, then occasionally boosting somebody else’s aquatic harvest.  However, it worth noting that Jack London did become a socialist as a young man, and it isn’t a stretch to imagine that his politics concerning the injustices of capitalism may have begun during his time as an oyster pirate.

Their method was devilishly simple: during the day they cruised around, collecting slim pickings of oysters that could be found in common-use areas, but this was a front, just a show for anyone looking to see they had been out there in common areas.  Then at night they would silently sail up to an oyster farm on their skiffs, jump out, haul in a literal boatload, and slip off into the darkness.  It isn’t as if farmers could brand the little oyster shells like cattle; so stolen oysters were indistinguishable from legitimate ones.  The perfect crime.  Everybody on the Oakland waterfront seems to have known who the oyster pirates were, but the community had no problem with thieves who stole property that felt like it should belong to everybody.  Besides, they offered cheaper oysters.

Then suddenly at the height of the Bay Area oyster boom, the industry suddenly took a dive.  The explosion of population that began with the Gold Rush never really stopped and in the early twentieth century we’re just getting the beginning of laws to regulate environmental impacts, so this means not just industrial waste in the water, but all those people means lots more human waste being dumped (no pun intended) into the bay.  Human waste does almost no damage to the actual oyster, in fact, they may even thrive on it, but a person who eats an oyster that had been soaking in all that nastiness will get very sick indeed.  After a string of poisonings the word got out that Bay Area oysters could potentially kill you and that was the end of that.  Even today, after decades of regulations and clean up, there is still a little bit of an “eww” factor about jumping into the bay.[2]

At this point, early 1910s, Jack London had long left the Razzle Dazzle and had traveled the world aboard much larger ships.  In fact, he was up in Sonoma, getting around to writing John Barleycorn, what he called his alcoholic memoirs, in which Johnny Heinold’s bar plays a prominent role.  Heinold, too, was doing just fine with the loss of the pirate patrons, after all he served alcohol on the Oakland waterfront.  And, typically, sailors want a drink the first chance they get when getting off a boat, or want a one last chance for a drink before they get on one.

John Michael Heinold arrived in San Francisco in 1876.  Enticed by the promise of adventures in the West, he had run away from home and signed on as deckhand on a windjammer out of Philadelphia.   For several years, he worked odd jobs along the waterfront in the city, until buying a bar in Oakland on San Pablo Ave, but Johnny (as everybody called him) decided this was too far from the salty ocean air and sea dogs he grown to love.  So in 1883, he bought a small bunkhouse used by workers on the oyster farms, cleared it out and ask a ship carpenter to help him build a bar.  Only a few steps from the estuary between Oakland and Alameda, the bar quickly became a success with the waterfront crowd and Heinold a fixture himself as he always worked alone, open until close every single day.  As I eluded to a moment ago, the bar took the name the First and Last Chance because it was the first and last place to get a drink before you got on or after you got off a boat.  This was also the case for commuters from the island city of Alameda, as it a dry city at the time and the ferry landing was only a block from the bar.[3]

The same year Heinold bought the bar, he met the woman who would become his wife, Christine Marie.  I was a bit hesitant to bring up the Heinold’s clearly unhappy marriage because gossip about people almost a century dead still sounds like gossip, but I uncovered some articles from the San Francisco Call in 1898 concerning their divorce and sometimes these things can be insightful about the time period.  But I warn that we shouldn’t draw too many conclusions about the character of the people involved in a “he said, she said” dispute played out in newspaper snippets.

The future Mrs. Heinold worked as a servant for a private family, but claimed to have aristocratic linage in her country of origin.  I’m not sure which country she immigrated from, but by the late 19^th century many old and distinguished European families had been brought low by the industrial revolution, so it’s not impossible the granddaughter of some minor German noble could have wound up making beds in Oakland, California.  Johnny was taken by her stories of high birth and proud family history, as well as charming personality.  They married quickly and Christine gave birth five times in as many years.  This strikes me as a stressful enough way to spend your life, but added to that two of their children died very young.  Johnny blamed Christine for the poor condition of the home, claiming his wife was reckless and neglectful of her children.  When Johnny filed for divorce in 1898, a very rare occurrence at the time, it was on grounds of desertion of the family, allegedly abandoning her kids and returning to work as a domestic for another family.  In response, Christine charged her husband with “extreme cruelty, intemperance and threats against her life.”[4]

Obviously, two short blubs in the newspaper tell us very little about what actually went on in the Heinold home, but, if I may offer a bit of speculation.  Other reading has led me to two major traits about Johnny: One, his children absolutely adored him. His son, George, wrote a short book about his father’s legendary big heart that George credits for the bar’s fame.  And, two, the man was an absolute workaholic who rarely went home.  For the bar’s existence while he lived, Johnny opened the joint at six in the morning and closed it some time after at eight at night, every single day.  His lack of delegation implies he wanted to be there and I sense the bar was Johnny’s real home.  This, compounded with the tragedy of two dead children, adds up to incredible amount stress and resentment in a marriage.  Johnny’s minor fame gives people many opportunities to say great things about him, while I’ve seen no mention of his wife anywhere besides these two articles, which gives the idea that these type of events must have been common place enough if Johnny, his son and Jack London don’t feel need to mention the problems has some great tragedies.   Beyond providing insight into the lives of ordinary people the divorce reveled in Mrs. Heinold’s countersuit for alimony payments the bar is valued at $10,000.  When I put this figure into couple online currency inflation calculators, 10,000 dollars in 1898 has about the same buying power as 270,000 to 280,000 dollars in 2013.  Considering the old shack of a bar is now a federally recognized historic landmark in a popular commercial waterfront and is considered an indispensible jewel by locals and tourists alike, I’m willing to bet the bar would sell for much more than that today.
 

London, 1885.

In 1888, Johnny noticed a boy sitting on a dock pylons near the front of the bar, reading a pocket dictionary.  The kid had recently moved to Alameda from San Francisco and spent a lot of time on the waterfront collecting firewood for this family or scavenging loose pieces of metal to sell.  Johnny invited him to come into the bar, warm himself by the potbelly stove, sit beneath the soft gas lamps and read the thick, proper dictionary Johnny kept behind the bar.  They boy was not yet a steady drinker at the age of twelve, but young Jack London was in the place regularly to read and be among men.  It is likely he was there during the frequent visits of Robert Louis Stevenson, who ever obsessed with health didn’t drink himself, but he wife had lived in Oakland and Stevenson was a friend of Heinold and he enjoyed the company, conversation and sarsaparilla as he prepared to sail for the South Seas and Somoa.  Other authors known to stop by the First and Last Chance was the great Civil War writer Ambrose Bierce, the “poet of the Sierras” Joaquin Miller, Rex Beach and Robert Service.[5] 

On Memorial Day of 1890 a commuter train flew off an open drawbridge between Oakland and Alameda.  The packed train plunged into the bay only feet from the front door of Heinold’s saloon.  Heroic bystanders dove in to rescue as many passengers as possible, but thirteen people died on the spot.  Heinold cried out, “Sell no more whiskey! Take everything in house if it will save a life, or make even one poor woman die easier!”  The crowded bar was cleared out and served as an ad-hoc hospital and morgue.  The newspaper reported, “Drinking men and rough men became gentle, while tears rolled down their cheeks.”  If the reporter on the scene had happened to catch any names of these weeping angels of mercy, London may very well been among them, along with the likes of French Frank, Whiskey Bob and Scratch Nelson.[6]

In the early 1890’s, the powerful Southern Pacific railroad made a play at taking over the Oakland waterfront.  With shaking legal standing to the area, the SP resorted to dirty tricks like sinking a massive barge offshore to block the construction of Mayor John L. Davie’s wharf, which would offer a cheap ferry to San Francisco and cut into the railroad’s business.  The SP also tried to halt the wharf by erecting fences along the waterfront, so Davie asked his friend Johnny Heinold if he might be able of some help.  Every night, Heinold, London and the Last Chance regulars would go out, surely blotto, and tear down all the SP fences around the waterfront.  The next day the railroad company would put them back up, that night they’d go down again.  Eventually, Davie removed the barge, opened his wharf and ferry, all owned by the city of Oakland, costing the people only cents for the ride, and the waterfront remained away from the hands of private developers.[7]

London spent the 1890s in and out of Oakland, serving as a deck hand on a merchant ship to Japan, riding the rails to upstate New York where he spent a month in jail for vagrancy, but at age seventeen he returned and spoke to Heinold about this desire to become a writer.  The bartender lent him forty dollars for tuition at the University of California in Berkeley; “without security, without interest, without buying a drink.”  London only went to Berkeley for one semester, but he remained eternally grateful, and he, like Heinold’s son George, credits the fame and success of the First and Last Chance to be in Johnny’s compassion and generosity.  For celebrity writer friends and unknown homeless boys alike, Heinold could be trusted to provide help and advice.[8]

When I said “step down” into the bar earlier, I was being literal.  In the great 1906 earthquake the pylons that support the tiny bar sank into the underwater ground below, dropping the floor approximately eight inches below street level.  They tried repeatedly to reinforce the building, but it always sank back down even further.  Today, the floor is almost two feet down and a steep ramp must be traversed to get inside and sit at a bar, which sits at about a 20-degree angle.  Obviously, this is part of the old-timey charm.  Just keep one hand free to hold onto your drink, lest it slide away.[9]

Though I have been unable to verify this, Otha Wearin, who wrote a short book on the bar, claims that Mayor Davie took President William Howard Taft to the First and Last Chance for “refreshment and a moment of relaxation” during Taft’s West Coast visit in October of 1911.  Somebody of a lesser standard of humor might make a joke here about how the portly president is the real reason the floor is sunken at the bar.  And I am that somebody: Yo Taft is so fat when he arrived on California his ass was still in Washington.  Yo Taft is so fat that Teddy Roosevelt told him he was starting the Bull-Moose Party and he brought over a knife and fork.  Yo Taft is so fat the Southern Pacific Railroad Company sunk him in the Oakland harbor in a bid to take over the waterfront.[10]

During Prohibition, Heinold abide by the Volstead Act and apparently getting by selling sandwiches, peanuts and sarsaparilla. George Heinold came back from World War One a decorated hero and Johnny told his friends, “If my boy can fight for the Constitution, I guess I can uphold it.”  Only months before the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, John Heinold died.  A special disposition by city hall was made to honor his last wishes and a pilot released the old bartender’s ashes above the saloon he loved so dearly.  George Heinold took over the joint and ran it just as dutifully until 1969, passing away only months later.  Ownership transferred his widow, and then to the bartenders who kept the place just as Johnny had.  The gas lights and potbellied stove even remained until 1989.[11]

You can and should still visit the First and Last Chance Saloon today, with a great patio for sitting outside, looking west onto the harbor, and a time warp as soon as you step inside.  You’ll find it at the end of Webster Street in the touristy part of the Oakland Harbor now called Jack London Square.  It looks every bit the ninetieth century relic it is; a diminutive wood shack with a sunken floor, but surrounded by towering glass and steel commercial structures.  

As you should have hopefully noticed by now, we are not at the Swallow’s Inn Saloon in San Juan Capistrano as I prematurely declared in last month’s show.  I have parts of that episode written, but collecting information on that bar has proven to be more challenging that I anticipated.  For all my arguments on the important role bars play in American life, the reality is that bars lie slightly on the under belly of society and traditionally have been ignored by scholars.   This queasy attitude toward alcohol is not always completely consciously, but obviously sometimes it has been.   I mean, we tried Prohibition for a reason.  Even aside from the most obvious negative social repercussions of excessive drinking (alcoholism, increase of domestic violence, generally poor decision making), it is a truly weird and rather ugly truth that we, as human beings, as a species, feel the need to occasionally practice ritualistic poisoning of ourselves in order to achieve an altered state.   It’s been said many times, many ways, but Jack London said it this way, “When good fortune comes, they drink.  When they have no fortune they drink to the hope of good fortune.  If fortune be ill, they drink to forget it.  If they meet a friend, they drink.  If they quarrel with a friend and lose him, they drink.  If their love-making be crowded with success, they are so happy they needs must drink [sic].  If they be jilted, they drink for the contrary reason.  And if haven’t anything to do at all, why they drink, secure in the knowledge that when they have taken a significant number of drinks the maggots will start crawling in their brains and they will have their hands full with things to do.  When they are sober they want to drink; and when they have drunk they want to drink more.”  Or, as Homer Simpson put it, “To alcohol!  The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”[12]

Sure, many people do not drink, and many more are able to drink in moderation, but the compulsion to drink is wide spread enough and deep enough that is an accepted fact that we all must live along side drunkeness.  No laws laid down by man or god has come close to abating our thirst.  I mean, we repelled Prohibition for a reason.  London could never admit he was an alcoholic, merely a “habitual drinker”, but he gave his compulsion for booze a name, John Barleycorn.  The name comes from an English folksong in which the process for making alcohol is personified by a man who his repeatedly murdered by three farmers.  I’ll post a link to the song at BearFlagLibation.blogspot.com.  

London’s John Barleycorn had a personality, a trickster who feigns friendship, capable of both unfiltered wisdom and malevolence.   It compelled him to drink when he knew he shouldn’t, when drunk it urged him toward reckless behavior, duping him into believing he was seeing the world as it really was; harsh, friendless, contemptible in everyway.  One night after tying it on to tight while saloon hopping in Bencia, London feel off his boat into dangerous and cold waters in the Carquinez Strait.  He spent four hours swimming against the powerful currents while coming no closer to the shore, all the while John Barleycorn whispered for him to simply give up, quit life now and know a man’s death, a death to make him a hero in his small world of boozers and wasters.  In those moments the young man was convinced he would never amount to anything, so why bother struggling for a life not worth living.  Eventually, London sobered up as the thrashed in the water and a boat of Greek fisherman rescued him, but such was the power of John Barleycorn on London, of alcohol on all people really, to reach into our darkest recesses, pull out our deepest insecurities, suspicions and fears and present them as the singular, authentic reality.[13]

 If this were the only effect of alcohol, obviously we would have abandoned this demon long ago, but as you well know, its reality altering magic works wonders in the other direction.  A single drink relaxes us, tells us that weight of daily life actually isn’t all that heavy.  The second drink narrows the scale of existence, suddenly everything outside of the bar, the house, the restaurant, fades into the back of our minds, like sound of steady rain against the window that signifies a larger storm, but in here you are safe and warm.  The third drink changes us, you are the source of the warmth, you are a wealth intelligence, strength, cleverness, and you know when you face the storm outside you will do so with impressive deftness, dancing between raindrops.  The forth drink ruins us.  The first three were felt so nice, how could we quit when so far ahead?  It is not always on the forth, but if you are having a forth, you are on the road toward “the turn”, the moment when your smiling face will turn slack and dull, when the smiling faces of people around you begin to look forced, eyes shifting away, seeking escape.  You might become an oblivious and boisterous back slapper, an angry brute or moping maudlin, but no matter what you will be locked into the narrative John Barleycorn constructed for you for the rest of the night.  If you tried to swing open the doors and invite in the storm, you inevitability lost.  And now you have a splitting headache as you try to reconstruct the night and piece together why your underwear is on backward.

As you might guess, my own relationship status with John Barleycorn, would be, “It’s complicated.”  But I believe this would be true of nearly every person I know.  I’ve gone on this extended diatribe in an attempt to work out the maligned standing of bars in our culture, as not just the purveyor legal, addictive substances, but as a constant reminder of our weaknesses as human beings.  I find our peculiar connection with alcohol fascinating and after more time at this project I hope to have historical examples to solidify a theory concerning the role of spirited drinks in our society.  For now I can say, researching the history of bars has proven more difficult than I originally thought because nobody ever bothered to write anything down.

            That said, I’m glad I had to mix up my plan.  I’ll bring you the Swallows Inn episode by mid-December, to talk about the Spanish and Mexican Eras in California, and the move right in to an episode in Sonoma to talk about the Bear Flag Revolt (the event which provide this podcast with it’s snappy, if slightly nonsensical name) and the Mexican-America War.  There is a huge amount of overlap of historical actors in those two episodes.  

As soon as I picked up John Barleycorn, I knew Johnny Heinold and Jack London were the perfect men to go to talk about saloon culture in California at the turn of the twentieth century.  After seeing what taverns were on the East Coast in the 18^th century in the first episode, now we are afforded a glimpse of what saloons were in the late 19^th century.  London defiantly had an “it’s complicated” relationship with booze.  Pretty much everyone except himself and his wife, Charmian, a classic enabler, would easily spot London as a raging alcoholic.  But his crippling, and ultimately fatal, disease results in our benefit, because while few others thought to record anything about saloon culture in California, London a talented and prolific writer, was a perfect historical witness.  John Barleycorn is a non-fiction memoir and can be trusted as much any other, even accounting for London’s Herculean feats of denial and self-delusion. 

            The book opens with London returning to his ranch on horseback after voting in a 1911 election to amend the California constitution.  He admits, “Because the warmth of they day I had had several drinks before casting my ballot, and divers drinks after casting it.”  The phrase he uses to describe his state is, “pleasantly jingled.”  His wife, Charmain, greets him to ask how he voted on the matter of women’s suffrage and he says he voted for it because women giving women the vote will bring about Prohibition and “drive the nails in the coffin of John Barleycorn.”

            “But I thought you were a friend to John Barleycorn,” she asks.

            This sparks a rant from London, which he admits has comes off sounding like the ramblings of a drunk who believes his mind his working more logically.  He says he has always hated alcohol, but it has given him so much in life, so many opportunities and friends, but this is the lie of alcohol because he knows it is ruining him, but is was always more or less inventible because drinking is just what men need to do to get away from the control of women, and this is why the women must be allowed to vote and take the dastardly alcohol away from future generations.  In the middle of this circular debate with himself, London says, “Not only had it always been accessible, but every interest of my developing life had drawn me to it.  A newsboy on the streets, a sailor, a miner, a wanderer in the far lands, always where men came together to exchange ideas, to laugh and boast and dare, to relax, to forget the dull toil of tiresome nights and days, always they came to together over alcohol.  The saloon was the place of congregation.  Men gathered to as primitive men gathered about the fire of the squatting-place at the mouth of the cave…. As a youth by way of the saloon I had escaped the narrowness of women’s influence into the wide free world of men.  All ways led to the saloon.  The thousand roads of romance and adventure drew together at the saloon, and thence led out and on over the world.”[14]

            This speech is important for three reasons.  First, it shows the division between sexes that historians these days usually refer to as “separate spheres”.  This is far beyond the old fashion chauvinism of saying cleaning and cooking are “women’s work” and paycheck earning labor is “men’s work”.  Between husbands and wives, in families, in the whole of society, men and women kept self-imposed distances from each other.  They rarely socialized in public, even at parties and gathering, men usually kept to one room, women another.  There has always been some segregation of the sexes, but the Victorian era saw this at a peak, with women being held up as the epitome of virtue and all that was right about a good Christian home, but they are so good, with this fragile purity, they must be kept detached, sheltered from the cruel reality in which men must deal with.   A great, physical example of the separate spheres is in that saloons did not have women’s restrooms because what possible reason would a women be in a saloon long enough for a need to use the restroom.  In fact, in many saloons, there was no restroom at all, but a gutter that ran the length of the bar in which men simply urinated into when need arose, without having to stand up.  You can still see an old-timey pee gutter in Merchants Bar in Oakland, only a couple blocks from the First and Last Chance, at the corner of Franklin and 2^nd Street.  The bar has replaced recently, but the tiled gutter is still there.  Women were not seen in drinking establishments until the 1920’s.  Aside from the many other factors leading toward greater female equality in that era, drinking in speakeasies already broke the law, contributing to a more lax social vibe.  It turned out men thought drinking with women to be way more fun that having a sausage-fest every night in some dirty, pee stained man-cave.

            The second thing we see in London’s speech is the importance of bars to the men who frequented them.  Most men worked long hours, we know they weren’t going home and spending time with their wives, their lives, in so far as they could choose what to do with their off hours, were spent at the bar.  London describes being fascinated by this as a boy, he writes, “In saloons life was different.  Men talked with great voices, laughed great laughs, and there was an atmosphere of greatness.  Here was something more than common every-day where nothing happened.  Here life was always very live, and sometimes even lurid, when blows were struck, and blood was shed, big policemen came shouldering in.”  He goes onto say for all the awful things he had been told about saloons and what went on there, here where “reporters, editors, lawyers, judges, whose names and faces I knew.  They put the seal of social approval on the saloon.”  While the official position of society, in keeping with those same Victorian values, preached temperance and decrying the evils of alcohol, but here were respectable men of the world, knocking around together, having a jolly old time with a cup in hand.[15]

            On the surface, saloons may seem to have the same egalitarian social function as we saw taverns having in the in the 18^th century, but there is a new development.  Most taverns we saw on the east coast serviced people of a particular area; the patronage was based mainly on geography.  California is a state largely settled first by miners and other working class men who came here without families, far from home, working hard, long hours, but with a good amount of coin to show for it.  This led to an abundance of bars.  In the tiny mining town of Rough And Ready, with on 672 people in 1850, there were fourteen saloons.  A man in Nevada City describes the downtown area having “five round tents as large as a circus tent occupied entirely as gambling shops and nine of every ten doors on the street open way to a liquor bar”.  This abundance of saloons seems to have been maintained over the next fifty year, as London describes at least five different bars within just few blocks of the First and Last Chance, and just up the street from there he says, “the east side of Broadway, between Sixth and Seventh, from corner to corner, there was a solid block of saloons.”  This is at least ten different bars over the stretch of a mile, running north-south, and those are just the ones he mentioned.  Even of rural areas, he wrote, “Saloons were always so damnably convenient.  They are everywhere in my western country.” [16]

All these bars lead to choice, frequenting a particular bar means joining a particular community.  After all, Johnny Heinold moved from his bar on San Pablo because he liked the clientele the waterfront provided.  Jack London did not chose to drink with reporters and lawyers, but with oyster pirates, sailors and longshoreman.  We’ve grown used to idea of forming an identity around our personal preferences:  are you a foodie? Do you follow football?  If so, Raider’s or 49ers?  Beatles or Elvis? Sure, you are a fan of Star Trek, but can you name, of the top of your head, the race of people susceptible to the disease known as Bendii Syndrome”?  The correct answers to those questions are no, no, who give a fuck, The Beatles and Vulcans.  I choose not to drink at the bar closest to my house because I’ve never seen anybody go in there who is not wearing a cowboy hat.  I realize that I have boiled personal identity to something pretty insipid just now, but I also just gave you a clearer of idea of who I am.  The type of place you choose to drink at, and who you choose to drink with, not only says something about who you are, but eventually it makes you who you are.  At the beginning of the twentieth century all these choices a person could make was still a relatively novel concept, but going forward the class you were born into would matter less, the job you worked mattered less, and people began to define themselves who how and where they spent their free time.  If bars themselves gave rise to popular culture, the abundance of bars led to the rise of subcultures.

            Which brings us to the last point from London’s speech.  He did not just enjoy the saloon life, he used it almost like a tool, to his great advantage.  He calls saloons, “the poor man’s clubs, they were the only clubs to which I had access.  I could get acquainted in saloons.  I could go into a saloon and talk with any man.  In strange towns and cities I wandered through, the only place for me to go was the saloon.  I was no longer a stranger in any town the moment I entered the saloon.”  He then describes his process of going to multiple saloons first upon arriving anywhere and by the end of the day knowing half town, from the mayor to the lowliest ranch hand, they wave to him on the street and offer him advice on the area.  To an adventurer writer like London, this is both a means of survival and livelihood.  I would argue that London’s greatest talent was not in the way he put word to page, or navigated the wild world with courage and passion, though he certainly excelled at both those, but it was his ability to talk to people, to drink with them, to make them like him and talk and drink more.  He considers himself blessed with what he calls a “gorgeous constitution”, even at an early age he shocked people with his aptitude for putting away drinks and remaining standing, but he also writes about the need to learn how to drink with men to earn their respect.  Proper drinking was more than simply adhering to ritual and lingo, but a skill, one in which Jack London was well practiced at.  Mining gold in the Yukon, or voyaging through the South Pacific, as a war correspondent in Japan or in Mexico, or tramping freight trains in New York, London used saloons to put his ear to the ground and find the story worth writing.  He calls this the “service John Barleycorn renders”.[17]

Had Johnny Heinold not invited the twelve year old boy into the warmth of bar and began his induction to world wide network “poor man’s clubs” there might not have had works like White Fang, Call of the Wild, Sea Wolf, Valley of the Moon and the scores of other books and stories.  Further, London set a template for the likes of Hemingway, Kerouac, and Kesey; he was the first of the rugged, drunken American adventure authors, traveling the world looking some undistilled form freedom, always on the brink of insanity by the sheer beauty and savagery of the human experience, homeless even when given wealth and fame, unmoored, but always drifting back to a barstool and typewriter.

            If it seems like over romanticizing Jack London right now, it’s because I am. Absolutely.   When I had read his books before, spaced out over time, I was able write off certain traits, like his racism and misogyny as merely being a product of his time.  But after spending the last couple weeks in his company while researching this episode it became obvious he had some fairly out-there opinions concerning the heroic role of the Anglo-Saxon race and some deeply embittering mommy-issues.  London spent most of the last years of his life on his ranch in Sonoma, writing books extolling the healing powers of hard work and returning to the frontier lifestyle of the hardy pioneer American stock.  In books like Valley of the Moon and Burning Daylight, he criticized the transformation within California, in which whites crammed themselves into suffocating and violent cities, abandoning the frontier dream to rot, grow over, or worse, be managed foreigners, who may be industrious, but could not comprehend what it truly meant to be American.  He did not seem to recognize the hypocrisy in the fact London did little of the real ranch work himself, instead hiring Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese laborers.  That’s not to say London was not working hard, writing at least a thousand words a day, good health or bad, on the road or at home, but he did so while ever incurring more debt, taking on more servants and building a luxurious mansion on his property, which sadly burned to the ground when only days from completion with not a dime to be redeemed from it.  London admitted that he cared little for the quality of the writing he was furiously producing, saying, “I have no unfinished stories.  Invariably I complete every one I start.  If it’s good, I sign it and send it out.  If it isn’t good, I sign it and send it out.”  I suppose this explains why he wrote dribble like Burning Daylight, I mean the main character’s name is actually Burning Daylight and he’s a thinly veiled version of London who does all the things London can’t.  And then a little while later he writes Valley of the Moon, which, despite its persistent xenophobia, is an epic road book that gives a gorgeous snapshot of California in the early twentieth century.  I was planning to spend time talking about this book, but time just didn’t permit it.  I’m sure I’ll return to it later when discussing other literary figures and the state’s long bohemian artist tradition.[18] 

         

London, 1904.

   Jack London died at forty years old, in 1916, and much of the last decade of his life his body was clearly failing, the inevitable result of a life hard lived, one part working-class swashbuckler, one part partying rockstar.  He always prided himself on the virility and strength, but near the end his teeth were rotting, he hands battered by hard labor and brawls, his knees were shot, his kidneys and liver were no longer able to properly process the body’s waste.  In 1913, he had an operation in which he was prescribed morphine, so then he remained an addict of that, alongside his alcoholism.  He’d go weeks sober then go on manic benders like the time he left the ranch in his car on errands, ended up tearing it up all around Sonoma country, then returned five days later atop of donkey.  Yet through it all he continued to write stories that bleed with hope the day would come he be able to shake off his ailments and be purified by clean country living.[19]

            That day would never come.  The frontier dream of California London lamented for- rural, white, built on the hands of hardworking family farmers, with air so clean it could rejuvenate and redeem all past sins- never really existed.  Like many things that drove Jack London, it was a romantic fantasy.  Industry, corporations, constant growth, urbanization, was always the path California had been on from the moment the Americans took over, a fact I mean to show over coming episodes.  But I admire London’s ability to dream, to live always on the cusp of possibilities, and why not?  He was poor child who had every reason to be conscripted to an unremarkable life of menial work, but instead refused and got aboard a boat, which turned into bigger boats.  He sought to companionship of men he admired and went into a bar, then entered a thousand bars, making friends the world over, and became one of the most admired men of his generation.  From reading about wild adventures, to having wild adventures, to writing wild adventures that will capture the imagination of people for many generations still yet to come.  There will always be an audience of people who still want to believe the free wilderness is out there, in infinite possibilities beyond the horizon, that the cure for this life is to make yourself a new one.

            Thank you for downloading and listening to the Bear Flag Libation.  I promise the next one will be out quicker.  Thank you again to Anthony Lukens of the Donkeys for playing the theme song.  You can listen to Donkey’s music, see tour dates and buy any of their three awesome albums at donkeysongs.com.  I would also like to thank my lovely and patient wife, Dawn, who not only aided in the recording of this podcast, but puts up with my insensate chatter about making this show. 

---

[1] Jack London, John Barleycorn (New York: Random House, Inc., 2001), 38-46.

[2] Matthew Morse Booker, “Oyster Growers and Oyster Pirates in San Francisco Bay”, Pacific Historical Review Vol. 75, No. 1 (February 2006): 63-88.

[3] George Heinold, John Heinold and His First and Last Chance (Oakland, The International Press, 1936), 9-10; Wearin, Heinold’s, 16.

[4] “No Charm in Royal Lineage”, San Francisco Call, March 9, 1898, Alameda County News section, pg. 10; “Oakland News Items”, San Francisco Call, March 25, 1898, Alameda County News section, pg. 11.

[5] Wearin, Heinold’s, 28-29.

[6] “An Oakland Train Dashes Into an Open Drawbridge with Awful Results”, San Francisco Call, May 31, 1890, pg. 1.

[7] “Slip and Fences: Exciting Times Across the Bay”, San Francisco Call, August 12, 1893, pg. 10; “Davie’s Historic Wharf, San Francisco Call, August 20, 1895, pg. 11; Heinold, John Heinold, 15.

[8] London, Barleycorn, 125-26; Heinold, John Heinold, 10.

[9] Otha Donner Wearin, Heinold’s First and Last Chance (Hastings, Iowa: Wearin, 1974), 17.

[10] Wearin, Heinold’s, 3.

[11] Wearin, Heinold’s, 21.

[12] London, Barleycorn, 62.

[13] London, Barleycorn, 70-73.

[14] London, Barleycorn, 1-7.

[15] London, Barleycorn, 27.

[16] Robert Phelps, “All hands have gone downtown: Urban Places in Gold Rush California” in Rooted in Barbarous Soil: People, Culture, and Community in Gold Rush California, ed. Kevin Starr and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 126 & 131; London, Barleycorn, 27 & 76.

[17] London, Barleycorn, 74-78.

[18] Kevin Starr, “The Sonoma Finale of Jack London Rancher” in Americans and the California Dream: 1850-1915 (New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1973); Pete Hamill, “Jack London and John Barleycorn”, introduction to John Barleycorn (New York: Random House, 2001).

[19] Hamill, “Jack London”, xxv; Starr, “The Sonoma Finale”, 214.

pocked universe pending

I apologize for the delay on episode two, but collecting information on the Swallow's Inn has proven more difficult that I anticipated.  Also other responsibilities and life keep getting in the way... stupid unceaseless linear existence always messes things up (the scientists in the Bear Flag Libation Theoretical Physics Department assure me they are making headway in fashioning a device that would allow access to pocket universes outside our time continuum, in which one could slip into to get work done and catch up on episodes of Boardwalk Empire).  So I've switch gears, put the Swallows Inn on the back burner for the time being and should have a new episode ready within two weeks.  I've set the hopeful goal of putting out three episodes by the first of the new year.

As a reward for you patience, here is a great song and disturbing video from Beachwood Sparks from Los Angeles (the video was filmed at the Gundlach Bundschu winery in Sonoma.  I was at this show!).

BFL is up on iTunes!

You can always listen to this show up clicking the big red star on the right, but you can also download and subscribe to this show in iTunes.
Downloading the show from iTunes raises it's rating there and makes it more searchable for other people to discover the Bear Flag Libation.
Also if you could take a mere one minute while in iTunes and rate the show, which also raises it's overall rating.

Thanks, you are a peach!

As a reward, here's a song by Jesse James from Richmond, California.

Episode Zero- The First Thing Ye English Do

You can download or stream the audio version of this episode by clicking here.  The following is the written script for first Bear Flag Libation episode, with appropriate footnotes.  I have also added links and pictures for things I mentioned during the show.

Thank you for downloading the introductory episode of this new California history podcast, that will unpack the magnificent and varied chronicles of the Golden State by exploring its oldest bars, saloons, taverns, pubs, clubs, lounges, speakeasies, watering-holes, dives, juke joints, honkey-tonks, grog-shops, taprooms, gin-mills, and drinkeries.  This is the Bear Flag Libation.
 
“Upon all the new settlements the Spanish make, the first thing they do is build a church, the first thing ye Dutch do upon a new colony is to build them a fort, but the first thing ye English do, be it in the most remote part of ye world, or amongst the most barbarous Indians, is to set up a drinking house.”  So wrote Captain Thomas Walduck in a 1708 letter to his nephew in London.  I can’t help but think Captain Walduck, an outspoken critic of the of his country’s colonial policies concerning slavery, might have been playing at a bit of that famed dry British satire, but his observation was fairly accurate.  Historian Christine Sismondo explains that the local tavern in each colonized area served as the unofficial town hall, the post office, the courthouse, the library, the bulletin board, the meeting place for business and trade, the transportation hub, the inn, the restaurant, and last, and possibly least, the place to get a drink.  So it might be easy to joke that the Brits conquered the world, one pint glass at a time, but it’s worth remembering that small island nation had a colonial system that, for better or for worse, actually did conquer approximately twenty-five percent of the earth’s livable land.  If the sun never sets on the British Empire, neither does set on happy hour.  You know that’s true because it rhymes.[1]   

But what I find more interesting is Captain Walduck’s comment succinctly exposes the difference in priorities European powers brought in the New World.  The Spanish built churches with the aim converting indigenous people to Catholicism.  They hoped to make the American natives into Spanish citizens by teaching the bedrock tenets of Spanish culture, to literally instruct Indians on how to think and see the world as people in Spain did.  In the next few episodes of this podcast, we’ll see how well that worked out for them.  The Dutch had little interest in the native population, beyond the slaves who could be bought and sold.  Anyone whose seen pirate or old navy movies has heard of the Dutch East India Company and West India Company.  This is because the Dutch were all about commerce and trade.  So the Dutch military built forts, high walled and well manned, and with the singular purpose of protecting their business interests. 

The British came relatively late to the imperialism game, and their early American colonies, while to be a source of pride and revenue for the Crown, mainly consisted of people from England who wanted to go be English some place else.  The establishment of a tavern in a new colony, which served at the center of town life, was the transposing of culture, making their new home a bit like the old one.  It is often forgotten by Americans, who fondly remember fighting a war of independence to free themselves of British tyranny, but seventieth and eighteenth century British society was among the most democratic, liberal and mobile in Europe.  I will not wade into the many and complex reasons for the American Revolution here, nor the evolution of democracy in England from the Middle Ages, but I believe there is a historiographical consensus to the idea colonists arrived with some sensibilities of budding Enlightenment, and to them personal liberty was not some radical concept.   In time, events carried the divergent and isolated new culture in the American colonies to develop democratic concepts faster than the Crown was willing to allow.  I bring this all up, here at the beginning of a California history podcast on bars, because I argue that the tavern, from its inception, to its importation to the New World, and through the Revolution, was a hotbed democratic fervor that was vital in the independence of this nation.  In due time, we will also see how when Americans annexed California in the mid-nineteenth century, reaching to the far side of the continent and imposing their culture on to the existing Mexican culture, they quite naturally take a page from their British grandfathers to build themselves, first and foremost, bars.

By the next episode, we will be solidly in California, at the Swallows Inn in San Juan Capistrano to talk about the Spanish plan for colonizing the far western end of the world.  But today we’re going to spend some time in the thirteen colonies, primarily in New England, which is actually the second place in North America to bear that name after, after where?  California, of course.  When Sir Francis Drake landed just north of the San Francisco Bay in 1579, he buried to British coins, had good relations with the native peoples and let them know they lived in Nova Albion, which is Latin for New England.  It’s difficult to say if the name had stuck Northern Californians would be saying “wicked pissah” instead of “hella tight”, but I do know there would be far less awesome taquerias. [2] 

First, let us quickly consider the origin of bars themselves.  Obviously a place go to get some kind of alcoholic beverage about as old as alcohol itself, which is to say it was hot on the heels of other great ideas, such as agriculture and permanent human settlements.  The British did not invent using the tavern as a means of societal expansion either.  When the Romans built their famous straight and well-maintained roads throughout their empire, every fifteen miles they established a tabernae deversoria (please forgive my Lain pronunciation, actually my pronunciation all non-English words.  You’ll soon see that my Spanish, after a lifetime in California and extensive traveling in Spanish speaking counties, is nothing short of shameful).  Romans could literally measure distance in how many taverns one passed between point A and point B.  These taverns were largely rest stops for travelers, perhaps akin to a Best Western but with a decent hotel bar.  The local working stiffs who sought a cup of wine and a dice game in place where everybody knows their nominis, had the tabernae meritoria, to drink away the long hard day.[3]

Public drinking spaces mostly vanished in Western Europe with the decline of the Roman Empire, but the consumption of alcohol did not.  Clean drinking water was often scarce, and though people did not understand the science of it, they knew if people drank more fermented drinks, such as beer and wine, less people got sick.  Common sense usually predates scientific explanations.  The making of beer was even a way to preserve grain crops and drink some amount of nutrients with a morning brew for breakfast.   Mind you, the beer was low on alcohol, high in nutrient, drank with extreme moderation and a means of survival, so don’t try telling your boss the three Coors Light you downed before work were for your health.

In fifteenth century England, an economic boom and urban development led to the first “publicans”, or “pub” for short.  For the first time in a long time, common people were not just drinking with other people of different occupations and backgrounds, they were doing what everyone loves to do while they drink: they talked.  Iain Gately describes pubs as being the “nucleus of a popular culture” in which people enjoyed freedom of speech and action not possible in feudal society.  Around the same time, a fellow in Germany named Gutenberg, invented a fast printing press with moveable type.   Before there were public libraries, pubs had books for patrons to read, so not only are exposed to new ideas, they are in a setting with other people who were also books, and they’re getting a bit drunk so they probably had strong opinions on it.  When common folk start reading and talking, well… a wise man once said, “Every time there's a revolution, it comes from somebody reading a book about revolution.”  Words departed from none other than Heavyweight Champion Mike Tyson, who also said, “Everyone has a plan until they punched in the mouth.”[4]
By the time the British colonize North America in the seventeenth century, the drinking house was deeply embedded in daily life.  In the colonies, with the absence of other institutions, the tavern served as a perfect substitute to house all governmental, commercial, legal and social proceedings.  Puritans, those notorious prudes, founded Boston in the year 1630 and used a tavern for all official business until the first government building was completed in 1658.  Just up the road, the first town hall meeting in this country ever held was in a tavern in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1633.  As the settlement outside the Dutch Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan Island became increasingly British in character, the focus of local commerce moved to Stadts Herbergh Inn, or City Tavern, which eventually became New York’s first city hall.[5]

In rural areas the tavern played an even more vital function.  The tavern functioned as not only the courtroom, but it also housed the traveling magistrates who were like judges on tour, hearing cases and dispensing justice in one town and then moving on to the next.  This raised the standards of all taverns, for instance, Maryland law required each tavern to have four good feather beds and in any establishment that held actually court, must have eight to put up magistrates and clerks.  It was apparently up to the magistrate to decide if drinking would go on during any given trail, something you should certainly hope for if accused of a crime, as drunken court rooms tended to favor acquittal.  In other words, you better remember to tip your bartender, or else he might suddenly find he’s out of wine when Goodie Constance accuses you of nicking boot buckles from the haberdashery.[6] 

            Indeed, with taverns playing such a key role in the community, the tavern owners were required to be upstanding citizens and they were highly regulated.  In Virginia after 1638, there were more laws regarding the licensing of taverns and their owners than on “roads, land titles, care for the poor and general law and order.”  Despite the amount of time colonists spent in the tavern, they seriously looked down on drunkenness.  A truism throughout the history of alcohol is that nobody holds their booze as well as you do, and it always seems that those you already don’t like are downright criminal when drunk.  Thus there were many laws designed to regulate who could drink, how much, at which place at what time of day, all in an attempt to curtail drunkenness and the antics it engenders.  It should be unsurprising that getting a drink in most areas proved difficult for Indians, blacks, women and other people of weak constitution who had not mastered the art of drinking well, regardless if any reputation for rambunctiousness was well deserved or not.[7]

            As usual the Puritans were able to take normal seventeenth century European prudishness and paternalism and make it weird by turning every cup into a battle for one’s immortal soul. 

Increase Mather summed up their views neatly by saying, “Drink is, in itself, a good creature of God, and to be received with thankfulness, but abuse of drink is from Satan; the wine is from God, the drunkard is from the Devil.”  One of the stranger fronts in the war on drunkenness was an attempt to bans drinking “healths”, a sort of competitive toasting.  In a crowded barroom, a gentlemen would stand-up, buy a round for the all present, then proceed to poetically espouse the greatness of King and Country, or the bravery of the local fighting men, or to his good and loyal horse, for all it mattered.  This kicked off what was essentially a drinking game, in which all involved attempted to out do each other for the eloquent or bawdy toasts.  And once everybody has bought a round, you can’t be the one cheap guy who has drinks for free and goes home.  Thus, honor and competition could quickly turn a pint after work into an all night bender.  Respectable New England Puritans warned that aside from the result of getting crowd of young men properly shit-faced, “healthing” seemed a little too heathen.  If a witch uses potions and calls on Satan to curse people with ill fortune, was Satan not also being called upon when somebody uses a alcoholic elixirs to wish somebody good fortune? At best, this business is beginning to reek of Catholicism and the creeping popery of King Charles is lamentable enough, but now our young men spend their nights at the pub acting like dirty papists?

At least one man who might have overrated this way was Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop, famous for opening to door to the concept of American Exceptionalism with his “city on a hill” sermon.   Winthrop waged a one-man war against drinking healths throughout the 1630s and 40s.  First, by forbidding them in his house, hope people would simply follow his example, then by declaring the healthing had gone out of style anyway, then by passing a law that fined anybody caught participating in a health.  Eventually, it became obvious it truly was a one-man war; with nobody outside the Winthrop house giving a damn about enforcing the law and it was taken off the books in 1645.  But the fact that the governor took such a public stance against certain drinking habits, and that a man so influential as Winthrop still feel ridiculously short of actually altering tavern culture, speaks to how deeply seeded that tavern culture was, even amongst the Puritans.  Generally, the sheer number of laws surrounding drinking and taverns clues us in to how big a part taverns truly played people’s lives.[8]    

In Britain, the pubs remained one part of the popular culture, but in the colonies, the taverns emerged as the social, political and commercial center of each community.  And, consider democratic effect this would have on the colonists over time.  Forts or churches, for the Dutch and the Spanish, were structured with a strict hierarchy and were sanctioned outposts of the mother country, where the taverns were owned and managed privately, by citizens from within the community.  People of all walks of life, even the abstainers, had some need of tavern services and they rubbed elbows together here, not to mention contact with merchants and travelers from other colonies.  Every voice could be heard, and on the night of many “healths”, some of those voices surely heard quite loudly.  God and the state had no official representatives here; instead taverns were ruled by social mores.   Even with all the laws designed to curb drunkenness, being drunk, as long as you were not a public nuisance, was not illegal, so on most nights, your words and activities were only tempered by degree of public judgment you were willing to endure the next morning.

This democratizing effect went from being theoretically culturally significant to tangibility politically significant when taverns became the first places to buzz with talk of rebellion against the British Crown.  Talking became speeches as taverns naturally became the best place for revolutionary groups, like the Sons of Liberty, to recruit angry men into the swelling ranks of the local militias.  Again, I don’t want to do a blow by blow of events leading to the Revolution.  There are plenty of books on the subject, and while I have not listened to any of the American Revolution podcasts, I’m really enjoying the indelible and brilliant MikeDuncan’s new podcast titled, “Revolutions”.  He is spending a few months of weekly episodes discussing different revolutions from various times and places.  Currently, he is discussing the English revolt against King Charles I, who I referenced just a few minutes agon, and that era, though not often mentioned by American historians, is an incredibly relevant precursor to the events in the colonies. 

The year is 1758.  You are a young, well-to-do, white male born in Commonwealth of Virginia, a colony with a thriving autonomous democracy while being fiercely loyal to King George II and the British parliament.  The global war that has engulfed Europe and North America for the past two years has not been going well for the British.   To boot, the harvest is lean this season and there are rumors of small pox raging amongst the Indians to the west.  You awake and dress on the morning of Election Day with the solemn responsibility of electing a representative to the House of Brugesses, and walk to the polls.  Upon arrival at the tavern a jovial man greets you, slaps you on the back and declares himself a personal friend of the young war hero named George Washington.  He asks if you might like a Whistle-Belly Vengeance before casting your vote.  No, perhaps a Scotchem? A Rum Switchel?  Mayhap a “bumbo”?

Now, since 1705, Virginia law explicitly prohibits alcohol at the polls, but…  Ah yes, a bumbo does sound quite nice actually, and the happy back-slapper brings you a jar of rum, water, sugar and nutmeg.  As the warm booze slides into your belly, expelling a familiar tingle about your body, you smile and say to your new friend, “I like the sound of this Washington fellow.  Can we discuss him further over another?”

By the end of the day, you’ve knock over the fishwife’s cart and been sick in the cooper’s barrels and young George Washington has been democratically elected to the Virginia legislature.  His bar bill for the day only consisted of forty-seven gallons of beer, thirty-four gallons of wine, two gallons of cider, three and half pints of brandy and a mere seventy gallons of rum punch.  Considering there are only 310 registered voters in this district, you are likely not the only one sleeping it off in the holster’s stable.[9]

Call it “treating”, “vote-jobbing” or flat out “bribery”, but the exchange of drinks for votes was common practice in this country for a very long time.  A century later, when the Edgar Allen Poe was found dead in an Baltimore the morning after elections wearing somebody else’s clothes, many speculated that hired thugs had taken the gravely ill man out all day; keeping him liquored up as they forced him to vote at various polling stations, then changing his clothing as they made and making the rounds again.  When Poe’s usefulness ran out, they simply left the master author for dead.  I want to be clear that this is only a theory and nobody knows fore sure the circumstances of that day, or even the ultimate cause of death, but it is commonly accepted that this type of voter fraud (called “cooping” at the time) did occur and that the living national treasure was enough of a hot mess for this to seem at least plausible.[10]  

Anyhow, back to the eighteenth century, to Boston, to the men who, if did not invent that practicing of buying votes with drinks, certainly mastered the practice in establishing America’s first political machine, while simultaneously setting the country on the road to Revolution.  An independently wealthy man named Elisha Cooke Jr. opened a bar on King Street near the docks in the late 1710s with the express purpose of garnering influence amongst the working populace.  Cooke’s and his friends, who included Samuel Adams Sr., wanted to affect public policy in Boston and they saw the way to do this was to get groups of friendly candidates elected to multiple offices in a single election.  They became known as the Boston Caucus.  In fact, the word “Caucus” as we know it, is thought to have derived from a bastardization of “Cooke’s House”, the bar on King Street.   They distributed flyers in taverns with recommendations on how to vote and they sent agents to make sure every sailor in the port on Election Day made his to the polls, but not without wetting his whistle first.  The Boston Caucus was less like a political party or voting block, as they were a shadowy cabal of puppet masters who met in smokey back rooms, like that of Cooke’s bar.  Think of this as a proto-version of Boss Tweed’s Tamney Hall in New York City; corrupt as all hell, but incredibility effective and, as it had just been invited, not technically illegal.[11]

One item at the top of the Caucus’s agenda was the laxation of liquor laws; through the 1720s the number of licensed taverns in Boston increased by eighty percent.  Throughout Massachusetts, during this era, regulations were lifted on dancing, singing, drinking healths and tavern closing times.  According to Revolutionary historian Gary Nash, the public referred to this movement simply as the “popular party” and it didn’t hurt that the moralists who opposed them made condescending comments toward the working class constituency, like “ordinary people” were prone to “foolish fondness for Commodities & fashions, excessive tippling in the taverns, laziness, sottishness, and a hunger for things above their station in life.”  Cotton Mather, son of Increase, the charming man who implied drunk people were possessed by Satan, weighed in and said, “It is to be demanded of the Poor that they do not indulge in an Affection of making themselves in all Things appear equal with the Rich: But patiently submit unto the differences, which the Maker of you Both, has put between you.”  It would seem one member of the Boston’s underclass did not appreciate this pompous Puritan declaring that the poor’s lot in life to be divinely ordained, so best shut up and take it, because shortly after Mather made the statement somebody threw a bomb through his window.

Secret society or not, Cook gained the well-deserved reputation as a champion of the working people of Boston.  He was not entirely altruistic in this cause, but neither was he exploiting the poor without seeing to their interest.  The symbiotic relationship he forged stands as Cooke’s most lasting contribution to American democracy: he recognized an underrepresented block of voters, ran candidates who made policies that appealed directly to this block, he mobilized them with get-out-the-vote-efforts and everybody involved rose together.  One example of an attractive platform: the tax assessors selected by the Caucus could be counted on for their delightful incompetence in assessing taxes from the working class.  It turns out voters really like it when somebody buys them a drink and tells them which candidate isn’t actually going to collect their taxes.[12]

Around 1764, the Caucus moved their headquarters at Cooke’s House to the tavern where it is a said the American Revolution was planed, The Green Dragon.  Yes, Tolkien fans, I’m well-aware that in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings that the spirited Shire pub of song and story is also named The Green Dragon, but I do not believe Tolkien was making a reference to the base of American revolutionary activity because apparently the England and Wales are littered with pubs with the name Green Dragon.  One of the renowned patrons of Boston’s Green Dragon was Samuel Adams Jr., founding member of the Sons of Liberty, cousin to the second president of the United States, but most widely known today as the dude with a frothy tin of brew, smiling at you from the label of a beer bottle.  Adams did briefly work for his fathers malt business, but took less interest in brewing beer when he could be drinking it.  He also spent time in his father’s position of inadequately collecting taxes from his friends at the various pubs around town.  Surely, Adams the Younger must not appeared a likely candidate to be one of the most celebrated names in American history, as he spent most of his time in low-rent drinking halls, toasting healths, dicing, and generally cutting it up with the local riff raff.  However, the foundation of trust and friendship he built there would prove tremendously valuable in the coming years.  While the sophisticated Whigs met the Bunch of Grapes tavern to politely discuss moderate political action, Adams was building relationships with the less educated and angry folks, more prone to the radical talk of which Revolutions are made.  Adams was the bridge between high-minded ideals and boots-on-the-ground action, capable of whipping up a crowd with fiery speeches and an indispensable recruiter for the patriots.[13]

In 1763, the Seven Years War, usually called the French-Indian War in the Americas, ended.  Though, the British came out on the winning side of the war, the victory was somewhat pyrrhic because of the untenable amount of debt incurred by the Crown.  To recoup some of the costs, Parliament levied a number of heavy and unpopular taxes on their American colonies.  The 1765 Stamp Act taxed all paper goods in the colonies.  The effects reached all levels of society, but in the tavern this meant everything from playing cards, to daily newspapers, to the liquor licenses, which needed to be renewed regularly to stay in business.  Everything on paper required an official stamp; that stamp came at a steep cost all importers, publishers and businesses; and, as usual, that cost was passed onto the everyday consumer.  The younger members of the Boston Caucus at the Green Dragon morphed into the Sons of Liberty in this time and used their connections to incite organized rebellion to the Stamp Act.  Sons of Liberty chapters popped up across the colonies, usually meeting in the backrooms and basements of taverns, and at least sixty-five riots broke out in different locations over the ensuing year in response to Stamp Act.  But beyond the rebellion being organized from taverns: before rioters hit the streets, where do you think they met, perhaps gaining a bit of liquid courage?  After the riot, where do you think they met, perhaps winding down and swamping stories?  After King George repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, were do you think the colonists celebrated?  They celebrated at the same place they had been commiserating, as people have for time immemorial, at the bar.  

Many healths were certainly drank when the news arrived: to victory, to the Sons of Liberty, to themselves, to the power of the people, but surely less healths were being heard across the colonies to King and Crown.  In fact, in New York slyly disguised a large celebration and made the whole affair official when New Yorkers suddenly decided commemorate King George’s birthday in 1766 with “Bear and Grog for the populace…, and a cannon fired with each toast, accompanied by many huzzas.”  If the King cared about such things it would have been rather awkward in the years that followed when the city partied hard on the actual anniversary of the Stamp Act repeal and never again put too much effort into George’s birthday.[14]

The Declaration of Independence was still ten years away, but the colonists saw the muscle of mass protest they could flex to effect policy sent down from Parliament, and they would well-remember the effective tool they discovered in the tavern network.  The model proved useful and was repeated numerous times over the next few years when anti-British sentiment came to a head.  In 1768, John Hancock, smuggler, protégé of Sam Adams and man of a famously large signature, was stopped bringing wine into the Boston harbor.  Apparently, Hancock’s ship was only carrying a quarter it’s possible load, leading authorities to suspect Hancock had off-loaded the rest of the wine someplace else without paying the high rate of taxes under the Townshead Acts.  The Townshed Acts were already so reviled that they created a boycott of British goods in the colonies and kickstarted the first “Buy American” movement.  When the British seized Hancock’s ship, rioting began anew down the Eastern Seaboard, as many felt customs agents were unduly restricting trade.  In Virginia, when the House of Burgess debated a legalized non-importation of British goods, the British Governor, Norborne Berkeley dissolved the congress.  Where did that nice young man you voted for, George Washington, go, along with Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry?  Why, of course, to the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, Virginia.  Can you believe they called their new legislature in exile, “Showtime at the Apollo”?  Good, you shouldn’t, that’d be super weird and more than a little ironic, they did not call it that.  But Patrick “Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death” Henry had been a bartender at the Raleigh Room, as was his father.

In New York City, in 1770, the redcoats fired shots into Bardin’s Tavern, the headquarters of the local Sons of Liberty chapter.  When the bar reopened months later, the army ransacked the place, which led to bloody fist fights in the streets between sailors and redcoats.  There is considerable evidence that in December of 1773, that the Boston Tea Party was decided on and plotted from the basement of the Green Dragon.   Suddenly, bars with names like “King’s Arms” and “Crown Tavern” were sporting new signs with names like “Liberty Tree” and “Congress”.  An editor at the New-York Journal wrote for the need of limiting the liquor licensees of these “hot-beds of sedition”, but somebody was smart enough to realize that taking people’s booze away was no way to calm a brewing revolt.

Even outside of the major cities, taverns functioned as centers of communication and recruitment.   Tavernkeepers, as a group, tended to be friendly to the growing patriot cause because of the high taxes they had paid under the Stamp Act and Townshed Acts, thus happily invited someone like Sam Adams come speak or for copies of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense to be distributed in their establishment.[15]

Lest it be thought that taverns only played a role at the grass roots level, there are quite taverns present at key moments in the lives of the Founding Fathers.  The first Continental Congress officially convened at Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia, but the large and elegant City Tavern became an informal meeting place for colonial representatives to take dinner, drinks and generally get to know each other, cementing relationships that would shape this nation.  In 1774, the first and second presidents, George Washington and John Adams met for the first time at the City Tavern before even going to Carpenter’s Hall.  Christine Sismondo suggests that, in 1776, that Thomas Jefferson and colleagues rehearsed the first draft of the Declaration of Independence at the Raleigh Tavern in Virginia, and that he finished it a the Indian Queen tavern in Philly.  I don’t mean to suggest that our third president was an eighteenth century barfly who scrawled the document that birthed our nation on the back of cocktail napkin, like some kind of Bukowski in a waistcoat, but I want to reiterate my point that, for people of all social classes, the tavern, in it’s many shapes and forms, was the natural place to be with people outside of the home.[16]

Another point I should bring up is the negative effects of the tavern culture.  Up until now I’ve been listing the ways taverns aided the Americans in the lead up to the Revolution, even in conjunction with riotous behavior.  While end result, the founding of these United States, seems to justify some of the more questionable means of the revolutionaries, on the ground this behavior might not have looked as acceptable to our modern sensibilities.  Historian T.H. Breen describes some of the methods of citizen mobs, which were surely fueled by alcohol before going out into the night and dragging suspected loyalists from their houses.  One public display punishment for those deemed not be significantly anti-British was the “wooden horse”, in which a person was set on a long fence rail and bounced up and down for possibly hours while others punched and kicked the victim.  In the months after the Boston Tea Party, a New Hampshire man named John Taylor was overheard making statements sympathetic to Parliament and forced to ride the wooden horse until a shape edge punctured a large hole his groin, causing him to bleed to death.  One person was charged with manslaughter and three others for abetting in this crime, but all were only lightly punished.  Breen also quotes a British official saying in 1774, “the Americans were a strange set of People, and that it was in vain to expect any degree of reasoning from them; that instead of making their claim by argument, they always chose to decide the matter by tarring and feathering.”  Modern imagination tends to focus more on the humiliating effect of the feathering, but consider the boiling tar poured into the victim would peal off a person’s skin.  If this is not painful enough, consider the whole body would become an open wound in a time before penicillin.  Breen does not always indicate drinking or taverns being connected to mob-justice, but it is mentioned on occasions and knowing what we do about time spent and taverns and human nature in of itself, the torture of people within ones’ own community does not sound like the actions of sober men.[17] 

On the morning April 19th, 1775, the militia “minutemen” of Concord, Massachusetts gathered at their ad-hoc headquarters, Wright’s Tavern.  Paul Revere had rode through in the early hours with the warning that the British aimed to march to Lexington and Concord to seize the weapons and disband the local militias.  Prudently, Colonel James Barrett, evacuated his men from Concord in order to take up a better position for battling the redcoats coming up from Boston.  When British Commander John Pitcairn arrived, he made Wrights Tavern his headquarters.  According to Christine Sismondo, Pitcairn marched up to bar, ordered a brandy, pricked his finger, dripping a bit of blood into his drink and offered a toast to the rebel blood that would be shed that day.  He was correct.    That afternoon the first shots of the American Revolutionary War were fired.[18]

Eight and a half years later, on November 25^th, 1883, the British army left New York on what would be called, “Evacuation Day”, and General George Washington entered the city on something of a victorious pub-crawl.  The local chapter of the Sons Of Liberty met the general in Harlem at the Bull’s Head Tavern.  On Broadway, he was stopped at Cape’s Tavern for further revelry in his honor.  Finally Washington ended up at Fraunces Tavern, owned by his friend “Black Sam”, which is still at 54 Pearl Street today in Manhattan’s Finical District.  At the celebratory party drank fourteen healths were drank, one for each of the newly independent colonies, and one more for the “close Union of these States” to “guard the Temple they have erected to Liberty.”[19]

Thank you for listening to the episode zero of the Bear Flag Libation.  I know it’s a lot of episode for not having a number, but aside from not actually spending any time in California, this episode is unique in that I drew entirely on secondary sources in creating it.  I relied heavily on Christine Sismondo’s America Walks Into a Bar, not only for information, but also as a roadmap to other sources.  However, normally I will be conducting original research and I will be centering a narrative on a particular bar from around the Golden State.  In the next episode I’ll be visiting the Swallow’s Inn Saloon in San Juan Capistrano, in South Orange County.  You’ll be hearing a bit about the Spanish colonization of California, the urban evolution of the Southland and about the bar that was so rough that when I was a kid, my mom made us cross the street to avoid even walking past it.

The Bear Flag Libation is part of my master’s thesis project in Public History at Cal-State East Bay, so I’d like to extend another big thanks to Dr. Linda Ivey who has the vision and patience to allow me to do something like this to get my MA.

I’d also like to thank Anthony Lukens of the brilliant San Diego band, The Donkeys.  Anthony plays all the instruments on this show’s theme song, “Lodi” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.  And thank you to Mike Martin of San Francisco for designing the Bear Flag Libation logos that you’ll see if you visit BearFlagLibation.blogspot.com.  There you can see fully sited copy of each script, a bibliography, pictures, maps and news on upcoming shows.  I’m not putting Mike’s designs to much good use yet, but hope to once this business of actually producing content gets under way.  I hope release a new episode every three weeks, but defiantly won’t go a month without bringing you a new show.

You can also follow the show on facebook at facebook.com/bearflaglibation.  Please give us a like.  And please download the show in iTunes, and if you like what you hear, give it a quick review so other people will be able to find it.  If you don’t like what you hear, tell me why in an email at BearFlagLibation@gmail.com.  Feedback can only make this thing better.  And, of course, tell your friends.  See you in a couple weeks at the Swallow’s Inn.

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[1] Christine Sismondo, America Walks into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4-6.

[2] Adolph S. Oko, “Francis Drake and Nova Albion,” California Historical Society Quarterly 43, no. 2 (June 1964).

[3] Sismondo, America Walks, 6.

[4] Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol (New York: Gotham, 2009), 86-87;  Mike Berardino, “Mike Tyson explains one of his most famous quotes,” Sun Sentinel, November 9, 2012, accessed October 10, 2013, http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2012-11-09/sports/sfl-mike-tyson-explains-one-of-his-most-famous-quotes-20121109_1_mike-tyson-undisputed-truth-famous-quotes.

[5] Sismondo, America Walks, 5.

[6] Sismondo, America Walks, 15.

[7] Sismondo, America Walks, 17-20.

[8] Sismondo, America Walks, 12; Ibed, 23-24.

[9] Sismondo, America Walks, 45.

[10] Mathew Pearl, “A Poe Death Dossier: Discoveries and Queries in the Death of Edgar Allan Poe: Part II,” The Edgar Allen Poe Review 8 (Spring 2007), 9-10.

[11] Sismondo, America Walks, 48-51.

[12] Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 50-55.

[13] Sismondo, America Walks, 54-56.

[14] Sismondo, America Walks, 57-60; Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising : Cities and the American Revolution (New York: Oxford Univeristy Press: 2007), 85-86.

[15] Sismondo, America Walks, 62-69.

[16] Sismondo, America Walks, 74-75; Ibid, 71-72.

[17] T.H. Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 14-15; Ibid, 67.

[18] Arthur Bernon Tourtellot, Lexington and Concord: The Beginning of the War of the American Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000), 152-54; Sismondo, America Walks, 72.

[19] Sismondo, America Walks, 76; Sons of the Revolution In the State of New York, Inc., “Fraunces Tavern Museum: 54 Pearl Street History”, accessed November 11, 2013, http://frauncestavernmuseum.org/history-and-education/history-of-fraunces-tavern/.

Pictures-
Map of New Amsterdam by Peter Spier at  http://www.teachout.org/vna/map.html.
Portrait of John Winthrop from the PBS at http://www.pbs.org/godinamerica/people/john-winthrop.html.
Portrait of Elisha Cooke Jr. from his wikipedia page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Cooke,_Jr.
Picture of the Green Dragon from Boston Caucas wikipedia page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Caucus.
Map of 1776 New England (with a much larger view of it) from http://www.sonofthesouth.net/revolutionary-war/maps/new-england-map.htm.