The Bear Flag Libation: November 2013

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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.

The Bear Flag Libation

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Saturday, November 30, 2013

Addendum to First and Last Chance Episode

Friday, November 29, 2013

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

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

pocked universe pending