I was just watching some old Howard Hawks/John Wayne westerns on AMC. It seems (to me), that the first thing that the cowboys did (after a long train drive), was to hit the local saloon and get hammered.
Was this the case? Was the saloon the center of life in these western cow towns?
I’m wondering if their stereotypically wild behavior might be caused by rolling in to a town having been very dry for weeks, and then resuming their previous alcohol consumption immediately without ramping up, so the first day the alcohol causes double the effect in behavior per drink. Not that I have experience in that or anything.
Heh, I imagine you can figure it out by watching how people drink now. I doubt it was much different. They drank when they wanted to unwind, and they got drunk no more or less than your average working class bloke. aqm
Folks like Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, & Wild Bill Hickcock made their reputations by taming cowtowns. Liquored up cowboys carrying firearms isn’t a movie invention.
If you have ever gone to a real “Ghost Town” you will note that they all had a saloon. That should indicate it was a popular attraction in town - I mean, what else did they have to do but drink and whore around?
Plus, if I were out working with stinking cattle for weeks on end, you can damn well bet I would get hammered out of my mind in a saloon the minute I got to a real town.
To more or less reiterate what’s been said: cowboys often spent months out on the unfenced range or on remote ranches. They’d probably be alloted a daily ration of liquor but they had long hours of hard work to perform each and every day (cattle don’t know when it’s Sunday). The culmination of their work for that season would be the cattle drive, when the cattle were driven to the nearest railhead to be shipped out to places like Chicago and St. Louis to be slaughtered. It was then that the owners would receive payment for the cattle sold and pay off what they owed the hands. So you would have a phenomenon similar to what happened when a ship made port: the hands would get payed, go on a binge of drinking, whoring and gambling, and once they were dead broke it would be time to start the yearly cycle again.
Basically they did the same thing in Australia. Many a man died from being an alcoholic.
Something I’ve wondered about but haven’t bothered to research is why whisky? Why not beer and ale?
I know they didn’t have a way to keep beer cold, but isn’t cold beer a fairly modern thing anyway? People have drunk beer and ale for centuries.
So why whisky?
Beer will go bad if not handled properly in transit and has a poor shelf life if not kept cool. Whiskey is stable once bottled.
Not to mention that it’s a lot easier to ship a bottle of whiskey than it is to ship a barrel of beer. A wagonload of beer won’t sell for half as much at its destination as a wagonload of whiskey will.
John Wesley Hardin once shot a man for chuggin’ too loud.
Spending money like a drunken sailor conveys the same meaning. Both groups would get paid weeks or months worth of wages at the end of a trip and were notarious for blowing much or all of it in a giant binge.
Any even halfway sizable western town had pretensions to culture, though. As soon as families settled there would be a variety of plays, lectures, presentations, entertainers, circuses, ball teams, rodeos, and any and every device known to pass time in those days. An astonishing number of small western towns built opera houses.
That doesn’t mean that saloons weren’t well represented. They get a good attendance today with far more ways of killing time. But most of the time they were off limits to women and children so they insisted that other forms of entertainment be available. And the temperance movement was a major factor in 19th century America. The state of Kansas put a ban on alcohol sales in its Constitution as early as 1881.
It’s basically an “all of the above” type of answer. If a town was so small that it housed nothing but a saloon, a blacksmith, a feed lot, and a few houses, of course the saloon would be the town center. It’s like a modern day tourist trap, feeding off the money of outsiders.
Larger towns tried to emulate eastern culture in every way. Every neighborhood in a large eastern city would have a number of local bars. So would western towns. They might be the center for a segment of the population, but not for everyone.
The religious makeup of the area would play a large part. The temperance movement, because of its heavily Protestant component, was a midwestern and western one, weaker in the cities of the northeast where Catholics were in the majority.
And cowboys were a large and varied group, with lots of young men doing the job for a few years before getting out. Most groups of young men in most cultures tend to drink more heavily so that’s a huge bias in the equation.
Makes sense. So all those people who drank beer in medieval times must have brewed their own, or lived close to a brewer.
appleciders, the economics makes sense too. Thanks.
What did cowpokes or sailors need with sworn documents? 
This might have a factual answer (at least in general terms based on history), so I’m moving it to GQ.
In real life cowboys got off trains or their horses and immediately head over to the nearest church, synagogue or mosque.
The only used those bottles of alochol, to smash each other over the head with. This happened when they got into fights over which God was better.
I came across some statistics suggesting that per capita alcohol consumption in the United States peaked around 4 gallons in the 1830s and was about 2.18 gallons in 2000. I would guess in the old West it was closer to the 1830s mark. Remember before pasteurization and other methods, many liquids will go bad quickly. Not whiskey.
Brewing was a woman’s job. Liquid bread it was. Brewsters made batches for the family, and anything left over could be sold for some spending money.
But it wasn’t as wild as you would think, either - read through some old collections of the newspapers from Tombstone and the like. Falling off horses was a leading cause of death, knives the preferred method of murder, and the cowboys basically got drunk up about the same as a ship full of sailors hitting San Diego. Let’s call it more a movie exaggeration than invention.
(PS - IMHO the people you name made their reputations more by the Penny Dreadfulls than actual deads. Although I will admit that its hard sometimes to separate the two.)
That…just…ain’t…right.
One would need some saloons to just cancel out the opera houses.
Opera!?!