…for your bar drinks? In most movies, the bartender pulls a whiskey bottle off the shelf-and you sit there pouring the rotgut down your gullet. Did you pay by the bottle?
And, when the bad guys shoot up the place-who pays for the lost stocks?
I understand local whiskey wasn’t too good in the olden days-was most of the liquor consumer in the wEST (1865-1900) LOCALLY MADE ROTGUT?
I’ve occasionally, mainly in small town bars, seen bar bottles that have strips down the side indicating how many shots remain in them. They’re marked as to how full they were when the previous customer finished with them, and thus you pay for the difference between that amount and how much is left when you give the bottle back.
I don’t know if this even exists anymore – it seems kind of unhygenic to hand a bottle over to a customer and have it be returned – but it is something that was an option a lot more recently than the old west.
When I was working at the Denver Post I remember looking in some old files and finding an old story from circa 1880 about a shipment of liquor coming in from the east and making it in before the snow fell. I think Burt Lancaster made a movie about it too.
But I also remember my grandfather half seriously talking about bars making up the liquor in the back room where they distilled hooch and then cut it to taste with any number of flavorings. My grandfather went back at least to the 1890s. I also remember old fading signs on the sides of ancient buildings when I was growing up that advertised different distilling companies.
So I have a hunch that both things happened. Good booze was brought in, bad booze was made and cut and probably some medicore stuff was brought in strong and cut.
As to paying, I seem to remember my grandfather talking about paying for a bottle or a shot. I also remember him saying that bar owners would drain remains of a number of bottles into a single bottle and reselling that as a new bottle. He said a lot of bar owner would reseal and relable bottles every evening. I remember as a kid watching people cough and spit into bottles and imagining that ending up in front of someone else the next evening.
When I started drinking, I would only drink canned beer.
Maybe the whiskey was free - if they wanted you to drink enough of it to be interested in the whores.
Whores?
Edited to add: Damn you, last poster!
I always heard it was “shave and a haircut: 2 bits”.
Wait, did you mean “salons” or “saloons”?
[sub]Sorry. I corrected the spelling. Carry on. samclem [/sub]
Don’t forget, there was often a card game going on, or a faro layout, or crap table. Perhaps some drinks were comped for gamblers.
As for the rest of them, I’ve seen jacquilynne’s “bottle measurement” method once or twice as well; again, usually in small, out-of-the-way places. The bill is settled when the bottle is returned, and the level measured. It would be reasonable to imagine this method being used in the Old West.
And it may not be the most reliable of sources, but I have read a lot of Luke Short, Louis L’Amour, and other famous Western authors. It often happened in those stories that if somebody just wanted a shot or a beer (or a cigar; some saloons sold those too), they’d tend to pay at the time it was served. Prices were low–beer tended to be a nickel in Luke Short’s books–so if you were paying as you drank, small change was probably the order of the day. This may be where the movies differ–the action (saloon brawls, gunfights, poker games), not the small details (like paying for a drink), is important in the visual medium of film. Plus, when folks do pay, it’s much more impressive on-screen to flip the barman a big silver dollar or gold piece than it is to boringly slide a nickel across the bar.
You all may already know this, but the term “two bits”, “four bits” and the like came from the method of paying things like bar bills. The bartender or merchant would cut a gold coin into eight pieces, or ‘bits’.
I though that in 1890 a nickel was a significant amount of money, probably close to what a dollar would buy today.
This started in the American West? I thought bits had been around longer than that, and that the practice of chopping up coins began in the UK.
The Last Chance Deadhorse Gulch Cooperage, Cartage and Insurance Company–assuming, of course, that your shoot-'em-up premiums were paid on time.
Circa 1987, near the Florida/Alabama state line, I walked into a small, rural bar long after the mandatory closing time for liquor stores in the area, and asked for a bottle of whiskey. The barkeep named a reasonable price, and I paid up and took it out the door.
Then, and now, I wonder if this was a legal transaction (actually, since I was underage, I’m certain that it wasn’t, but you know what I mean,) and I can’t say that I know what would have happened if I had tried to drink it in the establishment. But I can say that you don’t have to go as far back as the 1800’s to find examples of this sort of thing, and that I’m pretty sure that if gunfire had broken out, I wouldn’t have been offered any sort of reimbursement for the remaining spirits.
Well before the Old West, certainly, in the form of the Spanish eight real coin:
You are right-I used to have one of those tokens-it said on one side “Good for 1 Screw”, on the other side, was the name of the establishment.
“Johnson’s Hardware”? 
99% of those tokens are modern concoctions(fakes), sold at flea markets.
I’m not aware of any gold coins that were ever “cut” after they were originally struck.
As to silver coins, struck by Spain in the New World after 1732(when they first started making the “modern” round ones rather than the irregular “cobs” prior to that), I think the idea that they were routinely “cut” into bits is rather farfetched. The term “bit” was used to refer to the smaller denominations of struck coins such as the 1/2 Real. There certainly was little if any cutting of dollar-sized coins into smaller pieces in the 1800’s in the US.
It would appear that I got my history muddled up on this, although the post about the Spanish real rings a bell.
As to how guys paid for their rotgut, obviously they paid with gold. Gold! Hee hee! Gold I tell ya! Nuggets as big as your prostate! Goooooldddd!!!