PLEASE DON’T SHOOT THE BARTENDER
Please don’t shoot the pianist; he is doing his best. That saying entered Western lore from an unlikely source—Oscar Wilde. The celebrated Irish poet and playwright did a lecture tour of the United States in 1882 that took him to Western mining camps. While declaiming in a saloon in Leadville, Colorado, he read those words on a sign over the piano.
The plea might also apply to bartenders, who, like their piano-playing colleagues, tried to do their best in often trying circumstances. Tending bar in the Old West could be dangerous work, and a good saloon man was not easily replaced, as he was far more than a simple drink pourer. Reflecting in 1931 on his own pre-Prohibition saloon visits, writer Travis Hoke described the ideal old-time barkeep as “a counselor in all the ways of life, recipient of confidences, disburser of advice, arbiter of disputes [and] authority on every subject.”
A bartender was not necessarily the barkeep (or saloon proprietor) and vice versa, though newspapers on the frontier used the terms interchangeably. Like every other business owner, a saloon man had to be willing to roll up his sleeves and go to work. That meant getting behind the bar. One too proud to tend bar was not likely to be successful. In 1885 saloon man John T. Leer of Fort Worth, Texas, bought out his partners in the Theatre Comique, and most nights he tended bar. To lure patrons from rival saloons, Leer shrewdly slashed the price of drinks, knowing most men weren’t there for the variety show.
There were no qualifications for being a bartender. In the early years few even knew how to mix the specialty drinks that came to be known as cocktails. Patrons could order either beer or whiskey. It was a bartender’s option whether to serve the good stuff or the “Who Hit John.” An absolute no-no was dipping into an employer’s stock. That could get
