Saloons are certainly a staple of the American West. From gun-slinging cowboys to hard-drinking outlaws to hard-scrabble sheriffs — when you think of the Wild West, you think of saloons.
Homer Thiel documented hundreds of the saloons that crowded Tucson’s streets in the late 1800s. He even dug one of them up.
Thiel is an archaeologist and the author of the book "Saloons of Tucson, Arizona Territory" — a 337-page chronicling of the rich history of Tucson saloons. The Show spoke with him about the characters, drinks and his inspiration for the book: an excavation of the Cactus Saloon on historic Block 83 in downtown Tucson.
Full conversation
HOMER THIEL: You’d be surprised what is preserved under buildings and asphalt parking lots in both Tucson and in Phoenix. Once you strip off the building foundations and the parking lots, you’re going to find the remnants of both historic period stuff and also the pre-contact Native American villages are waiting to be found.
LAUREN GILGER: So when did you start to realize what you were discovering under there was saloons?
THIEL: Well, so prior to even starting the project, we look at a Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, which are maps created by fire insurance companies so that adjusters in New York City can know what buildings are to be insured in downtown Tucson. And these maps in Tucson start in 1886 and go up into the 1950s.
And so you look at those and you can see which buildings are there, and they’ll say “saloon” on them. And then you look at city directories or newspapers, and you can identify what they are. Like in this case, it was the Cactus Saloon.
GILGER: OK, tell us about the Cactus Saloon. When you started digging under the city for this particular spot, what did you find?
THIEL: So we targeted the backyard areas of the buildings on this particular project, because that’s where you find the outhouse pits and the wells. And prior to running water, people had outdoor bathrooms, and they would use them for maybe five or 10 years, and then they would pick up the building and move it. And then they’d use the old outhouse pit as a trash dump.
And so we excavated an outhouse from the Cactus Saloon. We would dig down in 1-foot levels, collect the artifacts, do another level. We take soil samples to get the plant remains. We collect all the animal bones, and we found a large amount of artifacts.
GILGER: Like what?
THIEL: Well, we found various types of alcoholic beverage bottles: whiskey and gin and champagne and wine. We found soda bottles. We found many shoe polish bottles. So there was a shoeshine stand inside the saloon.
We found fragments of an Anheuser-Busch mirror that once hung up behind the bar. And one of the cool things we found was pieces of the front window with words painted on them. We had the letters NY for New York, that was probably advertising a type of beer, and we had the letters F-O-O for food.
And one of the things that people don’t know about old time saloons is they offered a free lunch if you bought a beer. And in this case, the Cactus Saloon, you’d get a sardine or a cheese or a ham sandwich once you bought a beer.
GILGER: Once you bought a beer, you get your ham sandwich with it. That’s awesome. I mean, so what intrigued you about this idea of old saloons in Tucson? Was it this excavation and finding these old things, or did you start to realize this was a broader picture? There were a lot of these around back then.
THIEL: So this started out as an archeology project. I did some research in the other saloons, and this project took place in 2005. And that meant reading through reels of microfilm.
But in the years since then, all the newspapers have been scanned in and are available online. And so you could search the word “saloon” and find articles about saloons. And during COVID, when I didn’t have anything else to do, I decided to research every saloon in Tucson and found information on over 300 of them.
GILGER: Three-hundred of them! My goodness. So this was quite a saloon town, it sounds like.
THIEL: Yes. At one time there were at least 34 separate saloons for a town of less than 10,000 people.
GILGER: My goodness. [LAUGHS] I mean, I have to say, it does sort of play into the idea of what a town like Tucson might have been like back then. Like this idea of the Wild West. Is that what you found when you started researching these places? That it was gunfights and raucous drinking that we might assume based on old movies?
THIEL: That is exactly the opposite of what happened.
GILGER: Ha.
THIEL: So in the territorial period — I searched from 1860 to 1914 — and during that 54-year period, there were eight murders associated with saloons. Saloons really served a purpose for all the many single men in Tucson who didn’t have any other entertainment venues.
And so going to the saloon and having a drink, playing a game of cards, that was a fun activity to do. There was eventually an opera house, and eventually they had movie theaters, but there wasn’t much else to do.
GILGER: So it was a kind of a community center, almost?
THIEL: Yes. And each of them was different. So if you wanted to go to the Mexican saloons down on Meyer Street, you could go there. Or you could go to the ones that had restaurants associated with them and have a meal and have a drink. A lot of them had gambling games of various types.
They also had music. But eventually the city of Tucson decided to start cleaning up things, and eventually music was banned from being in saloons.
GILGER: Music of all things, not the gambling?
THIEL: Guess what? Gambling was also banned.
GILGER: Ah, there you go. So tell us about some of your favorite tidbits, maybe characters that you’ve uncovered in this. Like there are owners and people — a lot of immigrants who came in and started saloons in Tucson, it sounds like.
THIEL: Yes. So there were a lot of Italian, Austrian, French and German saloon owners, or at least employees.
There was a guy named Mr. Barloggi, who was from Italy, and he had a machine where you crank the handle, and he looked in this opening, and you could watch sort of an old-fashioned movie. Well, somebody reported them, and the sheriff came and looked at that movie and was horrified that it was a dirty movie. So he took the machine into the sheriff’s office and went up and reported it to the mayor and city council. And they all trooped down to the sheriff’s office, and they all cranked the handle to watch this movie and were just horrified by it.
And so they called in Mr. Barloggi and he said, “I didn’t know this was a bad thing.” ... And then they took his license for operating a saloon away.
GILGER: Over a bad movie, huh?
THIEL: Yes. And of course I’m really curious, what was it?
GILGER: What was in the movie? Yeah, yeah. So you have to tell me, because 337 saloons you’ve kind of uncovered here and documented in this book, and you’ve spent a lot of time learning about these places and documenting them. If you had to pick one that you could go back in time and go to, what would it be?
THIEL: I would go to — well, there would be two. I’d want to go to the Cactus Saloon, because I dug it up. And then there was the Congress Hall Saloon, and that one started in May of 1868. And that was the fancy saloon. And the surviving photographs of the interior show just how beautiful it was. And they had a cabinet of minerals and an elk head, and it was an interesting place.
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