Tasting the Stars: the Story of Champagne.

Here we come a-caroling among the leaves so green,

Here we come a-wandering so fair to be seen

Love and Joy come to you, and a Merry Christmas too

And God Bless You and send you a Happy New Year

God send you a Happy New Year.

Everyone is familiar with the Caroling Song. I had to learn it in music class when I was in elementary school, along with some additional verses, nearly forty years ago, and I still remember the song to this very day. The second verse goes;

We are not your daily beggars who go from door to door,

We are your neighbors children whom you have seen before.

And the third verse;

Good Master and Good Mistress while you’re sitting by the fire

Pray think of us poor children who are wandering in the mire.

But did you know that the song was originally an English song about children begging for an alcoholic beverage as they went from door to door singing Christmas carols? Yeah, of course our teachers left out the verses about drinking. And the verses we did learn had been changed dramatically from the original.

Christmas and alcohol have been together since the earliest days of the holiday, even before Christmas was Christmas, that is a celebration of the birth of Christ. It has origins in pagan celebrations of the Winter Solstice, and we all know what the pagans liked to do; drink. So this week we are going to take a look at the relationship between alcohol and winter celebrations, including some of the more famous drinks associated with the holiday.

When I bought an old bar in Jefferson City 16 years ago, the rumor had been propagated for many years, by previous owners and others, that it was the oldest bar west of the Mississippi River. At the time, I was working for the State Historic Preservation Office, and I knew that the bar wasn’t even considered to be the oldest in our state.

Folks who live here will come to the bar, usually with friends from out of town, and they’ll say, “Tell them, tell them- isn’t this the oldest bar west of the Mississippi?”

It takes a little diplomacy to tell them that it isn’t true without embarrassing them in front of their friends. I usually say something like, “Well, we used to think that it was, but some research has shown that it isn’t,” or “yeah, it’s easy to make that mistake, but it’s just the oldest bar here in town.”

They always look disappointed. Sometimes even miffed, I guess because I shattered their cherished beliefs, something they had boasted to others; “Our pub is the oldest bar west of the Mississippi!” I’m sorry, folks, but its just not true. Don’t be upset with me; I can’t in good conscience perpetuate the myth.

But people want to believe, they want to have a connection, a physical connection, an emotional connection, to their history and their past.

When I take tour groups to Ireland, the old pubs are some of the biggest attractions. They want to have a drink in the bar where Michael Collins took his last pint before he was assassinated, or where JFK hung out when he worked in Dublin in the late 1940’s, or where Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh used to have it out.

There is something about these places; these old bars, these dens of imbibing from a time of antiquity. For those of us who like to bend an elbow, there is something neat about having a drink in one of these touchstones to the past.

Back to the question; what is the oldest bar west of the Mississippi River? Well, I wanted to know that myself, and now you probably do, as well. Over the years I have done some digging. The list that I’ve pulled together, is not exactly the ten oldest bars west of the Mississippi, but it is the oldest bar in each of 10 different states west of Mississippi- The complete list of the oldest bar in each of the 24 states west of the Mississippi River can be found at the bottom of the blog

So by process of elimination, the oldest bar on this list is going to be the oldest bar west of the big river. Another thing, these are just a list of the oldest verifiable bar in each state that I could find. All of these establishments have been historically documented to have either been built or had the business started on the year given, in as much as I could authenticate the dates. I double-checked as much as the internet and the National Register of Historic Places would allow, and there is not a lot of scholarly research done on this subject; so, for all of you aspiring History PhD candidates out there, especially those in Historic Preservation, you’re welcome, here’s the start of your thesis subject.

And regarding Prohibition from 1920 to 1933; everybody gets a pass. Some areas of the country the Volstead Act was not enforced at all, while in other states, violators were staunchly cracked down upon. Also, some of these listed, after doing the research, I found were not continuously open. But, unless I found another property that had a stronger claim, I went with these...

Taxes. One of the founding principles of our country, or actually the reluctance to pay them that was the founding principle. Needless to say, we’ve had a bad relationship with taxation ever since.

Nobody likes to pay taxes, but we can all agree there are some things we can do better as a community than we can do by ourselves. Building roads, public utilities, law enforcement, fire department, the list goes on and on. But, defense, is a big check mark on the list. As a nation, one third of our federal budget is devoted to the military.

But, how do you finance a war effort if you can’t levy taxes? During the Revolutionary War the young United States had that very problem. They literally begged, borrowed, and stole whatever money they could from various sources by any means possible, including piracy (they called it “privateering”). They also obtained high interest loans from the other countries, including France and Spain, they cut deals with investors from the Netherlands, and borrowed hard currency from all 13 colonies. Interesting times they were; fighting a war for independence on borrowed money and borrowed time, being crushed by interest payments- thoughts of paying down the principle were far off in the future. They were in a spiral, from the beginning of the rebellion in 1775 until the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the only real choice that the Continental Congress had was to continually borrow more money to cover the interest on the loans that were already in arrears. By the end of the war the world’s newest republic was broke. The Continental Dollar was worthless, they owed money to investors and the states, and had nothing to pay the soldiers and sailors of the Continental Army or the US Navy, many of which had not been compensated from the beginning of their service. Their first order of business was getting the government in order, and to do that they had to figure out a way to implement and levy taxes and raise some coin… But what were they going to tax?

One of the things they decided on was whiskey. And that decision almost caused a civil war seventy years before the big one.

When I was in elementary school we were told the stories of the great American folk heroes that helped explore, settle, and exploit the American frontier. Some of you are old enough to remember the guys I’m talking about- Walt Disney made them famous back in the 1950’s. They actually showed us the cartoons in the classroom. There was Paul Bunyan with his Blue Ox, Babe, who conquered the north woods by chopping down and clearing out millions of acres of pine trees from Maine to Minnesota. And the steel driving man, John Henry, who could drive a rock drill with a sledgehammer faster than a steam powered machine, cutting tunnels through the Appalachian Mountains for the expanding railroads across the country. And Pecos Bill who was raised by coyotes on the high plains of Texas, used a rattlesnake as a lasso, once roped a tornado and rode it into submission, and scared all of the war paint of them Injuns, which made the painted desert.

Yeah, kind of gave all of us in elementary school back then a warped sense of history, being that some of our greatest American heroes were completely made up bullshit.

But, there was one of Disney’s American Legends that was an actual person; Johnny Appleseed. And according to Disney, he may have been the most IMPORTANT of all American frontiersmen.

Johnny Appleseed Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=484AJlOnOnc

According to old Walt’s cartoon, Johnny Appleseed’s story was told by an old settler who knew him well (more on that guy later). Armed with only a Bible, a bag of apple seeds, and a tin pot for a hat, Johnny was encouraged by his VERY own guardian angel to go west and plant orchard after orchard of apple trees from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania, over the Appalachian frontier into Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, so the settlers across this growing land could have tasty apples to make Apple Tarts, Apple Cobbler, Apple Sauce, Apple Butter, Apple Fritters, Apple Cake, and, on and on and on. We were all taught that only because of Johnny Appleseed and his dedication to spreading the apple across our nation, we have that most American of foods, Apple Pie.

But, there was one thing that Disney didn’t really explain; John Chapman, (his real name) wasn’t growing apples for Apple Pie. He was growing them for cider. And not the kind of cider that we let the kids drink on Halloween. No, John Chapman was cultivating orchards and nurseries of apples for one purpose; hard cider, Early America’s favorite alcoholic beverage.

Thirst. The physiological drive to drink liquid. It’s deadlier than hunger. You can survive without food for three weeks. But, without liquid sustenance, even in ideal conditions, you’d be hard pressed to make it a week before your body began to shut down. Of course, the most abundant liquid in our world is water. Some species of animals and plants are made up of almost 95% water. We humans are only 68%, but every living thing we know is at least 60% H2O. So- thirst. Other than breathing, it is the strongest compulsion that we have; more than hunger, more than sex… well, usually more than sex, at least in normal people.

Another urge that most species of fauna seem to share is the pursuit of altered consciousness. Grazing herd animals in North America seek out Jimson Weed- what is more commonly called Locoweed. Reindeer and caribou are known to forage for mushrooms and fungi in the boreal forests of Canada, and Scandinavia in a pursuit of psychotropic trips- Maybe that’s how Santa Claus gets them to fly. And let’s not forget our household tabby cat, which if allowed to, would stay so looped on catnip that it might skip eating altogether.

But, the preferred substance to get messed up on by most species, from elephants, to birds, to snails, and man, is alcohol. We humans have perfected the intersection of these two instinctual desires of thirst and getting drunk.

We generally think of History, that is History with the capitol H, as one big monolithic thing; all of the activities of human beings since the beginning of man’s recordation of events. Sometimes we divide the history of mankind into, say the history of a race of people, or a culture or civilization or a society, or of a piece of land. But, as the philosopher of science, Karl Popper noted, “There is really no history of mankind, there are only the many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life.”

And the one aspect of human life that has been with us since before we even started to write down our history is - alcohol.