Old Saloons in the West and the History of the Moonshine Masquarade

As the Gold Rush brought pioneers westward to the harsh frontier, Tripping Falls continued to thrive on its own as an agrarian community. All across the West, settlements were springing up all over the place. The rural population at the time was probably super annoyed with how trendy everything was getting. The Eastern U.S. transplants probably started giving different areas of town stupid new nicknames, like SoRoDeCo (South of the Rotting Dead Corpses). And you just know they talked about how “the sarsaparilla in the West just wasn’t as good as back home.” 

One thing every town needed to even be considered a town was a saloon. The history of saloons is a deep subject that could (and has) been researched and discussed at great length. The purpose here, however, is to just give a brief overview Old West saloon history and how the Moonshine Masquerade came to be. 

Early Saloons

The first place to call itself a saloon was “Brown’s Hole” near the Colorado-Wyoming-Utah border. Early saloons were anything from a tent slapped over a whiskey barrel, to a sawdust-covered room with some chairs and a bar. Eventually some fancier saloons emerged with fine decorations and high-end clientele. The Brown Russell, as it was originally named, was Tripping Falls’ second building, right after the Lodge. Today it is an often overlooked piece of Colorado history. 

Early saloons, by most accounts, were slightly different from how they’re depicted in every Western you’ve ever seen. To serve as a front for clergymen and the more respectable folks in town, saloons would often have a barber’s chair. This way, it was much easier for Father Fitzgerald to explain why he was in a saloon. “Just getting a shave and a haircut—two bits.”

Women generally weren’t present in the town’s saloon, at least not as patrons. The women who did regular the local watering holes were considered bawdy or rowdy, and didn’t enjoy a great reputation among the “decent folk.” On the other hand, in bigger cities like Denver and San Francisco, it wasn’t that odd to see high-society women enjoying a highball. 

Movie Depictions of Old West

In the movies, you often see a road-weary outlaw push his way through two swinging doors, give the stink-eye to cowardly locals, and slink up to the bar. The bartender goes about his business and plops down a bottle of whiskey with a shot glass, and he leaves the gunslinger to his business. Somewhere, coming from the backroom poker game, a voice yells out “he’s a cheat!” A gunfight breaks out and the saloon is soon destroyed from the inside out. Someone inevitably ends up being thrown through the window in the front of the saloon, and the bartender is left to clean up the mess. In reality, this might’ve happened on occasion, but it wasn’t the norm. There were plenty of bullets being shot in old saloons, and there were definitely some bad dudes in the Old West, we know that. But the average day in a saloon was probably a lot more relaxed than movies make it seem. 

For one thing, in the classier saloons, it might have been considered bad form just to order a “whiskey.” Cocktails were fashionable, and even Buffalo Bill Cody had a favorite mixed drink in his later years. In some of the rougher saloons, however, ordering a whiskey was fine. In these places, in fact, ordering a cocktail might’ve gotten your ass kicked. 

Beer was also very common in saloons; this fact seems to get overlooked in some movies. In Colorado, which has a long history of beer pioneering, beer was easy to make, readily available, and probably tasted a lot better than some of the poison that was being passed off as whiskey. But it wasn’t served ice-cold like it is today. It probably tasted cold though, after toiling away in hot-ass mineral mines and goat fields all day. 

‘Coffin Varnish’

Of course, there was a certain subset of miners and other hard-working folks who wanted only the strongest whiskey available, and they wanted their whiskey to burn all the way down. This burning effect was sometimes achieved by adding strychnine, gunpowder and all kinds of fun ingredients. 

To fill the demands of hard-living miners, fur traders, cowboys and other passers-through, saloons began to take on a more familiar form. Saloons did get rowdy. Drinking did cause a lot of noise and arguments. There were prostitutes. And there was a lot of drunken and disorderly behavior. As the noise and “immoral behavior” began to anger the quiet homesteaders of the West, more and more effort was put into banning saloons outright. The Anti-Saloon League was formed in response, and the Temperance Movement gained momentum. This was a successful platform to be sure, because many states in the West adopted prohibition a few years before the Volstead Act was passed in 1920. 

Tripping Falls During Prohibition

Enter mountain moonshiners — Colorado’s answer to prohibition. One of the few useful things transplants brought with them was the knowledge of how to make up a batch of moonshine. Since the mountains were generally less traveled — Tripping Falls especially so — the town became a paradise for bootleggers to hide their stashes. There was a special process for making moonshine at high altitude, and there was definitely a high price to pay if anyone had been caught distilling in prohibition-era Colorado. This required a heightened level of patience and anonymity. 

In order for the town to feel comfortable with the underground bootlegging that helped it thrive in the early 20s, a law was enacted requiring men and women to don face coverings when they were on the public streets. This way, no one could ever successfully identify a moonshiner if the Prohis ever came knocking. 

When prohibition was repealed in 1933, the townspeople of Tripping Falls had amassed such a collection of stylish face coverings, that it seemed a shame for them to go to waste. To celebrate Repeal Day, the Town immediately threw a party to celebrate, and thus the Moonshine Masquerade was born.