Of the year 1825, history books make a big fuss over events like the opening of the Erie Canal and the testing of the nation’s first steam locomotive. But nowhere is there any mention of the birth of Jeremiah Thomas, arguably the world’s first modern bartender. The oversight is a careless one; of all the American contributions to civilization, few are as universally appreciated as the cocktail (what good is civilization if you can’t get a decent drink?), and Jerry Thomas would appear to be the preeminent figure in elevating drinking to its most enlightened state.
Like any important 19th century American, Thomas is, of course, part historical figure, part myth. Akin to Johnny Chapman with his storied apple seeds or Davy Crockett with his wilderness-taming grin, Thomas’s legend has him traversing the length and breadth of the continent, armed with his matched pair of silver mixing cups, single-handedly civilizing every saloon in his path. This vision of Thomas as tall tale is principally the result of an introduction written by Herbert Asbury to a 1928 reprinting of Thomas’s bartending guide, The Bon Vivant’s Companion. Considered the original mixology manual, The Bon Vivant’s Companion is a scholarly and colorful work describing the preparation of 463 different drinks, but its re-publication in Prohibition America, like Galileo proving Copernicus to the Inquisition, was simultaneously noble, defiant, and futile. Asbury’s contempt for the Volsteadian dark ages is apparent in his eulogistic account of the life and times of Jerry Thomas.
In describing the barman, Asbury writes, “…an imposing and lordly figure of a man, portly, sleek, and jovial, yet possessed of immense dignity. A great diamond gleamed in his shirt front, and a jacket of pure spotless white encased his great bulk; a huge and handsome mustache, neatly trimmed in the arresting style called walrus, adorned his lip and lay caressingly athwart his plump and rosy cheeks.”
To complement this mythic profile, the frontispiece of the 1928 edition depicts our hero making his most famous cocktail, the Blue Blazer. A mixture of Scotch whisky and boiling water, the Blazer is prepared by igniting the liquid and rapidly tossing the blue flaming stream back and forth between two metal mixing cups. Thomas is shown wielding a meteoric, 4-foot shaft of burning hooch, so confident in his skill that he doesn’t even look at his hands.
In the original 1862 manuscript, the illustration accompanying the Blue Blazer recipe is equally exaggerated, drawn with sharp barbs of flame that are just barely contained between the two mixing cups. In his instructions, Thomas writes: “A beholder gazing for the first time upon an experienced artist, compounding this beverage, would naturally come to the conclusion that it was a nectar for Pluto rather than Bacchus. The novice in mixing this beverage should be careful not to scald himself.” Kids, don’t try this at home lest you set fire to the huge and handsome mustache lying athwart your plump and rosy cheeks.
It is possible that the making of the Blue Blazer was the first use in modern drinkdom of metallic mixing vessels, and it is thought that the subsequent popularity of the Blazer led to the cocktail shakers of the 20th century. But to get to the invention of the Blue Blazer, we must go back to 1847. At this time, 22 year-old Thomas leaves his hometown of New Haven, Connecticut and boards a ship in New York bound for San Francisco. We may never know what inspires the young man to make a treacherous, two-year voyage around Cape Horn, but suffice to say that history has a way of taking care of legends.
Halfway through his journey, gold is discovered at Sutter’s Mill, and by the time the ship puts into port in ’49, the California Gold Rush is turning San Francisco into a boomtown. Could there be better opportunity for a young barman than an enterprising, feral, and, no doubt, thirsty society of prospectors?
It is reputedly one of these barbarous and bewhiskered fellows who storms into the bar of the El Dorado Hotel, where Thomas is assistant bartender, demanding (and it is necessary to quote Asbury’s account), “Bar-keep! Fix me up some hellfire that’ll shake me right down to my gizzard.!” Young New Englander that Thomas was, he probably didn’t have the slightest idea regarding the location or the nature of a gizzard, but he was more than willing to accept the challenge to shake this one. Using a pair of wood-handled silver cups that had, up until then, been bar décor, Thomas bedazzles the prospector and a crowd of onlookers by making a great spectacle of the conflagration of the first Blue Blazer. Then, according to Asbury, the grizzled man drank his poison and sank down into a chair stupefied. “He done it. Right down to my gizzard.”
If this story is true, it sets a precedent more important than the creation of a new cocktail – the presentation is everything. It is worth noting that the Blue Blazer is not all that different from a hot toddy, which is commonly drunk by someone suffering from a cold. The efficacy, therefore, of the Blazer on this alleged prospector relies on the fact that even before drinking, the man was giddy with pyromaniacal euphoria.
And so, as the Blue Blazer becomes one of the most popular cocktails in the West, both drink and inventor enter that ephemeral world called Drinklore. For the next several years, roughly 1850 to 1865, Jerry Thomas is transformed into an American tall tale legend – adventurer/barman, along the way adopting the nickname “Professor.” His travels take him to the gold fields of the Yuba River, back to New Haven, then south to study the mysteries of the mint julep. He spends time in New Orleans and Chicago, and then the Planters’ House in St. Louis, where, as head bartender, he invents his other cold weather drink, the Tom and Jerry. From St. Louis, he travels to New York to become head bartender at the Metropolitan Hotel. Leaving the Metropolitan, he travels briefly to Europe but soon returns to open a luxuriously appointed bar on Broadway at Washington Square in October of 1860. But destiny demands that he return to San Francisco (this time by covered wagon), where, as head bartender at the Occidental Hotel, he must prepare a new cocktail for a traveler on his way to Martinez, California. They name the drink the Martinez, and thus, Thomas will be credited with concocting the precursor to the modern martini.
Concurrently, and despite what distractions the Civil War might provide, The Bon Vivant’s Companion is published in New York City. The author will be unavailable for comment, though, as he is travelling with a wagon train to Virginia City, where he refines the skills of local barmen and makes a small fortune in gold dust. Then, having influenced every remotely civilized region in the country, Thomas returns to New York where he apparently remains for the rest of his life.
All, some, or precious few of these details might be true, but insofar as Thomas is a folk hero, he, like his contemporaries Crockett and Chapman, is significantly connected to history in ways that are hard to discover for the layers of mythology that have been applied over the years. For contemplation, note that in 1859, when Thomas becomes head barman at the Metropolitan Hotel, the establishment is managed by William Marcy Tweed, known as “Boss” Tweed because he controls the powerful and corrupt political force of Tammany Hall. In 1865, when Thomas returns from his travels, he opens a bar at Broadway and 22nd Street, where he supposedly hosts a public exhibition of drawings by a young artist named Thomas Nast.
Nast, who will become America’s most influential political cartoonist, counts among his major works the 1871 caricatures that play a major role in the indictment of Tweed and his corrupt Tammany Ring. He is also responsible for the Democratic Donkey, the Republican Elephant, and our image of Santa Claus. President Ulysses S. Grant is supposed to have proclaimed: “Two things elected me. The sword of Sheridan and the pencil of Nast.” The illustrator was a great admirer, and eventually close friend, of Grant, and according to Herber Asbury, Grant was so fond of the Blue Blazer that he gave Jerry Thomas a cigar. Of course, we will never know if Grant met Jerry Thomas through Nast or at the Metropolitan Hotel, where Grant surely stayed, or even at the Planters’ House in St. Louis, the city in which Grant lived before the war.
Somewhere among these disjointed and gossamer details – and there are many others – is the story of a man. That saloons played a significant role in 19th century America, especially in New York City politics, is a matter of record. And the perception of Tomas as a bartender of great cultural importance may have even more basis in fact than we will ever know. As his biography is devoid of mortal remains (there is not mention of a woman in his life, no apparent knowledge of the time and place of death, no reference even to the kid brother who was once his partner), we can only raise a glass in honor of his ghost and offer our thanks for all he has done – whatever that might have been.
