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this book, he will stand in for the countless ranks of his colleagues whom history overlooked; his character and actions for those of all bartenders. Fortunately, if there was one old-time bartender whose shoulders could support such a burden, it was Jerry Thomas.

AN AMERICAN, AND A SAILOR, TOO
    Oh, to have seen him as Edward Hingston saw him in 1863, presiding over the luxurious marble-and-gilt barroom of the Occidental, the newest and best hotel in San Francisco:
     
    He is a gentleman who is all ablaze with diamonds. There is a very large pin, formed of a cluster of diamonds, in the front of his magnificent shirt, he has diamond studs at his wrists, and gorgeous diamond rings on his fingers—diamonds being “properties” essential to the calling of a bar-tender in the United States. . . . It must be remembered, however, that he is in California, and that he is engaged as a “star.”
     
    When Hingston encountered him, Thomas was, as he noted, “one of the most distinguished, if not the chief, of American ‘bartenders, ’” his name “as familiar in the Eastern States as it now is out here in California. . . . In the manufacture of a ‘cocktail,’ a ‘julep,’ a ‘smash’ or an ‘eye-opener,’ none can beat him, though he may have successful rivals.” This “Jupiter Olympus of the bar,” as the preface to his book had dubbed him the year before, was thirty-three years old and he was pulling down a cool hundred dollars a week, more than the vice president of the United States.
    Jerry P. Thomas—alas, we may never know what the “P.” stands for—was “an American . . . and a sailor too,” as he told a reporter from the New York Sun in 1882. He was a gold miner, a Broadway dandy, a (minor) theatrical impresario, an art collector, an artist himself (of sorts, anyway), an inventor, an author, and a gambler. A footloose type, at one time or another he tended bar in just about every place where conviviality was at high ebb, from London, England, to Virginia City, Nevada. And wherever he was, he was a man as good as any who stood before his bar, and a damned sight better than most.
    Jerry Thomas was born on or around November 1, 1830. Or maybe it was 1829—things like strict chronological accuracy don’t seem to have been a primary concern of his (the 1830 date comes from his death certificate and seems like the best bet). In any case, the place was Sackets Harbor, New York, a garrison town on the chilly waters of Lake Ontario not far from the Canadian border. About his parents, Jeremiah and Mary Morris Thomas, we know nothing. We know he had a younger brother, George M., because they ran saloons together, but of other siblings we also know nothing. His early childhood is a blank. We can deduce that his social class wasn’t the highest, but only from his career choices. On the other hand, Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville came from “respectable” families, and they shipped out as sailors, too, and George M. Thomas ended up as a bank director. At some point in the mid-1840s, Jerry ended up in New Haven; whether he moved there with his family or by himself is another open question.
    Here’s the problem: Jerry Thomas was a bartender, not a poet or a politician. Bartenders were important men in their milieu, but that milieu—discussed below—compiled its historical record by anecdote and barroom reminiscence, not systematic investigation backed by documents. That doesn’t mean that we’re without resources to reconstruct his life, but they tend to be catch-as-catch-can, giving us intermittent, if often vivid, glimpses of the man as he moved through his world. These don’t extend to the part of his life before he learned how to mix drinks. According to the unusually accurate obituary published in his hometown paper, this occurred “at sixteen years of age, [when] he began life as a New Haven barkeeper.” New Haven, which was both a seaport and a college town, would have been an excellent