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young man in Chicago when in early 1849 he first heard the news of gold being found. Michael Walsh was, fittingly enough, a journeyman brewer. At the time, Walsh was chafing under the stern direction of his mentor and father-in-law, master brewer Hans Koenig. True, Hans had taught him the marvelous craft of making beer. And Hans had allowed the young man to marry his only daughter, the tall and comely Adeline. And the old braumeister had even built a home for his daughter and son-in-law when the first of their three children had been born.
    But Michael Walsh and Hans Koenig could not agree on their beer.
    Herr Koenig insisted that beer be brewed only one way — the way he had learned. The way German law had decreed beer should be brewed since medieval times. Michael Walsh had no objection to brewing his father-in-law’s way. It made a grand beer, right enough. But he, too, came from a country with a proud tradition of brewing and distilling, and anytime Michael tried to brew some fine dark stout, even in his own house, Hans would fly into a rage about “Irish swill,” throw all of Michael’s wonderful elixir into the street, and threaten to take back his daughter, his grandchildren and the house in which Michael lived.
    All of which led Michael Walsh, at age thirty-one, to sell the house his father-in-law had fortuitously put in his name, buy two wagons, four oxen, brewing equipment and all the supplies Adeline insisted upon, bid the bitter Hans farewell and set off for California with his family to brew Irish stout for all those miners, many of them his countrymen, making ten to fifteen dollars a day.
    He was sure they were thirsty. He was sure his fortune would soon be made.
    The early part of the Walsh’s journey was relatively easy. They drove their wagons, in caravan with those of four other families leaving Chicago, across the blessedly flat and relatively settled prairies of Illinois to St. Louis. From there, they enjoyed the comparative comfort of a steamboat ride to Independence, Missouri.
    But once in Independence, the place where large parties of migrants formed for the westward push across the vast wilderness, life became a great deal more precarious. The plague of cholera struck. The disease was debilitating at the very least, producing bouts of diarrhea, projectile vomiting of blood and, most commonly, death.
    Michael and Adeline were fearful for their family: nearly panicked on the one hand that they would die and leave their children orphans, stranded hundreds of miles from their Chicago home; filled with dread on the other hand that their children would die, leaving them with broken hearts.
    To ward off the possibility of disease, the Walshes hit on two strategies. Adeline made sure that each of them was meticulously clean, right down to scraping the dirt from under their fingernails. She’d noticed, growing up, that those people most susceptible to disease and death were invariably the ones who went the longest between baths. Michael’s contribution was to soak bandannas in a barrel of his stout that he’d brought along, and then cover the faces of his family with them.
    The Walshes’ masked countenances soon drew public notice, as did the fact that they remained healthy. Others emulated them, though not many chose to bathe, and Michael even allowed them to dip their bandannas — once they’d been well laundered, at Adeline’s insistence — into his barrel of stout. In short order, a party was formed to head west on the Overland Trail, and escape the pestilence of the staging area. The Walshes were among them. Many in the party came by the Walshes’ wagons to dip their face masks in the stout again, until they were sure that the danger of contracting cholera was well past.
    Not a single migrant in the Masked Man Party, as it came to be called, came down with the dread disease.
    Neither did a single migrant come to consider Michael Walsh’s stout anything but medicine. It worked just fine for