As a saloonkeeper in Tucson, Arizona, during the last quarter of the 19th Century, George O. Hand drank to excess, often frequented prostitutes, and ran a saloon where violent behavior was a nightly affair. Nevertheless, Hand, shown here, became an Arizona legend simply by the expedient of keeping a diary of his life and times.
Hand was born in 1830 in Whiteside, Oneida County, New York, the son of Ira W. and Sybil Foster Hand, the oldest of six children. His father was listed in the 1850 federal census as a manufacturer, indicating a reasonable amount of wealth in the family. The boy likely had a secondary education. A brother became a well known dentist. George himself had a wanderlust and with the hint of gold in California in 1849 set his sights on the West Coast.
Hand’s success as a gold miner is unknown but when the Civil War broke out, he enlisted in August 1861 at Nevada City, California, joining Company G of the California 1st Infantry Regiment. Likely because he was older (31) and perhaps more literate than most Union recruits, he entered with the rank of sergeant. The regiment never saw combat as Confederate military forays westward from Texas ended early in the war. Hand and his fellow soldiers spent the duration doing garrison work in New Mexico, Arizona and West Texas, stationed for a time at Ft. Yuma, California, shown below. It was during this period that Hand first began to keep a diary.
After his discharge in August 1864 the writing stopped as Hand returned briefly to his family in New York. The 1865 state census recorded him there, listing his occupation as “miner.” Hand did not stay long in the East, returning west to engage in a series of unsuccessful business enterprises in New Mexico and Arizona. In 1867, he moved to Tucson, a town that was undergoing a growth spurt, and became a partner in a butcher shop.
In the summer of 1869, Hand and his partner, George F. Foster, sold the butcher shop and opened a Tucson drinking establishment they called “Foster’s Saloon.” When Foster temporarily left the partnership, Hand moved it from Main Street to the northwest corner of Mesilla and Meyer Streets. Shown below is a photo of the area. The man standing at far right is in front of the saloon.
Like many buildings in Tucson, the drinking establishment was a one story adobe structure with a flat roof. The interior was stark with a plain counter top as a bar and a few tables and chairs scattered around the room. Hand and Foster subsequently put up a partition to separate the main bar from gambling tables in the back. The only adornment was some Currier & Ives prints that Hand pasted on the walls, including the one of a horse, shown here. At night the barroom was lighted by kerosene lamps. Several smaller rooms were at the rear, one them where Hand, a lifelong bachelor, slept. A courtyard out back contained the privy.
Hand’s drinks similarly were unadorned. Whiskey was his customers’ liquor of choice and they were not fussy. No need for nationally known brands. Hand was buying whiskey by the barrel from wholesale dealers, selling some over the bar by the glass and decanting the rest into bottles and jugs for retail sales. He did not slap proprietary labels on those containers as some did.
Hand is believed to have to have revived his habit of a daily diary entry about 1872 after opening the saloon. Early entries apparently have been lost. Those that exist begin in January 1875 and end in the late 1880s. Biographer Neil Carmony has described the importance of Hand’s “saloon diary:” “Most of the pioneers who took the time to keep a diary were serious and orderly folks, not much given to humor and certainly not frank about their love loves.…In his diary, George Hand captured the flavor of the ribald, fun side of frontier life, described the often violent West, and revealed the…loneliness and tedium of a life far from home and family.”
During this period Hand was living a life far different from his New York family. Shown left with one of his many young friends, dressing and looking like an early day hippie, George generally was considered a “good guy” in Tucson’s rough and rowdy community. In his diary Hand was starkly honest about his activities and the saloon. For example, he documented his alcoholism with precision: Jan. 19, 1875: “Got up at 8 o’clock. Took one drink and was tight. Kept drinking until 11 a.m., then went to bed full of rot and slept till 3 p.m.” Nov. 5, 1875: “Got drunk today.” and the next day: “Got tight again. Went to a funeral. Got tighter at night.” Oct. 5, 1877: “Very dull. Drank all day and all evening.”
He was equally faithful in documenting his visits and payments to Tucson prostitutes: Jan. 13, 1875: “Cruz—$5.00;” Jan. 18, 1875: “Unknown girl—$3.00;” Nov. 6, 1875: “Juana—$1.00.” Dec. 23, 1876: “Called on Pancha a few moments—$10.” Hand also described the raucous activity at the saloon: May 23, 1875: “Green Rusk got tight, had a row with John Luck and got a cut in his head from a cane.” May 29, 1875: “Boyle hit a man in the eye for calling him a son-of-a-bitch. Later in the evening I knocked a man down,” Mar. 9, 1876: “Mr. Bedford, being full of liquor, made a row with old Dick. Foster hit Bedford in the neck and put him out of doors.”
Interspersed among such diary jottings are some Western history gems: "March 19, 1882: “Morgan Earp died today from a gunshot wound he received while playing billiards in Tombstone. He was shot through a window from the sidewalk.” March 21, 1882: “Frank Stillwell was shot all over, the worst shot-up man that I ever saw. He was found a few hundred yards from the hotel on the railroad tracks [In Tucson]. It is supposed to be the work of Doc Holliday and the Earps, but they were not found. Holliday and the Earps knew that Stillwell shot Morg Earp and they were bound to get him.”
Twenty years after Hand’s death, The Arizona Daily Star, Tucson’s morning newspaper, shown here, began publishing entries from his diaries as a historical feature on its editorial page. From 1917 to 1972, the saloonkeeper’s observations were printed almost daily, bringing a man who otherwise likely would have been utterly forgotten to the forefront of public attention. As Carmody has noted: “For more than four decades, thousands of Arizonians began their day reading George Hand’s laconic [and sometimes expurgated] comments on frontier life.” One observer has called Hand’s diaries “sacred documents.”
Hand continued to co-manage the saloon until 1881 when he and Foster, partners for twenty years, shut it down. He found it difficult to stay away from the whiskey trade. In March of 1882 Hand entrained 60 miles south from Tucson to Contention City, today a ghost mining town eight miles east of Tombstone. There he pitched in to help a friend open a new saloon. After staying four months Hand returned to Tucson, never again leaving that city.
As he aged, Hand modified his behavior and his appearance. Townsfolk, recognizing his Civil War service, began to address him with respect as “the old Captain” even though Hand had never risen above sergeant. His veterinary skill with dogs brought him friends among people of wealth. Gone was the shaggy, unkept beard and the wrinkled clothing. A photo in middle age with a favorite dog shows Hand dressed in a three-piece suit and holding a bowler hat, looking every bit the Eastern businessman. He and Foster were elected charter members of the Society of Arizona Pioneers, a forerunner of the Arizona Historical Society. Hand also was an active member of the G.A.R., Civil War veterans organization. Remarkably given his past, he served for a time as the chaplain of the Tucson chapter.
After Hand’s return to Tucson in 1882 he was hired as a janitor and night watchman for the newly constructed Pima County courthouse, shown here The job gave him an income, an office in which to continue writing his diary, and a place to sleep at night. Even in his younger days Hand often had complained of feeling ill. In 1887 his health deteriorated rapidly, apparently heart failure.
A last word on George Hand I leave to Author Neil Carmony: “His ingenuous writings are both rich reading and important historical documents. George Hand chronicled the lives and loves of the pioneers with a candor and style that is unique in the literature of the Old West.
Note: Although a number of articles have appeared about George Hand, the principal source for this vignette was the book, “Whiskey, Six-guns & Red-light Ladies: George Hand’s Saloon Diary, Tucson, 1875-1878,” edited by Neil Carmony and published by High-Lonesome Books, Silver City NM, 1995. Carmony has included them all in an unexpurgated edition, along with informative commentary. I recommend it to readers of this blog. The photos here are gratefully acknowledged from the Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.
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