Italian Immigrant Whiskey Men

 

Foreword:  Of the various nationalities that made up the distillers, liquor dealers, saloonkeeper and other whiskey men of the pre-Prohibition era, the majority of immigrants were either Irish or German.  Italians were a distant third, often selling liquor in connection with a grocery business.  Here are vignettes of three men born in Italy, each of whom in his own way climbed the ladder from penury to prosperity while contributing to their communities.

In 1859, an immigrant Italian boy of 16 stepped off the S.S John Simon onto the dock at Memphis, Tennessee. It would be his home town for the rest of his life and upon his death he had created a liquor and mercantile family dynasty that survived until 2010.  Shown here, his name was Domenico Canale.

Canale’s first employment was in a liquor and wine business owned by his uncles.  Saving his money, he struck out for himself about 1866.  He began selling fruits and vegetables from a push cart while continuing an interest in the liquor trade.  Within seven years Canale had graduated from his produce wagon to selling from a warehouse at Eight Madison St., near Front Street. Called D. Canale & Co., his company sold wholesale vegetables and fruit and also a quality bourbon whiskey that he named “Old Dominick.”

The D. Canale organization first showed up in Memphis business directories as a liquor house in 1885. Old Dominick whiskey rapidly gained a local and regional customer base, advertised lavishly by Canale in large signs in downtown Memphis.  He sold his liquor in stoneware jugs as well as in glass bottles with his name prominently displayed, Canale also became known for his giveaways to saloons and other favored customers, including paperweights and shot glasses.

Meanwhile, the italian immigrant’s continued success was drawing attention in Memphis business circles. A 1905 book entitled “Notable Men of Tennessee” featured him among the notables.  His biography stated:  “Today [he] stands at the head of the fruit business of Memphis and, perhaps, of the South. It added that: “Mr. Canale is what is rightly termed a self-made man, and has won his position in the social and commercial life of Memphis by his industry, his native ability, and the exercise of correct business principles.”

Canale died in 1919 just before the advent of National Prohibition.  Because whiskey and beer were only part of D. Canale’s business, the firm weathered the temperance “storm” by concentrating on fruit and vegetable sales. With Repeal the Canale family continued to market Old Dominick whiskey for a time, but eventually dropped their liquor business to concentrate on produce.  

Ernesto Bisi arrived on American shores in 1880 as an impoverished Italian immigrant with limited education.  After getting a start selling groceries and liquor in Pittsburgh, he went on to become the largest pasta producer in the United States.  But he did not do it alone.  Under highly unusual circumstances, Bisi in 1895 married Emilia, a woman who became the mother of his children and his valuable partner in business.  

After arriving in Pittsburgh in 1884, Ernesto joined in a grocery business with Civil War veteran Frank Bonistalli and Bonistalli’s vivacious young wife, Emilia. Eventually Bonistalli took Bisi as a full partner.  They added a full line of spiritous beverages, advertising widely.  In addition to featuring wines, E. Bonistalli & Bisi claimed “…A full stock of Guckenheimer, Silver Seal, Crystal Wedding and other whiskies.”  Many of the brands were Pennsylvania-made and would have resonated with the Pittsburgh clientele. As one biographer put it:  “It was clear that Ernesto possessed a remarkable business sense.”  Within a few years the store registered gross sales of over $100,000 — a fortune in the late 1880s. Goods were being sold in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia and further west.  

All was not well, however, at Bonistalli & Bisi.  Emilia was the cause.  As a “silent partner” in the store she was constantly on the scene. Known to fudge her actual age, Emilia was 18 to possibly 26 years younger than her husband and virtually the same age as Bisi.  In addition to her business savvy, Emilia, shown here, was talented.  She spoke three languages in addition to Italian, was noted for a fine singing voice, and performed with the Pittsburgh Opera Society.  She could see the promise in Ernesto and the two became lovers.  Their liaison produced a son in 1891, baptized as a Bonistalli.  Four more years elapsed before Emilia sued for and in 1895 was granted a divorce from her husband.  Ernesto and Emilia soon married.

The liquor business subsequently was taken over by Carmelio Bisi, a younger brother whom Ernesto had brought from Italy in 1889 to assist him. This move allowed Ernesto and Emilia to concentrate on macaroni, spaghetti and linguini.  Together they established a large pasta factory at Fort Pitt on the periphery of Pittsburgh.  Shown here is an illustration of the plant. Situated on fifteen acres of land, the couple employed 150 employees.  The Bisi United States Macaroni Factory eventually would be accounted the largest in the Nation. Ernesto was president; Emilia was corporate secretary, in charge of all communications with suppliers and clients.

When he died in 1907, Bisi was eulogized as “one of the most prominent Italians in the eastern part of the United States.”  Floral tributes and condolences poured in from all parts of the country.  Beginning in America as an impoverished, poorly educated immigrant, because of the opportunities presented, his own “remarkable business sense” and his marriage to Emilia, Ernesto Bisi had risen to become a wealthy manufacturer and nationally recognized Italian-American leader. 

In 1893 Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, Governor of South Carolina and a man of dictatorial instincts, in order to enforce his hold on the sales of alcohol in the Palmetto State decided to make an example of a self-educated Italian immigrant Charleston saloonkeeper and liquor dealer named Vincent Chicco.  In targeting Chicco, shown here, Tillman had picked the wrong man.  

Trying to placate prohibitionist forces in South Carolina, the wily Tillman, shown left, had proposed a halfway solution:  Saloons would close along with all liquor dealerships but whiskey, wine and beer would still be available through a state dispensary system.  In protest, speakeasies called “Blind Tigers” became rampant throughout Charleston.  Tillman was outraged.  He vowed that if residents did not comply he would make the city “dry enough to burn” and would send sufficient compliance officers “to cover every city block with a man.”  In July 1893, Tillman’s officers made their first arrest.  It was Vincent Chicco.

The Italian immigrant’s arrest occasioned a near riot as local supporters rallied to protest the action.  Taken to court, he faced a friendly judge who freed him immediately to return to his establishment, shown below.  Overnight Chicco became a local hero in Charleston, dubbed as “King of the Blind Tigers.” In short order Chicco had become a public nemesis to Tillman, who called him “a kind of Dago devil.”  Hauled into court repeatedly over the years, Chicco always walked away a free man.

Tillman’s attacks on Chicco heightened into a personal battle, one that the Italian immigrant seemed to relish.  He introduced a line of cigars he called “The Two Determined.”  They came in a box with his picture and Tillman’s on the lid.  Chicco explained the concept to newsmen this way:  Tillman was determined that he should stop selling liquor;  Chicco was equally determined to continue selling it.  He also used his Charleston popularity to be elected to four terms as an alderman.

Tillman’s dispensary scheme in time became so corrupt that it was abolished by the South Carolina legislature. In 1915 the state went “dry,” however, and the Italian immigrant was forced to end his liquor trade.   When Vincent Chicco died in 1928, wrote one Charleston observer:  “The city nearly shut down for his funeral, as well it should have. The "King of Blind Tigers" is someone we can all draw inspiration from. He was an underdog, a free spirit, an independent thinker….”  

Note:  Longer articles on each of these whiskey men may be found elsewhere on this website:  Domenico Carnale, November 26, 2011;  Ernesto Bisi, June 2, 2020; and Vincent Chicco, July 4, 2020.  This blog featured a post about Ben Tillman and the South Carolina Dispensary on November 20, 2013.

 

Ohio’s F. W. Thorla: Farmer-Distiller with Imagination

 During the 19th Century America teemed with farmer-distillers, agriculturalists who used surplus grains to make a little whiskey on the side, almost always relying on urban liquor dealers to sell it.  A notable exception was Francis W. Thorla from a rural corner of southeastern Ohio.  Thorla had an inventive, imaginative side that led him to sell his products himself with illustrations like the one that opens this vignette.

The Thorla family had a long and distinguished American heritage.  As shown here, the family founder, George Thorla, arrived a century before the American Revolution.  His grandson, John Thomas, born in New England in 1748, served as a soldier in the War for Independence.  His son, Richard, Frank’s father, was reckoned a pioneer when he left New Hampshire and settled on a plot of land on the Ohio River near present day Marietta, Ohio.  A born adventurer, he subsequently pushed further west, going down the Ohio and up the Mississippi in a pirogue as far as the Kaskaskia River in 1818.  Forced back to Ohio by a bout of malaria, Richard bought a quarter section of land (160 acres) on Dye’s Fork, a stream that runs through Brookfield Township, Noble County.  In time a settlement known as Renrock grew up there.  It is shown below.

There F. W. “Frank” Thorla was born in May 1832, one of five children from Richard and Camilla, herself noted as an Ohio pioneer originally from New Hampshire.  Young Frank likely received the standard education of the time in a one room school house, the standard text being the McGuffey Reader, being produced downstream in Cincinnati.  While apparently showing a lively imagination as a youth, Thorla initially never strayed from the family farm.  He is recorded there in the 1860 federal census at age working as a farm hand for his widowed mother.

In 1858 at age 26 he married Sarah A. Stevens of Noble County, who was 21 and likely the sister of the wife of his older brother who had inherited the Thorla homeplace.  Frank subsequently moved with Sarah to a farm two and one-half miles from Renrock where they raised a family of six children:  Silas, born in 1850;  Ellsworth, 1862; Florence, 1867; Linda, 1869; George, 1872; and Milo, 1872.The 1880 census found the Thorlas all living on the farm with two field hands boarding with them. 

Although distilling does not show up in the biographies of his forebearers, Thorla, possibly spurred on by the need to provide for his growing family, tried his hand at making whiskey.  Not only did he demonstrate a remarkable talent for making good liquor, he had a genius for marketing it.  Shown here is his whimsical letterhead in which he clearly has taken on merchandising his rye whiskey as well as making it.  While many farmer-distillers of his time were content to sell their products to wholesalers dealers to blend, bottle, label and sell, Thorla was taking his cues from Pennsylvania distillers like Overholt and Large who were growing rich while marketing their own whiskey.  Like them too, Thorla was using rye grain as the basis of his liquor rather than the corn popular with distillers in western Ohio.  

Thorla also may have been selling by mail order.  Shown here is a clip from a company envelope that contains another imaginative drawing, this time of the distilling process, depicting the “worm,” a pot still and buckets.  My surmise is that Thorla was heavily engaged with his distillery during his lifetime with his  farm principally the means to grow rye for the mash.

This farmer-distiller also used his imagination to join the legions of Ohio residents (think of the Wright Brothers) who were inventing things right and left.  For Thorla, appropriately it was an instrument for tossing hay, patented on January 18, 1870.  Shown here,  he called it “An Improvement in Horse Hay-Forks.”  He described the invention this way:  “My invention has for its object to furnish an improved horse hay-fork, simple in construction, easily operated, and effective in operation, being so constructed as to be readily-thrust into the hay, and which will hold the load securely until it is discharged.”  No evidence exists that Thorla’s invention was ever put into industrial production.

Thorla died in May 1905 at the age of 73,  his burial monument shown above.

His whiskey legacy lived after him.  Shown here is the label from a bottle of rye named “Old Thorla.”  It was issued by a Zanesville, Ohio, merchant named J. Adam Sauer, who called himself “Successor to F.W. Thorla.”  The 50 mile distance between Noble County and Zanesville indicates that the farmer-distiller’s customer base ranged far beyond Renrock.  Note the Thorla slogan:  “Good as the best and better than the rest.”

Another “successor to F. W. Thorla" was his son Silas.  This eldest son went on to be a well-known figure in southwestern Ohio, highly regarded as a businessman (maple sugar), photographer, author and raconteur. It was he who chronicled the story of the Thorla family and the community known as Renrock. Silas also is said himself to have done some distilling, obviously a skill learned from his father.

Note:  This vignette has been drawn from a number of sources, triggered by seeing a copy of F.W. Thorla’s interesting letterhead.  Much of the story of the Thorla family comes from History of Noble County, Ohio,  Published by L.H. Watkins & Co. of Chicago, 1887.

Peoria’s Woolners: Deals, Disaster & Discord

Worthy of a novel, the Hungarian-born five Woolner Brothers held sway among Peoria, Illinois, distillers for almost 45 years, amid a whirlwind of “deals” good and bad, fires and a horrific disaster, and discord among the siblings.  At the center of events was Samuel Woolner, shown here, best remembered as co-founder of the first Whiskey Trust.

The Woolners came from Szentendre (meaning St. Andrew), the Hungarian riverside town between Budapest and the Pilis-Visegrad Mountains shown below.  Their father, Solomon, is said to have been a distiller.  In order of their births, the brothers were Jacob (1829), Ignatius (1839), Adolph (1841), Samuel (1845) and Morris (1847).  Adolph is the first Woolner to be recorded in America, arriving about 1863 0r 1864.  He was followed soon after by Ignatius and Samuel. 

 

Initially the young men worked as itinerant salesmen.  Adolph made his way by selling housewares in Ohio.  Samuel’s biographer indicates that he too was a peddler of merchandise, a common profession for male Jewish immigrants.  With distilling being “in their blood,” and saving their money, the three brothers joined together in 1871 to purchase the Grove Distillery in Peoria, known in Federal records as Registered Distillery #24, 5th District. The brothers named their enterprise “Woolner  &  Company.”  Subsequently they were joined in America and whiskey-making by Jacob and Morris.

Beginning with the purchase of the Grove Distillery, the Woolners set out to dominate the vibrant and growing Peoria liquor industry.  Not long after their first acquisition, they also bought and expanded the Atlas Distillery (RD #20. 5th Dist.), later reputed to be the largest distillery in the world.  Over the years the family would be responsible for buying and selling multiple liquor manufacturing plants. 

The Woolners issued a “blizzard” of whiskey brands.  They included:  "Better Times,” "Canterbury Rye,” “Cronies,” “Donnybrook," “Eastland,” "Gilt Edge,” "Leetsdale Rye,” ”Mosswoods,” "Old Cronies Rye,” "Old Grove Pure Rye,” ”Old Measure,” "Rock Cave,” "Satin Finish Spirits,” “Sparland,” "W. B. Bourbon,” "Woolner's Dry Gin,” "Woolner's Excelsior,” "Woolner's S. M." and "Woolner's Satin Finish.”

With the five brothers all assuming management roles and Samuel emerging as their leader, Woolner holdings grew steadily, including the Peoria Grape Sugar works, financed with $100,000 in stock.  They also created the Union Distillery in Peoria and built a five story headquarters building at the corner of Adams and Fulton Streets in downtown Peoria, appropriately named The Woolner Building.  The reported worth of their firm grew to more than $5 million in today’s dollar, “an accumulation of a few brief years, through business energy and judicious management,” commented one observer.  Beginning as indigent immigrants attempting to make a living by peddling, the Woolners had emerged as a major force in American distilling.

Despite their personal success,  Adolph and Samuel became entranced by the idea of consolidating the liquor industry in Peoria and perhaps beyond.  There were just too many U.S. distilleries making too much whiskey for too small a market, depressing prices.  The Standard Oil Trust created in 1882 showed a potential way to control liquor production. Five years later a group of Peoria distillers came together to form the Distillers & Cattle Feeders Corp., an organization that became known as the first “Whiskey Trust.”  After the Trust formed in May of 1887, 65 distilleries joined, including 24 in Illinois. Peoria had 12—more than any other city in America.  Joseph Greenhut of Peoria was elected president, and the headquarters was located in the Illinois city.

From the outset Samuel was a major force in the attempt at a monopoly.  This became clear when Greenhut hired a Japanese scientist, Dr. Jokici Takamine, to develop a faster and cheaper method of fermentation, hoping to sell Trust whiskey at a price undercutting the competition. He entrusted this “hush-hush” project to the Woolners.  Takamine’s laboratory, under heavy security, was located in the malt house of the Woolner's Grove Distillery.  In 1894, their Manhattan Distillery in Peoria was converted to use Takamine’s process.  Shortly after the Japanese scientist’s equipment was installed, however, the building caught fire, a blaze of suspicious origin.  Some blamed the conflagration on malt manufacturers and their workers who prepared traditional distillery enzymes from barley malt.  They reputedly had expressed strong objections to Takamine’s method, fearing for their economic future.

Meanwhile, Samuel was busy working to add new properties to the Trust.  Apparently approaching the proprietors as if he was buying their distilleries for the Woolner interests, he was able to engineer the sales of the Star, Crescent, Central, and Nebraska distilleries, deals worth some $25 million in today’s dollar. 

Samuel’s commissions from these transactions were alleged to reached into the hundreds of thousands. Now very wealthy, he became prominent in the Illinois banking world as director and vice president of the German-American National Bank and a major stockholder in several Chicago banks.

Samuel was able to move his family into a Peoria showpiece mansion home, shown here.  He is said to have served in every office of the Peoria Board of Trade and as a Republican was elected to the Peoria Common Council for eight two-year terms.  Hailed for his philanthropy, Samuel was president of the Cleveland Home for Aged and Infirm Israelites, a director of an orphan asylum, and a contributor to many non-Jewish causes.  An 1890 biography in a Peoria compendium said of this Woolner:  “While shrewd in business transactions, he is honorable in his dealings, interested n the upbuilding of the city and its advancement as an educational center, and he, therefore, enjoys an excellent reputation and has many warm personal friends.”

The past, however, had not been without trauma.  In the spring of 1881, the Woolners’ main distillery burned.  Most of the buildings were destroyed; as shown below, only the still house stood after the blaze.  The brothers immediately pledged to rebuild.  Amidst the rubble the Woolners found that two tubs of fermented mash had been left virtually untouched.  After slight repairs to the tubs it was decided to run the contents through a repaired still: “…The boilers were cleaned and refitted, the pumps rigged, and the distillation commenced.”  It was a terrible mistake. 

As the Chicago Tribune told the story: “Without a moment’s warning, a loud explosion was heard, the gigantic tub swayed and careened over, and a rush of steam escaped from the lower chamber, carrying everything before it.  Men were picked up and hurled, scalded and parboiled, from twenty to forty feet away, and ruthlessly bruised with falling bricks and timbers.”  Of eighteen men injured in the blast thirteen died, many painfully.  A man identified as Max Woolner, likely a nephew, was killed instantly.  Ignatius, 41, the brother who likely was supervising the operation, was badly burned and died that night.

Samuel’s reaction to this tragedy has gone unrecorded.  As time went by, the Whiskey Trust for which he had exerted so much effort began to unravel.  The organization was plagued with a reputation for violence, lack of promised remuneration to member distillers, and a flawed business plan.  On April 10, 1898, the Chicago Tribune headlined “GREENHUT IN FOR IT…Is Charged with “Absorbing” $225,000 Whisky Funds…First Suit Is Begun.”  Samuel as a Trust officer was sued as a Greenhut co-defendant.  Accused of having wrongly diverted money from distillery purchases, Woolner fought back.  The Tribune opined that Samuel “has his war paint on and having withdrawn from…[the Trust]…is arranging to start a fight” against his accusers.

In resigning Samuel was aligning himself with several large rebel Illinois distillers and smaller independents who had brought the suit.  By making common cause with the accusers, he apparently was able to avoid further legal troubles.  The Hungarian immigrant was still enamored with the idea of a whiskey monopoly, however, and when a new Trust formed out of the rubble of the old one, he joined.

This led to what one newspaper headlined:  “Brothers at War.”  Apparently registering his objection to the first Whiskey Trust, Jacob Woolner had left the family firm in 1887 and set up on his own, building and operating the Union Brewery in Peoria.  In December 1898, Jacob announced that he was re-entering the distilling business by purchasing the Great Eastern distillery and upgrading it as an independent competitor against the new manifestation of the Trust. “It is understood that Samuel Woolner was placed in a very peculiar position by his elder brother’s unexpected announcement…,”  one newspaper suggested.

Samuel told reporters he had been given a vice presidency and a salary in the new combine in return for a promise that neither he nor any of his brothers would compete:  “Sam stated that he represented the entire Woolner interest and that if he were taken care of no trouble need be feared from any of the family.”  In retaliating against his brother, Sam now called in deeds and mortgages against Jacob equivalent to $573,000 today.  Exactly how this battle of the brothers was resolved, I have been unable to discover.

Jacob died in 1909, followed by Samuel in 1911. Alolph had preceded them in 1891.  This left the youngest brother Morris to guide the family fortunes.  When Prohibition was enacted, the company was sold to US Food Products, a company formed from the remnants of the second Trust that ultimately became the National Distillers Products Company. 

At least four of the Woolner brothers, including Samuel and Jacob, and members of their families, are interred in Peoria’s Springdale Cemetery and Mausoleum. Despite the disasters and disputes that fractured the Woolner family in life they have reunited in death.

Note:  This vignette has been gathered from a variety of sources, some cited in the text.  Of particular help was an undated article by Bernie Drake, past president of the Peoria Historical Society.  The two cartoons are from a Japanese comic book. Two previous posts on this website have dealt with other principals involved in the Peoria Whiskey Trust:  Jokici Takamine, August 5, 2018, and Joseph Greenhut, September 23, 2019.

 

Twin Cities’ Cantienys: A Soldier and a Prodigal Son

 A Swiss-born soldier who served in three armies, Casper O. Cantieny became an early saloonkeeper in Minneapolis.  Known for his good reputation and genial nature in the Twin Cities, he doted on his son, Antony “Tony” Cantieny, who was known to others as “a brutal tough.”  Tony’s violent behavior eventually would lead to a killing and family disgrace and decline. 

Casper Cantieny was born in 1807 at the town of Oberwaltz, Canon Graubuenden, high in the Swiss Alps.  In his youth he served in the Swiss Army during a period of European unrest, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Third Battalion. From there he served in the Papal Army during the conflicts to unify Italy.  He arrived in America about 1859 and soon settled in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. 

With the outbreak of the Civil War, despite being 51 years old, Casper enlisted in the First Minnesota Calvary, mustering in at nearby Fort Snelling, shown right, to serve entirely in Minnesota and the Dakota Territory guarding the frontier against hostile Sioux Indians.  This thrust him into several skirmishes against native forces from June to September 1863.  Mustered out late that year, Cantieny was recorded as serving “with honor.”

By this time Caspar was married, his wife a Swiss-born woman 15 years his junior named Maria B. Von Coray, called “Mary.”   At first working in Minneapolis as a carpenter, Cantieny eventually concluded that selling liquor and beer over the bar was more lucrative.  He opened a saloon in a very auspicious location,  just over the Father Hennepin Avenue Bridge spanning the Mississippi River between Minneapolis and St. Paul.  Shown below, the supports were made in the image of a Medieval castle and led straight to Cantieny’s drinking establishment. 

 

Canthieny’s saloon can be seen at the far left of the photo above.  Enlarged, it is pictured here.  The building looks like something out of a Wild West town, with a false front.  The proprietor who had carpentry skills may have been his own builder.  As many saloonkeeper families did, the Canthienys lived upstairs, accessing their quarters from a stairway at one side.  The saloon interior would have been simple and spare, with a bar along one wall, topped by a mirror and a potbellied stove in a corner.  Mary may have assisted with the cooking and Casper serving drinks from behind the bar.

Although Casper had a reputation as a genial host, something essential to a successful publican, his third child, Anthony/Tony, was a wayward boy, sent to reform school when he was 14 and subsequently in and out of scrapes with the law.  Incarceration, however, failed to bring reform.  Events came to a head on a July night in 1884.  After finishing a shift at the saloon, the 26-year old Tony headed out with buddies to visit some after-hours bars.  He was armed with a loaded pistol that had been given to him by a customer as collateral for drinks until payday.  

Soon drunk, the roisterers attracted the attention of Officer Laughlin, a policeman they apparently had encountered before.  They began hectoring him, leading to a confrontation.  When Laughlin tried to arrest the young men, they ran away, with the policeman in pursuit.  At some point in the chase, according to press accounts, Tony turned and yelled:  “You can’t arrest me you son of a bitch,” and fired wildly.  A bullet caught Laughlin in the midsection and felled him.  Young Canthieny threw the gun into a nearby creek and headed home.  Meanwhile the officer in his dying moments identified Tony as his assailant and the youth was soon arrested.

Although Tony assumed a “tough guy” demeanor as he was hauled off to jail, his arrest sparked a vigilante mob of young men, some of whom may have been bullied by the saloonkeeper’s son in the past. They gathered at the jail demanding that Tony be hanged then and there.  Although they rushed the building, breaking down the doors, a reinforced police force was able to keep him from the mob.  When further violence seemed immanent the mayor of Minneapolis called on the state militia to restore order.  Tony was spirited to a jail across the river in St. Paul where his trial was held seven months later.

The St. Paul Globe of March 3, 1885, provided an account of the courtroom scene, describing Tony as having a prison pallor, clean shaven and neatly dressed in a blue suit.  “Just behind him is his father, Casper Cantieny, the saloon-keeper.  He is a man nearly 70 years old, but seems to have borne his life easily.  The family resemblance between father and son is noticeable….The courtroom was filled with spectators and within the railings were many attorneys.”

Because Cathieny pere was able to secure a good lawyer, Tony pleaded “self-defense,” alleging Laughlin fired first.  He was convict of second-degree manslaughter, not murder, and sentenced to seven years in Minnesota’s Stillwell Prison, shown above.  Immediately Casper, ever the doting father, began working to secure his son’s release, spending large sums on lawyers.  He finally persuaded Minnesota’s governor to commute the sentence and Tony was released in 1888 after serving four years.  Doing time this time appears to have had a chastening effect.  “I never should have done it if I had been sober,” he told the awaiting press outside the prison.

The fortunes of the Cathieny family, however, had been changed unalterably.  Even before Tony was jailed, Casper had been notified by local officials that he would have to move from his highly desirable location at the bridge.  His saloon was torn down to become the site of the Minneapolis Union Station, shown here. Cathieny moved to several locations downtown during ensuing years; his last saloon and residence was at 815 Washington Avenue North.  Well into his eighties when he died in 1896, Casper reputedly was still working behind the bar.

As an old soldier and a charter member of the Minneapolis G.A.R., Canthieny received a rousing send-off.  After a funeral Mass at St. Joseph German Catholic Church, his body was carried to the East Side Catholic (St. Anthony) Cemetery, followed by a crowd of friends. There a flag-carrying honor guard paraded and the Sons of Veterans. Camp No. 4, fired off a salute as Casper was lowered into the ground, Sec. 93, Lot 8. 

Meanwhile Tony Cantieny was attempting to establish himself in Minneapolis, a task that likely proved difficult given his reputation around town as a “cop killer” who had gotten off lightly.  A saloon he operated not far from his father’s original quarters apparently failed.  Subsequently he moved to Fargo, North Dakota, where presumably his reputation was relatively unknown.  He married and started a family.  

An older brother, Anton Cantieny, was living in Fargo, arriving in 1879, first operating a restaurant and oyster house.  Ten years later he opened the Hotel Cantieny.  At the time the hotel and bar opened, the following notice was printed in the June 4, 1889 Fargo Daily Argus:  “A. Cantieny, long known as one of the most enterprising men in Fargo, has taken possession of the Webster building, 501 Northern Pacific Avenue, and is dispensing the "beautiful ardent" to the boys. Tony is behind the bar and everyone is assured of the finest treatment and most gentlemanly service.”  “Tony” was the prodigal son, now rehabilitated.  After Anton died, he married his brother's widow.

Tony Canthieny died of natural causes in 1907 at the relatively young age of 46, and was buried in the Riverside Cemetery in Fargo.  His gravestone is located in the Southpark Section, Block 7.  Thus ended the saga of Casper Cathieny, a man remembered as a “honored comrade and brave soldier” whose later life was marred by his intense fatherly devotion to a wayward son.

Note:  The idea for this post came from the book “Closing Time: Saloons. Taverns, Dives, and Watering Holes of the Twin City.”  Written by Bill Lindeke and Andy Sturdevant, the book is an interesting survey of the drinking scene in Minneapolis and St.Paul past and present — and a recommended read.  Information there has been enhanced by newspaper stories, genealogy sites, and other sources.