Illustrations by Eric Hanson
Frontier Bars
When we told people we were working on a book about bars in the Twin Cities, most of them made the same joke: “Ah, I’ll bet you enjoyed doing the research, huh?” They’d throw up air quotes around “research” and then they’d make the universal “glug glug” sign, as if all we did was go to bars and drink whiskey doubles.
Which, OK, sure, we did. It’s a part of the job when you need to talk to people in those bars: about the year that the old man bought the place and if F. Scott Fitzgerald really did turn up regularly in the old days. (Pro tip: Don’t believe anything anyone tells you about places F. Scott Fitzgerald hung out.)
As much time as we spent in those places, though, we spent looking through court and property records, poring over negatives at the Minnesota Historical Society, and cold calling elderly Minnesotans in the suburbs to ask if their great-grandfathers had owned a specific bar 90 years ago.
That’s how we found most of the stories that appear in Closing Time: Saloons, Taverns, Dives, and Watering Holes of the Twin Cities. In the course of assembling stories from 50 bars across 150 years, we encountered a cast of colorful, inspiring, and occasionally dubious characters whose contributions to the cultural and civic life of the Twin Cities are as important as any CEO’s or politician’s.
There was A. B. Cassius, whose bar in downtown Minneapolis became a hangout for both black and white Minnesotans in a segregated city. And there was Captain Al Schaefers, the scam artist whose career as a bar owner brought him close to the heights of political power, until he skipped town with all of his money—probably not even a real captain, it turned out!
In each of their stories, we encountered some truth about Minneapolis and St. Paul: our obsessions, our hang-ups, our self-image, our flaws and strengths.
The two stories adapted here—which chronicle the very first bars to open in St. Paul and Minneapolis—also represent the first two in the book. These joints created some enduring myths about the Twin Cities as two drinking towns: tightly constrained by laws and morality and always eager to down one more—even a glass of 3.2 beer—before close.
Pigseye Parrant
Pig’s Eye Parrant’s Saloon: The Whiskey Dealer Beyond the Wall
You’d be hard pressed to invent a more unlikely civic mascot than Pierre “Pig’s Eye” Parrant, the squatter and whiskey dealer whose crooked face somehow came to represent the city of St. Paul. To this day, from dives to boardrooms, people recount the story of Pig’s Eye’s whiskey shack. He is a historical pariah and underground antihero, a symbol of the tension between St. Paul’s prim 19th-century self-image and the persistent forces of merriment—forces as strong today as they were 150 beers ago.
Yet Parrant’s short-lived saloon (1838–1843) left behind more legend than history. What follows is the best story of Pig’s Eye’s you are likely to find.
Pierre “Pig’s Eye” Parrant first enters the historical record as a retired fur trader who began squatting around the outskirts of Fort Snelling in 1832. Lawrence Taliaferro, the head “Indian agent” (an administrator) at the fort, described him simply as “a foreigner, prohibited from the trade.” Taliaferro’s journals make it clear that Parrant routinely flouted this prohibition and made his name selling whiskey on the borders of the native lands.
Also clear is that Pig’s Eye’s particular combination of personality and appearance made him the perfect scapegoat for the territory’s power players. The nickname “Pig’s Eye” referred to Parrant’s physical deformity: He was blind in one eye, with a white ring around the pupil and puffy pink skin around that. His rough voyageur manners and askew face seemed to personify frontier vice. Writer J. Fletcher Williams, in the first definitive history of St. Paul (published 1876), explains, “It must be related, that he bore not the most enviable character. It was hinted that he left Sault Ste. Marie on account of some irregularities of conduct that were distasteful to the good people there.”
Parrant set up camp near the Mendota settlement. At the time, everything outside the fort’s boundaries remained Dakota land, and living or doing business required permission from the Indian agent.
Also dwelling around the fort were scores of civilians who had fled the doomed Selkirk colony on the Red River in today’s Manitoba. They worked for the military or sold produce and livestock to the garrison, farming on the military reservation near Camp Coldwater or staying at Mendota. One imagines Parrant living among these settlers, dealing whiskey or maybe other commodities to soldiers and other customers, eking out an existence at the margins of the fort’s official society.
That all changed in 1837, when news of a new treaty with the Dakota began to spread. With land claims on the horizon, the fort’s commander, Major Joseph Plympton, decided to redraw and expand the lines of the military reservation, evicting the traders. As historian Mary Lethert Wingerd describes it, pushing out the traders put nearby land claims in the eager hands of military leadership.
Anticipating eviction, many of the displaced Canadians moved east of the Mississippi to what was called Rumtown, today’s Highland Park. Parrant himself set up shop next to Fountain Cave, a well-known cavern in the bluffs three-and-a-half miles downstream. By the summer of 1838, he had built a small but highly visible building where he peddled his whiskey.
Fountain Cave was an attraction in itself, a huge cavern extending deep into the bluffs near what is today Randolph Avenue. Passersby heading down the river would stop to make discreet purchases of Pig’s Eye’s booze and then wander into the dark abyss for further adventure.
J. Fletcher Williams’s early history of the state describes a typical occurrence at Parrant’s place:
But we must not lose sight of old PARRANT, located at the cave. During all this time he was driving a flourishing trade, selling whisky to both Indians and whites. Occasionally a party of soldiers, bound on a spree, would come down to his ranch, get soaked with his red-eye and tangle-foot brands, and fail to report next day. Hence a guard would have to hunt them up, and the poor fellows would sojourn in the guardhouse, or wear a ball and chain for a period. Two or three times the officers at the fort threatened to tear his shanty down, but never executed the threat at that time.
Pig’s Eye’s shop at the mouth of Fountain Cave did not last long. Less than a year later, Parrant put up his land claim as collateral on a loan, and a year after that he lost his stake for failing to pay the debt. What’s more, the final lines of the expanded military reservation effectively annexed Rumtown and the cave, as well.
Under pressure from the fort, Pig’s Eye moved a few miles farther downstream, made another land claim in 1839, and opened another whiskey saloon.
This one lasted a bit longer. Located in a prime location at the base of the river bluffs, Parrant’s place proved to be the first of many saloons, stores, and cabins that collected in what would eventually become downtown St. Paul. (Today, it would sit near Jackson, Shepard, Kellogg, and Robert.) Parrant’s new saloon became a landmark for the growing community of squatters, settlers, and adventure seekers.
whiskey bottle illustration
Pig’s Eye’s lasting fame stems largely from an 1839 account written by Edmund Brissett, a Canadian handyman who had stopped near the landing for a few days during his travels. Brissett was passing time at Parrant’s tavern and wanted to send a letter to a man he knew downriver on Grey Cloud Island (near today’s Cottage Grove). The only problem was that he did not know what to list as a return address.
Brissett’s account includes the following description of that fateful afternoon in the saloon:
I looked up inquiringly at Parrant, and seeing his old crooked eye scowling at me, it suddenly popped into my head to date it at Pig’s Eye, feeling sure that the place would be recognized, as Parrant was well known along the river. In a little while an answer was safely received, directed to me at Pig’s Eye. I told the joke to some of the boys, and they made lots of fun of Parrant. He was very mad, and threatened to lick me, but never tried to execute it.
And thus the town of Pig’s Eye was born, a frontier joke meant to poke fun at a disfigured, irascible crank, albeit one with a small gift for opportunism.
By 1841, the “town of Pig’s Eye” had been renamed by the newly arrived Catholic priest Lucien Galtier, who did not think much of the collection of saloons by the landing. Pig’s Eye’s place had already been surpassed by better-funded settlers and, for the second time, he lost his land claim in a legal dispute. Soon afterward, Pig’s Eye Parrant disappeared into the northern forests and moved, as an early writer noted, “his fame, trade, name and carcass” to parts unknown. Some said he died of disease; others said he perished in a fight.
Nevertheless, his image thrived in the ensuing decades. His saloon grew in reputation with each new recollection. Consider this one from Dakota Land; or, the Beauty of Saint Paul (1869), by a New York writer attempting to paint a rosy picture of the new territory:
Parrant was a Canadian voyageur, who acquired some notoriety from a facial deformity not very dissimilar to that of Caliban. Many people believed he had but one eye. That was a mistake. He had two eyes. But the singularity of defect in his optical expression was so swinish, that even the Indians as well as the whites, unanimously bestowed upon him the derisive title of “Pig’s Eye.” Yet he cared not for that so long as they were his deluded slaves. He had a miserly heart, and loved nothing better than gold.
Parrant’s temple became a popular resort. There was no sign over the door, nor any emblem of Deity or God to be seen upon the outside of the temple; and yet it was thronged with Dakotas and pale-faces who thirsted for minne-wakan—which is called “whisky” in our less poetical vernacular idiom.
Thus did the short-lived whiskey saloon of Pierre “Pig’s Eye” Parrant become the symbol of moral turpitude and a legend that foretold the birth of a new city on the ruins of one old man’s attempt to find a place to live.
The tale, perhaps like that original letter, comes with a postscript. In the 1990s, before the current taproom renaissance, investors attempted to revive operations at the old Schmidt Brewery on West Seventh Street. Their premier pale lager hit the taps and store shelves under the name Pig’s Eye. This brew came with official sanction: St. Paul City Council member Dave Thune posed as the image of Pierre Parrant for the label.
Though the brand lasted for less than two decades, the signs advertising Pig’s Eye beer can still be seen hanging over the doors of select St. Paul dives, an enduring offer for an unpretentious good time.
Ninepin Bowling
Alexis Cloutier’s Bowling Saloon 1850–1852
Marshall Street at Dana Street (now Fifth Avenue Northeast), St. Anthony (now Minneapolis)
Alexis and Theodose Cloutier arrived in the Minnesota Territory in 1843, about the same time that Pig’s Eye Parrant sold his claim on the lower levee. Alexis Cloutier, like Pig’s Eye, was born in Canada, spoke French as his first language, and aspired to make a living in the liquor business. A generation younger than Pig’s Eye, he arrived in the territory with his young family amid a group of other French Canadians from Quebec, via the Red River settlement. The Cloutiers settled for a time in St. Paul and then moved upriver to the village of St. Anthony, on the east bank of the Mississippi River at St. Anthony Falls.
The village of St. Anthony, despite being just a few miles up the road, did not wish to emulate the city of St. Paul. Most of the inhabitants likely would have agreed with the assessment of the Minnesota Register in 1849 that “the number of retail liquor establishments in St. Paul and other towns in the Territory is a LEETLE too great for a sound and healthy State of public morals.” Such booziness, the article concluded, was “the subject of remark by strangers and gives us a bad name at home and abroad.”
That moral opprobrium also meant opportunity. In 1850, there were five churches, nine sawmills, two newspapers, and a pervasive spirit of Yankee rectitude among the New Englanders who settled the city. (St. Anthony and Minneapolis, which lay across the river, would merge in 1867.) When Alexis Cloutier opened his bowling saloon at Marshall and Dana Streets, near the steamboat landing, his was the only saloon in a town of 1,300 people.
“We have a small police force organized, that we may be fully equipped,” proclaimed the introduction to the city directory that year, “but there is not much for them to do. The people are well disposed, love to go in the way of usefulness, rather than in the way of vice and immorality.”
Cloutier was probably aware of this. Shortly after he opened his saloon, he took out an ad in the St. Anthony Express, making an exceptionally genteel pitch for his new place: “Alexis Cloutier begs leave to inform his friends and the public generally that he has completed a new Bowling Saloon at the Falls (near the Steamboat Landing), and he now flatters himself that all who feel inclined to patronise him will find every comfort and convenience that an establishment of the kind can afford.”
Almost as an afterthought, he added: “Also, Wine and Spirits of the best quality attached to the establishment.”
Cloutier’s only St. Anthony–based industry peer was the German immigrant John Orth, who’d arrived from Alsace-Lorraine in 1848. That year, he opened the state’s second brewery (after Yoerg’s in St. Paul), located at Marshall Street and what would soon become known as Brewery Street, in Northeast. Orth also took out an announcement in the Express: “I am now prepared to supply the citizens of the Territory with Ale and Beer, which will be found equal—yes superior—to what is brought from below. I am now demonstrating that malt liquors of the very best quality can be manufactured in Minnesota.”
Orth succeeded wildly: His brewing company became the largest in the region by 1875, operating 18 breweries across the state. Brewery Street—now Thirteenth Avenue—remains the site of the imposing Grain Belt Brewery building, formerly the home of the Minneapolis Brewing Company, successor to Orth’s original company.
Residents of and visitors to St. Anthony could also get a drink at Cheever’s Tower, a 90-foot lookout tower and tourist attraction a bit farther downriver. Cheever’s boasted a ladies’ saloon on the first floor, offering ice cream and sparkling water. The second-floor men’s saloon served hard cider and—improbably—featured a small menagerie consisting of two raccoons.
That was about it, though. Cloutier’s saloon—unlike those broader purveyors—opened right in the heart of the village, stumbling distance from Main Street and the burgeoning milling and commercial district.
Bowling saloons were popular in the East in the 1840s, and you could find beautifully appointed examples as far west as Illinois and Wisconsin. During this period, the bowling saloon straddled the line between respectability and vice. These were very masculine spaces, thick with cigar smoke and lined with spittoons. Gambling was common. Visiting New York City in 1842, Charles Dickens made note of “a painted lamp direct[ing] you to the Bowling Saloon or Ten-Pin alley, Ten-Pins being a game of mingled chance and skill, invented when the legislature passed an act forbidding Nine-Pins.”
In spite of—or because of—this tinge of illicitness, Minnesota men enjoyed visiting bowling saloons like Cloutier’s. The English writer Laurence Oliphant traveled through Minnesota in 1855 and paid a visit to a bowling saloon in St. Paul. His description gives a sense for what Cloutier’s place may have been like: “The roughest characters from all parts of the West between the Mississippi and the Pacific collect here and from morning till night shouts of hoarse laughter, extraordinary and complicated imprecations, the shrill cries of the boy-markers calling the game and the booming of the heavy bowls are strangely intermingled, and you come out stunned with noise and half blinded with tobacco smoke.”
He also gives a glimpse into the polyglot crowd you might have found in such a saloon: “Of course the Anglo-Saxon language in its varied modifications of Yankee English, Scotch, and Irish prevails, but there is plenty of good French and the voyageur patois, Chippewa or Sioux, German, Dutch, and Norwegian.”
The decade of the 1840s and early 1850s saw a wave of temperance agitation in the Minnesota Territory. Activists took cues from New England, then a hotbed of prohibitionist sentiment. The state of Maine passed the most comprehensive anti-liquor legislation in the nation in 1851, completely outlawing the manufacture and sale of alcohol. And the Minnesota Territory soon followed suit. On April 5 of the following year, a territory-wide referendum on prohibition passed 853–662. Minnesota would be, as of May 5, 1852, a dry territory.
Cloutier must have watched these developments with unease. However, though a barkeep, he was no Pig’s Eye Parrant—a pariah who could be run out of town. Cloutier would serve as a county commissioner a few years later, and by 1852, he likely had already cultivated some political connections. He knew whom to call on.
On April 29, a week before the law was to take effect, Cloutier paid a visit to two county commissioners, who issued him a liquor license good for “one year.” To what degree these two elected officials were acting in good faith isn’t clear. When Cloutier later appeared before the courts, the opposing counsel contended that it was “a fact notoriously public that the only one of the Commissioners who could write his name, or read and understand the Law, protested against the giving of this and other licenses.”
Regardless, Cloutier got his license. That gave him time to figure out his next move. Gambling, smoking, and bowling went on as usual throughout May and June on the corner of Marshall and Dana.
Sometime in June, three of Cloutier’s neighbors went to the city police to complain. Sheriff George Brott stopped by with a warrant, arrested Cloutier, and confiscated three barrels of booze. The officer was apparently “threatened with formidable resistance” from some of Cloutier’s patrons. But Brott rolled the barrels out of the saloon and into a warehouse a few blocks away.
Cloutier appeared in court and pleaded not guilty. His attorney argued that his right to continue to sell liquor was not based on abstract permission, but rather on an authorized, physical piece of paper from the commissioners, which he presented to the judge, asserting, “There is no dodging it, no getting behind it, nor before it.” Nevertheless, Cloutier was found guilty and fined either $20 or $25 dollars, depending on which account you believe.
Cloutier appealed the case to Justice Henry Z. Hayner and the territorial supreme court. There, a funny thing happened.
Hayner, after reviewing the case, ruled unconstitutional the law under which Cloutier had been charged. In short, the statewide referendum had been bunk: Territorial legislative power was vested in the legislative assembly and governor. And they had, in the words of a contemporary account, “no right or authority to delegate it to any body of persons—not even to the people of the Territory.” The results of the referendum unraveled, and prohibition fervor in the territory dissipated for the immediate future. Sheriff Brott was left in the embarrassing situation of having to return Cloutier’s product to him.
“After Heyner’s [sic] decision was made,” he recalled decades later, “I went to return the liquors but found that some one had gotten under the building and bored a hole through the floor and casks and drawn off all the liquors; consequently I had to pay.
“I was not sorry when I had no more seizures to make in that line,” he added.
Hopefully, Cloutier had the decency to buy the man a drink.
Excerpted from Closing Time: Saloons, Taverns, Dives, and Watering Holes of the Twin Cities by Bill Lindeke and Andy Sturdevant, available from the Minnesota Historical Society Press.
