Panders

(3 of 7)

Spurs and six-guns of long-dead badmen are still to be kicked up from the sand and cactus of the Colorado plains. Buffalo skulls and stage-coach axles still bleach and rust in forgotten gulches of the Rocky Mountain foothills. But the West is "civilized," has been for some time, and with it Colorado. The funicular up Pike's Peak is 35 years old and for 21 years there has been a searchlight on the summit. The $2,500,000 State Capitol was finished way back in 1895. Denver still smelts lead for bullets and other useful articles, but for at least two decades tame agriculture, led by stub-horned cattle and sugar made from cowbeets, has been twice as important to Denver as mining.

Yet Denver harbors more than a ghost of the rip-roaring West that was. The vocabulary has altered little. The barroom brawls that once fascinated a robust populace are not extinct. They have merely been transferred, noise, color and violence intact, to the newspapers. How that transfer came about, and how the latest, loudest, most violent brawl of all is progressing, is a story that begins in a small Chicago printshop at the time of the World's Fair.

The young but already portly bartender of Denver's brand new Windsor Hotel was there to see the printer about a folio of World's Fair views he wanted to peddle on the crowded Midway. A swarthy young hellion happened in to see the same printer. This youth was a professional gambler who had played the Mississippi River boats for all they were worth and only lately slipped out of Kansas City, Kan., after the highly profitable operation of a Little Louisiana Lottery. The two men introduced themselves and went off for lunch together. Great exploits were in the air. Neither of the adventurers had a partner. During lunch they eyed each other like a pair of strange coyotes, but instead of flying for throatholds, they decided to hunt shoulder to shoulder.

The bartender gave his name as H. H. Tammen. He had started life as a waif, he said, who had found shelter in a Philadelphia saloon, where he became cuspidor and errand boy at the age of seven. It was warm in the saloon, there was free food and from the beer-spotted newspapers left by customers he had learned how to read. He was, he guessed, clever as a kid, for he had risen swiftly to heights of bartending. Before he was 21 he had reigned over a prodigious expanse of dazzling brass and mahogany in the Palmer House, right there in Chicago. Ask anyone. Then the Windsor out in Denver had sent for him and he was doing pretty good out there, selling cigar boxes full of shiny mineral specimens on the side. Denver was a red hot town for someone with some money to make a lot more in. A growing town, a wideopen town, an ignorant town. Now if only—

The gambler, whose olive mien was a little too sleek to inspire trust at once, was enchanted by this garrulous bartender, whose words and wit were of an unusual facility. He liked the combination of heartiness and sly insinuation, and furthermore Tammen was one of those creatures so awe-inspiring to high-livers, a bartender who despised drink. The gambler took a chance and told his own history.