Grub

The Society of Colorado Pioneers
Denver, 1881

When the Society of Colorado Pioneers gathered for its first reunion in 1881 at the Windsor Hotel in Denver, the menu featured “grub.” Even so, the venue was first-class. The 300-room Windsor was the largest and most luxurious hotel between the Palmer House in Chicago and the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Amidst its labyrinth of public rooms, the new hotel featured a Western Union office, a barber shop, and a tobacconist, along with several bars and restaurants.

Windsor Hotel, ca. 1885

Thousands arrived in Colorado during the years 1858-1860, a period that would be fondly remembered as the “pioneer years.”  The migration abruptly ended with the onset of the Civil War and the population remained stagnant until the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869.1  However, in order to be a member of the Society of Colorado Pioneers, you had to have settled in the territory prior to January 1861. Since few people were there before 1858, this rule effectively meant that most of the society's members came to Colorado during those three years just before the war. Scattering all through the mountains as they arrived, they were the pioneers who opened the mines, built the towns, and established large ranches in the valleys.2 By the time of this banquet in 1881, trips across the prairie were made in the comfort of railroad sleeper cars. In fact, many of the berths were now occupied by wealthy Easterners taking western vacations arranged by the newly-formed tourist agencies in Boston.

 As shown below, there were two bills of fare on the menu that evening. The first one, labeled “Grub—1859,” lists beans, bacon, dried apples, hard tack, and Taos lightning, a whiskey of dubious origin. The frontier theme was further reinforced by eight ornamental pieces with names like “First House in Denver,” “Summer at the Ranch,” and “Indian Teepees.” In addition to the table decorations, the illustrations on the menu also recalled the pioneer days; one wryly entitled “The ‘Sleeper’ We Came On” depicts a Conestoga wagon.

The actual banquet shown below the "grub" featured the same type of lavish fare that was typically served at luxury hotels. In fact, the banquet was remarkably similar to the regular table d'hote dinner served at the Windsor only sixteen days earlier. Comparing the two menus below, both meals start with raw oysters (shipped in fresh by rail each day), followed by mock turtle soup, boiled leg of mutton, sweetbreads, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, roast turkey, and quail. The fishes are different—baked trout for the banquet versus baked flounder for the regular dinner, both served with Parisian potatoes. Although the table d'hote dinner menu offers a few additional choices like rabbit, chicken livers, and boned capon in aspic, the two meals are basically the same, down to the mince pie and lemon meringue pie for dessert.

The routine appearance of English dishes like roast beef with Yorkshire pudding reflected the tastes of the well-to-do English ranchers in Colorado, some of whom reportedly invested in the hotel. However, Denver's population of 35,000 was more diverse than Colorado Springs which called itself “Little London.” In fact, a third of Denver’s forty-eight saloons were owned by German- and Austrian-born immigrants whose patrons read German newspapers and quaffed beer in places like the Bavarian House, Germania Hall, Edelweiss, and the Heidelberg Cafe. Nevertheless, it was the English who set the city’s standards at the high end.

The symbolic presence of "grub" on the menu at the society’s first banquet triggered nostalgic memories of the past. Judge Wilbur Stone, who spoke that evening about the “Pioneer Bar,” observed at a later reunion in 1888, “Perhaps (we) appreciated our hardships in those days better than we do our present luxuries. Will the choice coffee that will be served us tonight in our elegant banquet taste as good as that which we used to make at night by campfires in our toilsome march across the plains?”3

Notes
1. Campbell Gibson, Population of the 100 largest cities and urban places in the United States: 1790-1990, U.S. Census Bureau (June 1998). In 1860, the population of Denver was 4,749. By 1870, it was 4,759, the population of the city growing by only ten people during the decade. The population grew to 35,000 by 1880, a seven-fold increase. 
2.  Alice Polk Hill, Colorado Pioneers in Picture and Story, 1915.
3. New York Times, 27 November 1888.