This Is How Much A Bottle Of Whiskey Cost In The American Old West Vs Now

The Old West saloon, with swinging doors and a bar filled with dusty and tired cowboys, has been thoroughly cemented in our minds after years of fictionalization in print and on the silver screen. When the barkeep asks what one such character will have, the answer is invariably whiskey. A small glass is poured, and the cowboy slaps an unknown coin or two down by way of payment. The quantities are generally irrelevant to any such tale, but it does make us wonder: What did these spirits actually cost in those days? To find the answer, we spoke with Mark Boardman, Old West historian and editor of Arizona's Tombstone Epitaph newspaper, published just steps away from the O.K. Corral Gunfight Site.

While the image of the dusty, run-down saloon was shattered almost immediately, in its place came some real clarity. "As towns grew up — sometimes very quickly," Boardman says, "they went for high-end drinks to give the air of sophistication." The cheap whiskey in an unlabeled bottle (as seen in many Western films) likely wasn't what was typically served throughout the West. Low-end whiskeys were certainly out there, but, unsurprisingly, most customers wanted to drink the good stuff.

"In such places — especially boom towns that were hard to reach — a bottle of fine whiskey might go for $3," Boardman explains. "A shot (or equivalent) would likely go for 25 cents." Picking a year in the middle of the Wild West era — 1875, for reference — the $3 spent on that bottle would equate to about $91 in today's money. For that $0.25 shot, you're looking at closer to $7.60.

It's difficult to define exactly what qualifies as a fine whiskey when comparing the present to a century and half ago. Generally, whiskey experts tend to say that the $40 to $70 range is where premium bottles of whiskey can be found, and the market is full of good bottles of whiskey under $60 — roughly one-third cheaper than what a cowboy paid for whiskey in the Old West. Even the budget whiskeys of today, though — those in the $20 to $25 range — are much better than what was being served on the cheap back then.

"The really cheap stuff cost about a nickel," Boardman says, referring to the price of a single drink. That would equate to around $1.50 today. An inexpensive drink, to be sure, but of inferior quality than what you'd find in even the lowest modern dive bar. This wasn't the sort of rotgut made with all sorts of poisonous chemicals, but this horrible-tasting cheap Wild West whiskey may have been adulterated with river water, molasses, and tobacco, intended to dilute, flavor, and color precious whiskey to stretch it a bit further.

At the absolute bottom of the Old West whiskey barrel was rotgut, a catch-all term for liquors that honestly barely deserve that title. "Rotgut whiskey was rare in the Old West, unless people were making their own," Boardman reveals, but there are plenty of stories of the stuff. One such Old West "whiskey" called "tarantula juice," was made from a combination of wood grain alcohol, sulfuric acid, essence of laurel, prussic acid, tobacco oil, and strychnine. For a horrible concoction like this, we should simply be relieved that regulators would no longer allow such a product to make it to market.

Interestingly, though, as much as popular media has fixed the idea in our minds that straight whiskey was the drink of the Wild West, historians beg to differ. "In Tombstone, for example," Boardman shares, "if you check drink ads and menus, the most popular beverages were mixed drinks — gin fizzes and the like." It might shatter the image a bit, picturing that dusty cowboy sipping daintily at a frothy gin fizz in a coupe glass rather than slamming back one whiskey after another, but one should think twice before arguing with a historian.

"Whiskey and beer were way down the list in terms of demand," Boardman says. "If folks were going to a fancy saloon, they wanted a fancy drink as well." Cocktails, of course, weren't the only other offering that one might find in such a place. Old West cowboys also drank sarsaparilla, a cousin of root beer made from a vine native to Central and South America, and even though the beer found in saloons might've been bad, it was another option. Add to that the many alcoholic tonics, elixirs, and bitters consumed at the time, and the bar menu starts to look more modern than the movies would have you believe.

With a rough inflation-adjusted price of over $90 a bottle, whiskey wasn't cheap in the Old West. That said, drinks like whiskey punches, whiskey slings, and whiskey cocktails all made use of that signature spirit. With a per-drink cost of around $7.60, things start to look a bit more reasonable. Compared to the $12 to $30 average cost of a cocktail in Las Vegas, that's downright affordable.