Thinking about Thanksgiving, this present day one and the one we learned about in grade school. I am wondering about the pilgrims and their feast with the foods they grew, the game they hunted and preserved and the fish they caught. Since Johnny Appleseed hadn’t arrived on the scene they probably weren’t drinking hard cider. Our friends at Superstition Meadery probably would guess that the pilgrims drank mead but I think the smart money is on rum.

A dram of rum to wash down some dry cornbread and tough wild turkey might be just the ticket.

Rum was the drink of choice for the crew of the Mayflower and for the crews of many of the ships that sailed the Atlantic and the Pacific. In order to get from the East to the Pacific these hardy souls had to sail around Cape Horn, perhaps through the Straights of Magellan (everyone’s favorite explorer). We can assume that before heading south from the Caribbean to the nasty weather surrounding the Falklands that they stocked up on Rum. Rum from Cuba, from Jamaica, from Barbados and from Venezuela all loaded aboard in barrels. Hunter Thompson could never have written the Rum Diaries without the Puerto Rican rum he imbibed.

This rum, the barrels that weren’t consumed by the sailors, ended up at California’s Barbary Coast - San Francisco. I am going to be busy for the next few days tracing the route of this rum from San Francisco to the thirsty citizens of the Arizona Territory. I think I will be hot on the heels of Kit Carson and John C. Fremont as they trekked Southeast crossing the mighty Colorado somewhere around Needles and then continuing East towards the saloons on Whiskey Row.