Tunnels Under Whiskey Row

The best things in life are dirty!

Prescott, AZ

Prescott (pronounced by the locals as ‘Preskit’) is about 100 miles north of Phoenix, located near the Bradshaw Mountains. At an elevation of 5,400’, the town has a mild climate with cool summer nights and an occasional light snow in the winter.  In 1864, Prescott was named the territorial capital of Arizona Territory. Three years later, the capital was moved to Tucson, and then returned to Prescott in 1877, until Phoenix became the capital in 1889. 

Prescott was originally a gold and silver mining town. The real money wasn’t made digging in the dirt, it was made providing goods and services for the poor sonabitches that dug in the dirt, and Prescott was no exception. “Whiskey Row” was located across the street from the Court House, and at one time there were more than forty saloons lining Montezuma Street. Behind Whiskey Row there were several “cat houses” located along Granite Creek where the miners could find some much needed female companionship. 

By the late 1870’s, Prescott became more civilized as the town’s female population increased and demanded that their husbands provide suitable housing for their families. This was during the Victorian era, so the downtown area was filled with Victorian style homes, including the Bashford House, built in 1875, which is now part of the Sharlot Hall Museum.

When I moved to Prescott in 1997, it had a population of 34,000 people and was self-proclaimed as “Everyone’s Hometown.” The Palace Restaurant and Saloon, located on Whiskey Row, (the oldest business in Arizona, opened in 1877), once frequented by Doc Holiday, Wyatt Earp and his brother, Virgil, was now filled with tourists from California and refugees from the Phoenix heat. Intermingled among the saloons on Whiskey Row were souvenir shops, art studios, coffee shops and other tourist hangouts. The old Chinese laundry and a nearby cat house once located behind Whiskey Row, near Granite Creek, was now the home of a Bank One – which may be fitting if you consider that banks launder money and screw customers. 

The wild west had been tamed.

Tunnels Under Prescott

It was a cold winter morning. The ground was covered with a light dusting of snow. I had met a friend at the coffee shop in Hotel St. Michael to discuss the upcoming baseball season. I was coaching the Prescott HS baseball team, and he was one of my assistant coaches. After a while, the conversation drifted into a discussion about a new bar on Whiskey Row that was getting ready to open. I almost spilled my coffee when he said, “I wonder if they stumbled across any tunnels during the construction of that new bar?” Tunnels! What tunnels? He went on to explain that back in the day, the Chinese workers had built tunnels connecting Whiskey Row to “Chinatown” (located behind Whiskey Row, near Granite Creek) so they wouldn’t risk being accosted in public.

Tunnels under Whiskey Row! The first thing that came to mind was an image from the movie “Paint Your Wagon,” with Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood as gold miners during the California Gold Rush, when they dug a tunnel under the local saloon so they could “mine” the gold dust that fell through cracks in the saloon’s wood floor. Curiosity was getting the best of me!

Today, I would Google “Prescott Tunnels” and immediately have access to newspaper articles, YouTube videos, images, and books about the alleged tunnels of Prescott. But, in 1998, using the internet as a research tool was well beyond my skill level, so I went “old school” and made a trip to the archives at Sharlot Hall Museum. After searching their card catalogue, I found several references to newspaper articles about Prescott’s tunnels and asked the clerk if she could retrieve the documents. While I was reading the documents and taking notes, a gentlemen approached me and introduced himself as the assistant director, and then asked what I was researching. I told him that I was interested to learn more about the tunnels under Whiskey Row. He glared at me with his smug little smile as he said, “There’s lots of real history in Prescott, but the tunnels are a myth. That would be like going to the Grand Canyon and asking for directions to a Coke machine.” I returned his smile as I replied, “There are Coke machines at the Grand Canyon.” I continued my research while the little smug man walked away.

The newspaper stories about the tunnels focused on two themes: illicit behavior and Chinese racism. Of course, illicit behavior is the trade craft of public servants. So it should be of no surprise that the tunnels were alleged to have provided access for judges and politicians to move from the courthouse to Whiskey Row for a drink or a romp with a lady of the evening or to chase the dragon in a Chinese opium den – I’m sorry, that sounded like Russian disinformation! 

One of the stories that caught my interest was about an old speakeasy, called the Gold Nugget, located in a tunnel under Moore’s Laundry at the corner of Carleton & Montezuma, on the south end of Whiskey Row. I couldn’t resist, so I took some shirts to Moore’s Laundry and, while I was there, I asked the owner if I could see the old speakeasy. He told me to come back when they weren’t busy, and to bring a flashlight. A few days later, I showed up with my flashlight and he took me to a back room and pointed at some large wooden planks covering a hole in the concrete floor and said, “If you can move those boards, then you can climb down there, but be careful,” and walked away. I moved the planks and climbed into the black hole with my flashlight. There was a large room with wood beams supporting the ceiling and another room with a bar decorated with “fool’s gold” (pyrite) that glittered in the beam from my flashlight. On the wall was a portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt, in honor of the president who repealed prohibition with the Twenty-First Amendment. I passed through a door into a hallway/tunnel heading in the direction of the current Mile High Middle School, which happened to be in the area where the Chinese once lived. Unfortunately, the hallway/tunnel abruptly ended with a modern cement block wall. Could this have been one of the mythical tunnels of Prescott?

Recently, I came across photographs of the Gold Nugget Speakeasy that you can find on Way Out West Photography’s website.  https://www.wayoutwestphotography.com/speakeasy Check ‘em out! Their photographs are also featured in Patricia Ireland-Williams’s book, “Underground Prescott” that can be found on Amazon.

“You aren’t from around here, are you?”

Let’s face it, prejudice and discrimination are real. In fact, the history of mankind is filled with examples of prejudice and discrimination. While researching the tunnels under Prescott, I came across the Arizona Weekly Miner’s reporting on the Chinese immigrant’s arrival in Prescott during the late 1800s.

In 1863, the transcontinental railroad began construction, and the railroads hired over 15,000 Chinese laborers to work on the railroad. The railroad was completed on May 10, 1869, and all the Chinese laborers were out of a job.

On May 29, 1869, the Arizona Weekly Miner reported under the headline: A Celestial, “We have heretofore neglected to inform our readers that a veritable young Celestial arrived at Fort Whipple a short time ago. Should he live long enough to become a man, Yavapai County will contain one Chinaman.” (Note: Prescott was located near Fort Whipple)

Wow! That sounds like something the New York Times would write about the Midnight Cowboy arriving in the Big Apple on a Greyhound Bus!

But it didn’t stop there. On November 27, 1869, the Arizona Weekly Miner reported under the headline: More Chinamen, “Three more Chinamen arrived here during the week, and have gone to work. There are four in this vicinity, which is quite enough.”

The arrival of the first Chinese woman in Prescott was celebrated by the Arizona Weekly Miner on March 11, 1871, under the headline: The First Chinawoman, “Wickenburg stage arrived… Among the passengers was a Chinese female, the first that has even visited this town, and section of country, and, we hope, the last.”

In Prescott, the Chinese worked as produce farmers, miners, cooks, domestic servants, and laundry owners. However, with the level of prejudice expressed in the local newspaper, it would make sense that the Chinese might have built tunnels that would have allowed them to travel from their homes and businesses in Chinatown to work at the establishments on Whiskey Row without having to encounter the locals.

During the 1870s, the US experienced an economic recession, which caused fear that Chinese immigrants were taking jobs from American citizens and led to violence against some Chinese communities. In 1875, the Page Law restricted the immigration of Chinese women. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 limited Chinese immigration for 10 years and was renewed for another 10 years by the Geary Act of 1892, before it was made a permanent law in 1902. Finally, the law was rescinded in 1943, which allowed Chinese to be eligible for citizenship.

The 2000 census reflected that Prescott had a population of 34,000 and 0.8% were of Asian descent, which is about the same number of Chinese living in Prescott in 1900 when its population was 5,043.  Prescott proclaimed itself as “Everyone’s Hometown,” but I guess “everyone” wasn’t meant to include the Chinese.

Postscript

I guess you could say that I went looking for tunnels and ended up going down a rabbit hole. Although I never found the mythical tunnels under Whiskey Row, I did explore the Golden Nugget Speakeasy under Moore’s Laundry and, as a bonus, I learned about Chinese immigration during the late 1800s.

I must say that it was disturbing to read the newspaper clippings cited above that publicly expressed prejudice and discrimination against the Chinese immigrants during Prescott’s territorial period. By today’s standards, such “hate speech” would be condemned. However, before we get on our high horse and condemn people from the past, we may want to consider the surreptitious manner that some of our most illustrious liberal institutions have discriminated against Chinese students in favor of other minorities with lesser academic qualifications (see June 29, 2023, US Supreme Court decision in SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. University of North Carolina).

Like I said earlier, prejudice and discrimination are real. But if you’re going to do it, at least have the guts to put your cards on the table.

The End

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