Commercial Row

The train stopped in Reno at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday in September 1869, and Otto Kellerman stepped onto the platform intending to eat something and continue on to Virginia City.

He did not continue on to Virginia City.

He had been traveling for six weeks, from Hamburg by steamship to New York, from New York by rail to Chicago, from Chicago west along a route that kept getting adjusted because the transcontinental line had only been finished in May and the connections were still being worked out. He was forty years old, carrying a single trunk and a letter of introduction to a saloonkeeper in Virginia City who may or may not still be in business. He had been a brewer's assistant in Hamburg for twelve years and had saved enough to start something of his own, and the American West was where a man started something of his own in 1869. This was not an original observation. He had made it on the ship with sixty other men who had made the same observation.

What stopped him was the light.

It was coming off the Sierra Nevada to the west at the particular angle of a September afternoon, the kind of light that made objects look more precisely themselves than they usually did -- the mountains very clearly mountains, the river very clearly a river, the raw wooden buildings of the town very clearly the beginning of something rather than the end. He had seen a lot of country in six weeks. This was the first place that looked unfinished in a way that suggested it would be finished well.

He ate at a counter on Commercial Row and asked questions. The town was fourteen months old. There were four saloons. There was a brewery -- Hertlein, at the east end of the row, producing lager that the man at the counter described as adequate. There was a lot on Virginia Street that had been through two owners already and was currently for sale at a price that Kellerman thought was too high and that he offered for anyway, by the end of the week, because no good lot stayed available and this was a good lot.

He wrote to the saloonkeeper in Virginia City to say he would not be coming. He did not receive a reply, which suggested the saloonkeeper had also not been waiting.

The saloon opened in November 1869. He sourced his lager from Hertlein and his whiskey from a distributor in Sacramento and his bar from a carpenter in the row who built it in four days from Douglas fir. The name above the door was simply KELLERMAN because he could not think of anything better and because, at forty years old in a new country, he thought it was important to be findable.

The first winter was quiet. The railroad men drank. The Comstock miners passed through going both directions and drank depending on whether they were going toward the mines or away from them. A man named Doyle came in every Friday and sat at the same end of the bar and ordered the same thing and did not cause problems. A Chinese laundryman named Wei Ah Lum sent his tablecloths for washing every week -- Kellerman had added four tables by January -- and always paid promptly and in exact change.

By spring he had stopped thinking about Hamburg.

He wrote to his brother Franz in the summer of 1870, a letter he had been composing in his head since the previous September: the town, the lot, the saloon, the light off the mountains. His brother arrived two years later with his wife and two children and a set of opinions about how the saloon should be run. They argued about this for thirty years, productively.

Otto Kellerman died in 1901. The saloon was still there. His son Frank was running it by then, and Frank's daughter Helen would run it after that, and the building would outlast all of them and several of the buildings around it and the town it had been built in the beginning of, which was not the town it was anymore but was still, recognizably, a place.

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