My Favorite Old Bottle

I was going to dig for old bottles in the dead of winter.  There was a good foot of snow on the ground, which itself was frozen down a good eighteen inches.  I couldn't wait.

The ground level was 15 feet above the river, but it had not always been that way.  When the first miners arrived in town the river meandered a bit on the west side of town.  But, the valley floor had limited space, and while it was a bit risky to live alongside the river, those parts of the community that needed only the most basic buildings - stables, brothels, opium dens and the like - started to move in. More and more junk was piled along the river to raise these humble digs above its flood level.  A hundred and ten years later I was coming in search of some of that junk. 

These opportunities just don't present themselves every day.  The city needed to do some work on the main sewer line that ran along the river, and a fresh trench had been dug just that afternoon, five feet wide and ten feet deep.  All unfrozen. Sides bristling with who knows what treasures.  As soon as the dark fell, the old bottle fanatics started to file in.

The objection to us poking around in the sides of the trench were more safety than anything else.  Since trash tends to be dumped flat on the ground, that's the way it stays even after another eight feet of rock and odd refuse pile up on top of it.  If a digger wants to work that deposit for old whiskey and medicine bottles, they'd have to dig horizontally into the side of the trench.  The further you dug back, the greater danger of all those feet of overburden coming down on your head.

People do die every now and then digging for bottles.

About a half dozen of us were not deterred.  Armed with varying degrees of experience and dimwittedness we charged ahead.  There'd be no soft ground to dig in for another 4 months, and even then, nothing compared to Ouray's old red light district for producing spectacular bottles.

I had gotten into an interesting spot. There was a soft patch about the size of a dinner plate in the bank, and it contained no rocks.  The ground in the mountains is all rocks, so I knew this was a dump.  It was surrounded by particularly hard ground, so I just tunneled in with my arm - a drift back as far as I could reach.  Not much there.  A few lead printing plates I'd clean up later, but I was after bottles. 

The softness continued to the right back out of view.  I worked that way and found a nice round bottle.  After some patient work, I brought out a nice aqua Thomas master ink bottle.  It was quart-sized and looked to be from about 1890.  I have it today.

Encouraged, I checked around the cavity from which I'd pulled the ink, and felt the flat smooth surface of another large, this time square bottle.  Square bottles tend to be neater than round ones.  For the most part they're either medicines or bitters, while the 1800s abounded with plain round whiskey and beer bottles. 

I took my time.  I could feel a wide cork top and beveled sides.  The fancier the bottle, the more expensive the contents.  The more expensive the contents the fancier the bottle.  "Looking good!" I thought.  I lifted it out carefully and turned my failing flashlight on it.

Cobalt blue is one of the most desirable colors an old bottle can have.  Honey amber or peacock blue might be rarer, but the demand for cobalt is high, and this was a very large, square example.  That alone made it the coolest bottle I'd ever found, provided there weren't any cracks or chips.

I turned it in my hands and wiped the dirt off each side, checking for flaws.  The third side was rough, and I thought maybe some clay or concrete was caked on it, but a little test with my fingernail told me this was embossing(!), embossing =: ] that ran all the way from the bottom to the top of one side of the bottle.

It was a picture of an owl.  An owl standing on top of a mortar.  In one of its claws it was holding a pestle, as though it was grinding up some medical preparation for a customer.

I was done.  Elvis was leaving the hole.

I grabbed the master ink and the owl bottle.  I didn't say goodbye to anyone.  Damned if I was going to have some self-righteous part-time cop come down and say, "Okay, allya outa there and you leave them bottles bee hind.  Yer gonna getcher self killed now. C'mon. No. Ah said leave it."  That was not an option.  I was going straight to my truck and heading home.

What I have and what continues to be the gem of my collection is a quart-size Owl Drug Company salts bottle. 

Owl Drug started in San Francisco and was so named because it was one of the first drug stores that stayed open all night long.  As the company grew, it began to export its products around the West in clear, aqua and cobalt colored bottles.  Later they grew their network of stores, which eventually became Rexall Drugs.  If you're ever in a town where there's a old Rexall sign, you might see a little owl down in the corner, a nod to the chain's beginnings.

Not all embossed bottles are created equal.  On some the lettering and designs are weak.  This beauty was one of the first out of the mold, and the detail goes right down to individual feathers.

I think my bottle would go for maybe $500-$800 on Ebay, but I don't need the money that bad.  I'll never need the money that bad.  It's my baby, man!