Harvey’s Prairie Bitters

Several years ago I saw a picture of a Harvey’s Prairie Bitters bottle. It caught my imagination, not only in its very homespun shape – a cuboid body with indented framed panels, the shoulder looking like a buttressed skep, topped with a simple cylindrical neck – but also with its color – a glowing amber with deep burnt sienna filling out its top and edges. 

 In my imagination this bitters from 19th century USA would have been made from botanicals from the Great Plains, With a mix of ingredients inspired by indigenous folkways and good old American snake oil hucksterism. This antebellum elixir inspired me to think of a lost art of making strange and bitter concoctions, some palatable, many not, that would become the essential essences of the nascent cocktail culture that would define drinking in the USA. 

 It seems that prairie bitters is actually a subset of patent medicines that used bison gall as their main ingredient. As the great herds of American bison were being driven to near extinction by the rapaciousness of Manifest Destiny, even the gall of these magnificent beasts found its way into bottles of stuff that could be sold. It apparently really did taste disgusting. Who now knows? Nonetheless, it was a step on the way to bitters that did taste good. And damn, that was a cool looking bottle.

NV