TRACING THE PATH PODCAST

This episode about “French Lick” traces interconnected stories across centuries stemming from a specific location in Indiana.

It begins by detailing the territorial conflicts and early American claims to the region, highlighting the significance of natural saline springs which led to the establishment of “French Lick.” The story then broadens, introducing figures like the controversial Dr. William Bowles, who built the first French Lick Springs Hotel, and the evolution of the area into a prominent resort destination, especially with the construction of the innovative West Baden Springs Hotel.

Beyond local development, the tale weaves in the global journey of Smirnoff vodka and the creation of famous cocktails like the Bloody Mary and Moscow Mule, directly linking them to the social hubs in French Lick.

Finally, it concludes by connecting the resort’s decline during the Great Depression to the rise of local figures like NBA legend Larry Bird, demonstrating how diverse historical threads converge around this singular geographic point.

A History of French Lick, Indiana

In today’s episode, we connect NBA All-Stars to Al Capone’s hideouts, Hall of Fame Horse Jockeys, and the most popular drinks in the world.

Our story begins in 1670 in Indiana, when the first recorded European settlers arrogantly claimed the territory for the Kingdom of France. That would spark 142 years of conflict in the region among the French, the British, the New Americans, and the Native populations.

The weapons of the West were largely too much for the Native Americans, and they were slowly forced to retreat away from the fighting.

Many tumultuous years passed, along with the Treaty of 1763, the Treaty of Paris, the French and Indian War, all before the territory of Indiana was created. At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, George Rogers’ Clark was sent from Virginia to enforce the new government’s claim to much of the land in the Great Lakes region.

He was not only supposed to expel any remaining British factions, but also quell any Indian uprisings. In particular, he was sent to protect southern Indiana, Cascasilla in Illinois and Cahoka near St. Louis.

Vincenes had been a fur trading center, started by the French. They had erected a permanent station there, but abandoned it after the Treaty of 1763. The Americans who took over the settlement there were ill-prepared for the continuing Native American conflicts, thus creating a hotbed of activity for the new American government who did not want to seed the land back to its rightful owners.

George Rogers’ Clark was sent with a thousand men, where they gathered in Louisville for the final push across the Buffalo Trace to Vincennes. The Buffalo Trace was a trail cut into the land, made by the American bison, in their natural migrations across the prairies, looking for salt, food, and water.

Halfway to Vincennes was a swampy area they tended to settle and spend time. Not only was it refreshing, but the presence of a natural mineral spring meant the rocks were covered with salt after the water evaporated.

Because of the salt, the location was often referred to as a lick.

When Clark arrived, he found a small settlement had already been started there by the French, so \ this is where his team camped for the night. Clark’s expedition was only moderately successful.

The only thing it did was give Clark the knowledge he needed to help pressure the passing of the Northwest Ordinance.

John Adams, President of the United States, appointed William Henry Harrison to be the governor of the new Indiana Territory headquartered at Vincennes. By 1800, the population of the Indiana Territory was 6,500 people, most of which were living in the Vincennes area.

The Northwest Ordinance that was passed included a provision that no more land be taken from the Indigineous Americans unless negotiated with them. But in no place did negotiation go well as the Indians continued to feel cheated out of their land.

Rangers were then introduced to the region to build outposts for patrolling.

The population had grown to 60,000 by 1815, so ranger stations had to be in smaller places like the Lick as well.

In 1816, with the passing of the Enabling Act, Indiana was made a state.

The Enabling Act was designed to help the pioneers in the frontier with their westward expansion.

One of the problems frontier settlers had was fruit preservation – smoking, salting, and drying were the only real options. So the Enabling Act set aside 36 sections of land for saline reserves.

That land was not to be homesteaded, leased or sold, but it was there for the public good. The Lick, now known as French Lick, for the small French settlement that was there when George Rogers’ car went through, the natural springs at French Lick were set aside as saline lands.

Over the next ten years, however, despite boiling large vats of water and drilling, the saline reserves failed to produce very much salt. Plan after plan failed until the General Assembly of Indiana asked Congress if they could sell the lands.

In 1832, their request was approved and the French-like sailine reserves were sold, which brings us to the first hero of our story. 

Dr. William Bowles: The Man Who Does Not Deserve This Attention

Dr. William Bowles was born in 1799 in Maryland, but the pioneer spirit tugged at his heart so he made his way westward to Indiana. Dr. Bowles settled in southern Indiana near the springs and always felt they were a much bigger asset than just sitting as a sailine reserve.

When he heard they were up for auction, he was the first in line to buy them. It is not known what he did with them, but for the first ten years they went largely unused and underdeveloped. Instead he continued with his medical practice.

In 1839 he decided to run for state legislature. He won and was re-elected twice. In 1845, Dr. Bowles was defeated, so he returned home to French Lick to work on his business interests, and his first project then was his property in French Lick.

There he built the French Lick Springs Hotel, where the early French ranger station once stood. But he only ran the place for a year before the US declared war on Mexico.

And then at that time, the Secretary of War called the Governor of Indiana asking that he furnished three regiments of volunteers. Among those who answered the call was Dr. Bowles.

He quickly leased the operation of the hotel to entrepreneur and friend John Lane, then took his place with the military. While we referenced Dr. Bowles’s as the first hero of our story, he is far from the definition of hero.

In this case, he gave life to this story by building the French Lick Springs Hotel. But in reality, Dr. Bowles deserves no admiration. While his volunteering for the military seemed noble, it was less than noble.

In an attempt to embarrass the government, he made his way up the ranks in leadership until he commanded some troops, and then in one of the major battles of the Mexican War, he took his troops out and quickly retreated.

Losing the battle he was supposed to win.

He was discharged from his duties immediately.

And then returning home from the war, he was tried and convicted for practicing medicine without a license. Thus the beginning of his troubles.

Finally, Dr. Bowles was an advocate for slavery, convicted again in 1958 for importing seven slaves into the free state of Indiana.

Using his government knowledge from when he was on the state legislature, he introduced legislation opposing the war with the South and publicly debated anyone on the right to own slaves.

In his effort, he even organized the local Knights of the Golden Circle, a secret society that supported the South.

On June 18, 1863, he and others met with a spy from the Confederate Army to help them invade Indiana and promised he’d rally 10,000 troops to help them.

On September 17, 1864, General Allen Peterson-Hovey rounded up Bowles and six others who were plotting against the government. General Hovey authorized the military commission to try the men for treason.

On December 10, 1864, they were found guilty and sentenced to hanging.

The president stayed their execution, however. He wanted to see if the justice system agreed with the military tribunal. The case made its way to the US Supreme Court, which decided that trying men in a military tribunal, when the regular court system was available, violated the US Constitution.

The Supreme Court indicated the trial had no authority and should be thrown out immediately.

The case became known as Exparte Milligan and has to this day never been reversed or set aside.

Dr. Bowles was released and died on March 28, 1873 with the courts auctioning his hotel to resolve his debts.

French Lick Meets Paris

During this time of Westward expansion in the US, there was also a movement of creatives who were moving east to Paris to pursue arts and education and higher knowledge. They wanted to meet the most interesting people and be part of a larger arts culture.

David McCullough, the famed History author, and his book The Greater Journey, wrote that the first female American doctor Elizabeth Blackwell went to Paris for this reason.

Charles Sumner, the senator from New York, also went to Paris at this time. He wanted to absorb knowledge like a sponge and enrolled at the Sorbonne. It was there that he engaged with black students, who had as much intellect and ambition as he did, and when he returned to the US he became one of America’s foremost abolitionists.

James Fenimore Cooper and his friend Samuel Morse went to Paris. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain all made their way.

One of those who went was famed thoroughbred horse racing jockey, Todd Sloan.

Sloan had also been an Indiana boy who grew up just north of Indianapolis. Sloan’s mother died when he was young, and his father, a union army soldier, didn’t have much time for him. Being independent by necessity, he found work in the oil and gas fields before he was even ten.

In 1886 at the age of fourteen, he moved himself to Covington, Kentucky to become a horse-jockey with hopes of riding in the Kentucky Derby someday. Many people had commented to him over the years that with his small stature he could be a great one.

And by 1889, he’d scored his first win in a race. And in 1893, he’d been hired by a group out east to come jockey for them. By 1896 he had become the premier rider on the east coast, winning one-third of every race he jockeyed. His reputation landed him a job across the pond in London.

His winning streak continued there as well, until he was the UK’s top rider.

By 1901 he got caught up in some controversy and lost his racing license. So like Mark Twain and James Fenimore Cooper, Sloan moved to Paris. He asked a friend who owned a bar in Manhattan to dismantle it and bring it to London, where they would open a New York bar.

Since he spent all the time in the UK, he’d always wanted a place that felt like home. So he thought if he moved a bar to Paris he could create the unique experience for all the expats to come and be together.

Over the years the bar would be frequented by the likes of Newt Rockne, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Dempsey, Rita Hayworth, Humphrey Bogart, and an up-and-coming vodka maker, named Vladimir Smirnov, which brings us to the next hero of our story. 

The Vladimir Smirnov Connection

In Russia, almost every day is some sort of holiday, as they celebrate over 400 professional holidays. One of those is in January when Russians celebrate the birth of vodka.

The day the Russians chose to celebrate the origin of vodka, was the day Demetri Mendeleev defended his doctoral dissertation “On Combining Water and Alcohol” in 1865, which led him to creating the periodic table of elements just four years later. 

The periodic table established Mendeleev as one of the leading scientists. His fame earned him a spot working for the Bureau of Weights and Measures to which Nicholas II asked if he would create a standard recipe for Russian Vodka.

Vodka was an important drink in Russia. Going back to Ivan the Terrible, the Tsarist government maintained an incredibly lucrative monopoly on vodka, generating more than one-third of all state money through selling vodka to its own people.

Despite that, the government allowed some people the right to homebrew and to a limited number of others the right to create vodka for commercial use.

Pyotr Smirnoff was one of those. In 1864, he founded a vodka distillery in Moscow under the name P.A. Smirnov. He aimed to make the purest vodka. In his quest, he actually pioneered charcoal filtration. By 1886, he had captured two-thirds of the vodka market in Moscow and was one of the richest Russians. 

Unforseen to the vodka industry, however, when the Japanese attacked Russia in 1904, it would change everything. What Russia thought would be a quick win became an embarrassment. Russian soldiers showed up to the front lines drunk, to which newspaper headlines around the globe were laughing at Russia.

Nicholas II was furious and immediately nationalized the vodka industry he wanted to control the flow. Peter and his son Vladimir Smirnov had to sell the factory and the brand.

When Peter passed away, Vladimir had taken over already and was still angry that he wasn’t able to pursue the family business. So when the October 1917 revolution began, he took the opportunity to flee Russia.

Vladimir went directly to Constantinople Turkey, where he established a new vodka distillery and sent on reinvigorating the Smirnov Vodka brand around the world.

Prohibition in the United States, however, meant his global dream might have to wait.

That brings us back to John Lane, the man who at leased Dr. Bowles’ French Lick Springs hotel while Bowles had gone to fight in Mexico. 

The West Baden Springs Hotel

After Bowles returned from the Mexican War war and before his other troubles began, he took the hotel back from John Lane. But to make some additional money, he sold some of his land to John.

The piece he sold was about a mile away and also included a natural springs. In 1852, enamored with his hotel experience at French Lick Springs, John Lane decided to build his own hotel on his newly acquired land.

The springs on his property were already referred to as West Baden Springs, named after West Baden Germany, and as such, Lane’s new hotel would be named West Baden Resort. The allure of the area and the number of people already visiting prompted the Monon Railroad to build an extension, directly to French Lick and West Baden, marking the beginning of them becoming the premier resort destination in the US.

By 1890, seven separate railroads delivered guests from across the country, all in search of the ailment healing springs, fresh clean air, and bottled mineral springs water.

Eventually, the hotel grew to be too much work for Lane, so he sold to a group of investors, and sadly for them, disaster struck in 1901, when the hotel burned to the ground.

The investors, thinking they had sympathetic friends in the owners of the neighboring French Lick Springs Hotel, offered to sell the land in hopes of recouping some of their investment. But instead, the French Lick owners scoffed and were overjoyed their competition was gone.

That fueled the investors to not only want to rebuild, but to build something extraordinary.

Lee Wiley Sinclair, head of the investment group, wanted to build something as monumental as the Colosseum and St. Pete’s Cathedral he’d seen in Rome.

He dreamt of a six-story circular hotel with a giant atrium and domed roof more than 200 feet wide. Nothing like it existed in the world, and most architects rejected the idea altogether.

But one architect in West Virginia knew it could be done and knew he could design it.

When it opened in 1902, many referred to it as the eighth wonder of the world.

• 500 rooms
• 6 stories
• Spa and mineral springs 

French Lick soon became known as a world-class resort area, complete with casinos, a Donald Russ PGA golf course, hot tubs, restaurants, and famous guests. People like Al Capone, FDR, Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, the Marx Brothers, Abbot and Costello and Bing Crosby stayed there.

And West Baden’s enormous atrium invited entertainment, like the Hagenbeck Wallace circus to perform under their dome.

The crowds attracted the finest chefs as well.

The Birthplace of Tomato Juice

The famous chef Louis Perrin and his wife moved from France to Indiana in the 1860s to escape to civil unrest. In Indiana, he sought out the nicest dining experience he could and found the Spring’s Restaurant at the French Lick Springs Hotel. 

Early one summer day in 1917, Perrin found himself with a booked hotel ready to start the day.

Looking in the produce locker, however, he saw that there were no oranges, which would mean no orange juice for breakfast, which would be a problem.

But Perrin was not deterred. Seeing a case of tomatoes in the produce locker, he thought he’d take a stab at creating a new breakfast drink. He blended together tomato’s sugar, celery, salt, onion, and pepper.

And the first ever tomato juice was born.

Chef Perrin’s tomato juice cocktail could not have come at a better time for the hotel. Just months prior, in 1916, 48 states had passed anti-saloon legislation as the temperance movement and the call for banning alcohol heated up.

Fortunately for French Lick, its resort clients were arriving to take advantage of the healthy spring water, the air, and the beautiful surroundings.

And now this healthy tomato juice cocktail was attracting guests while the rest of the country was losing them. attracting guests while the rest of the country was losing them. The Tomato Juice got so popular they even had to form a tomato juice company to supply the hotel. 

Locally, the Kemp Brothers took up the helm of building the tomato juice company. They had to invent new machines for the process because the solids would slowly collect at the bottom of the glass. The machines they created, however, reduced the solids to such fineness by homogenization that they did not settle.

They packaged the juice under the label Sun Rayed, Sun Rayed Tomato Juice. They sold 99% of their production to the hotel. While they did sell some to French Lick visitors and others to special orders, they didn’t actually sell commercially until 1928.

When prohibition was finally enacted in 1920, Perrin’s drink became even more popular, but so did the desire for creatives to move to Europe where alcohol was legal. Paris was a hotbed of Americans fleeing prohibition and Russians escaping the revolution.

That made Todd Sloan’s New York Bar a popular destination for both.

Vladimir Schmiroff found it a great plate to visit on sales trips and trying to grow his brand. To stay on top of all the American trends, the bartender at New York Bar, Ferdinand Petiot, had ordered some tomato juice cocktail for his guests all the way from Indiana.

One day when Vladimir was at the bar, Petiot offered to make him a new mixer with his vodka. He combined the vodka and the tomato juice cocktail along with some seasonings and served it to Vladimir.

And Vladimir loved it.

Petiot suggested they name this new drink after him as it might help in his marketing the vodka. What if they named it the Vladimir? The Bladimir? The Bladi Miri? The Bloody Mary?

And the Moscow Mule

Since prohibition was in effect, it wasn’t until 1933 that Vladimir had reason to visit the United States, but he desperately wanted to succeed there. Being such a large country, Vladimir didn’t know where to start, but felt it would be best if he found someone who knew the lay of the land.

 Rudolph Kunet, a Russian who emigrated to the United States from Russia 20 years prior, had already created some successful businesses there. He knew Kunet because his family had provided grain to his father for their vodka business.

Vladimir sold the rights to Smirnov to him and then Rudolph immediately opened a distillery in Connecticut to get it started. But despite the success of the Bloody Mary, vodka had less than 1% market share in America.

America was a whiskey, bourbon, and gin country.

They weren’t yet ready for vodka. Ultimately, Rudolph Kunett failed, and in 1938 had to sell his interest in Smirnov. He contacted John Martin at the Hueblein Company. Hueblin specialized in the import and export of liquors, and also found success marketing a steak sauce called A1.

Hueblin started pushing Smirnov vodka as a white whiskey, going from bar to bar introducing it.

In California, John Martin found himself at the famous Cock n Bull Restaurant. He and the proprietor of Cock n Bowl, Jack Morgan, hit it off immediately.

John divulged to him how difficult it was to compete with whiskey and gin, and suggested that vodka’s path of success was likely going to be in a mixer.

Surprisingly, Jack Morgan had a similar problem. He had created a signature soda for the Cock N Bull restaurant, a ginger beer, but had a hard time selling it because people preferred ginger ale.

Wes Price, the bartender at the Cock n Bull, decided to mix the two together. Ginger Beer and Smirnov vodka. And he called it the Moscow Mule. Mule was the term for any alcoholic ginger drink, and the vodka was Russian, thus Moscow Mule.

They served it to local superstar, Broderick Crawford, who had starred in the film “All the King’s Men”, and its popularity took off like wildfire.

Smirnov Vodka never looked back, and they still believe the success of Smirnov is due to the overwhelming popularity of the Moscow Mule.

That takes us back to the Hayday, the 1920s, French Lick.

The Hick from French Lick

Back in Indiana, the French lick resort community had grown to 30 hotels, 13 casinos, and 15 clubs. It was a lively community for gamblers, athletes, politicians, and entertainers and gangsters.

As ownership of automobiles increased, Americans began to drive to places like Florida, more and more, slowing down the popularity of French Lake. 

But it was the stock market crash of 1929, that would be too much. Despite their best efforts, resorts were no longer a destination. In a last-ditch effort, the doomed West Baden Springs Resort hosted the 1931 National Governors Conference.

23 state governors joined the event, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Governor of New York. It was here that FDR spent time networking to gain support for his presidential run one year later that would eventually lead to the first four term president.

Unfortunately, West Baden Hotel had to close in 1932.

For French Lick, the locals who relied heavily on tourism were forced to find other work. Many found work at factories like Kemp Brothers to make juice, and the springwater bottling plants.

Others left, and some, joined the military, which brings us to the next hero of our story.

Claude Joseph Byrd was born in French Lick in 1936, just after the Depression. He grew up in an environment where most of the adults were heading to World War II, and as soon as he could, he too signed up for the military and was sent to fight in the Korean War.

Upon returning to French Lick after the war, he found work in a factory, got married and started a family. He and his wife both worked two jobs to support the family. For entertainment, they hung a basketball hoop on the outside of the garage and played often.

Two of their sons, Eddie and Larry, were high school standouts. Larry attended and played at Indiana State University. He played so well at Indiana State, he was drafted sixth overall by the Boston Celtics.

There he became one of the most prolific basketball players ever. Being a 12-time NBA All-Star, 3-time MVP, and 3-time NBA Champion.

He was called the “Hick from French Lick,” but you probably know him, as basketball hall-fame legend, Larry Bird.

Today, French Lick, Indiana, is known for its historic mineral springs. The French Lick Springs Hotel and the West Baden resort are operating and again in full swing. West Baden’s dome has been fully restored and is the largest hotel dome in the world. Stop by and order a tomato juice cocktail, a Bloody Mary or a Moscow Mule, before visiting the childhood home of Larry Bird.