Dutch Jake was one of Spokane’s most beloved characters

Dutch Jake Goetz was not exactly Spokane’s founding father. He was Spokane’s fun-loving uncle.

From the 1880s onwards, Dutch Jake was the most famous saloon-casino-hotel-theater impresario in the entire region – and arguably, one of the most beloved characters in Spokane’s history. To understand why Dutch Jake was revered by loggers, miners, mayors, businessmen, gamblers, historians and even the occasional minister, it helps to list a few Dutch Jake highlights:

• He invited every miner in the Silver Valley to his 1886 wedding – and 678 of them showed up.

• He owned several cannons, which he loved to fire off from the roof of his downtown Spokane hotel.

• He held a birthday picnic every year that lasted two days, attracted hundreds of his closest friends, featured mock sea-battles and was fueled by wagons full of free beer.

• The roof of his Hotel Coeur d’Alene featured “The Deck of a Modern Steamship on Top,” complete with lifeboats.

• The hotel also featured his favorite piece of art – a painting of a jackass.

That jackass, it turns out, was one of the key figures in Dutch Jake’s history, as we will see below.

First, you should know that Dutch Jake was not Dutch. He was Deutsch (German) and spoke with a strong German accent, which was comically rendered by nearly every journalist who interviewed him. He was born Johann Jacob Goetz on July 25, 1853, in Frankfurt, Germany. He was 15 when he immigrated to America in 1868 with his father and two brothers. After brief stints in the Midwest and Mississippi, Jacob Goetz decided that, as a young man with “no education to speak ouf, und no trade I could do, and no moneys,” he needed to make a fortune in the West.

He drove mule teams in Wyoming, where he acquired two things that would stick with him his entire life. The first was a business partner and best friend, Harry Baer, and the second was a nickname.

“Because of Jakie’s unusual name, it was always being mispronounced,” Baer later said. “They called him everything from Goats to Guts. One day, he got mad. ‘Goats, Guts, Gots,’ he exclaimed. ‘From now on, I’m chust Dutch Jake.’ The name stuck and he became known far and wide as ‘Dutch Jake of Cheyenne.’ ”

He went on to cut logs on the Clearwater River, and to homestead briefly in Viola, Idaho (near Moscow). Around 1881, he learned that the Northern Pacific railroad had assembled a big construction camp at Ellisport, Idaho, about 12 miles east of Sandpoint. In the first of many smart business choices, he decided to go to Ellisport not to lay track, but to erect a log-and-canvas restaurant/boarding house for the laborers. His second inspiration came almost immediately: Tack on a saloon.

When the construction crews moved down the line, Dutch Jake and his partner Baer folded up their tent and moved with them. Then in 1883, the big construction camps moved all the way to Ainsworth, near present-day Pasco. There, Goetz and Baer built their biggest establishment yet. This time, they added gambling, thus completing the Four B’s of the Goetz-Baer business formula: Bed, board, booze and betting. They were careful to run a “fair and honest house,” which was hardly the frontier norm, and it gave them a good reputation for decades.

In 1883, Dutch Jake spotted an even more glittering opportunity: gold and silver in the Coeur d’Alene mining district. He tramped by snowshoe into Eagle City, Idaho, and discovered “between 1,000 and 1,500 men camping in the snow” and “most of them didn’t know what they were doing.” He went down to nearby Murray and erected a canvas hotel-cafe-saloon. During the terrible winter of 1884-1885, he helped many of those miners stave off starvation, out of his own pocket. He later said that he and Baer never “let a hungry working man or miner go hungry.”

He also started doing some prospecting of his own and staking other prospectors to food and supplies in exchange for a cut of their strikes. This paid off in the biggest conceivable way in 1885 when he staked Phil O’Rourke and Noah Kellogg, who found a huge ledge of galena ore that would become the Bunker Hill and Sullivan Mine, one of the largest and richest mines in the nation. Dutch Jake himself helped locate an extension of the ledge, and his share was $200,000, a fortune in those days.

And what did he first spend his money on? The biggest party North Idaho had ever seen. It was Dutch Jake’s own wedding to Louisa Knuth, his German-born sweetheart. “I vants everypody to come,” he said. The invitations, posted on trees, said, “Everyone is expected to make a night of it. No sleep ’til morning . … Dutch Jake pays all the bills.”

Grizzled prospectors contributed to the wedding festivities by going up on the ridge and setting off TNT. “Imagine a wedding march played on dynamite sticks,” said Baer. “They shot them off like firecrackers and strung them together to save time.”

At the ceremony in the Union Hall, the German-born justice of the peace said, “Now Jake, shust put da ring on her finger and you got her!” The crowd gave three cheers and the band struck up “The Mistakes of My Life Have Been Many.”

The dinner reception was attended by 678, and hungry miners took full advantage of Goetz and Baer’s largesse. One “great, uncouth, rawboned fellow” stuffed himself at a “fearful rate, dish after dish disappearing down his throat.” The champagne was also free, and, because everybody was snowed in by a blizzard, the party continued for most of a week.

Dutch Jake decided to use the rest of his fortune to build a four-story brick hotel-saloon-restaurant-casino in Spokane Falls. He named it the Frankfurt Building, after his hometown. On Aug. 4, 1889, about $30,000 in fancy furnishings from Chicago were sitting on the sidewalk, ready to be installed, when Spokane’s Great Fire broke out. It destroyed most of downtown Spokane, including the new Frankfurt Building and all of its furnishings.

Dutch Jake’s Bunker Hill cash was gone. He and Baer scraped together enough capital to buy the biggest tent they could find, a circus tent out of Portland. On the smoldering embers of Riverside Avenue, they erected “Dutch Jake’s Beer Garden – Frankfurt, Milwaukee Beer on Draught, Chop House, Cigars and Tobacco.”

A Spokane Falls Review reporter described a typical night in Dutch Jake’s gambling tent in 1889:

“The first glance is bewildering: A long hall lighted by numberless incandescent lamps, full of men, true types of the miner, logger and cowboy. … A whirring, buzzing sound attracts your attention to the big, gorgeously colored ‘wheel of fortune.’ Here is where the crowd of workingmen is thickest. … The surging throng is kept at a distance by a rough board railing, and the excitement is tremendous.”

The tent was 200 feet long by 50 feet wide, with “patronage of 600 on a dull night and 1,000 on Saturday nights.”

The profits were also massive. In 1894, Goetz and Baer used them to build the Coeur d’Alene Hotel and Variety Theater, on the southeast corner of Front Avenue and Howard Street (occupied today by the Boo Radley’s store). It had all of the Four B’s and more.

“A person can get anything he wants in this place of business – drink, bath, meal, bed, shave, go to the theater, dance hall or gambling room,” wrote old friend and prospector Jim Wardner, in his 1900 autobiography. “There are 144 men and women working in this establishment. Here you find barkeepers, barbers, carpenters, gamblers, actors, electricians, waiters, and boot-blacks. The house never closes its doors. It is a continuous performance the year round.”

The basement also served as a homeless shelter, because Dutch Jake allowed any flat-broke workingman a blanket, a bed and a meal. Wardner said he once saw hundreds stretched out in the basement on a bitter winter night.

Around this time, Dutch Jake began holding his annual birthday picnic, a two-day party at one of the area’s rivers or lakes. The 1899 picnic on Lake Coeur d’Alene included a minstrel show, a Sitting Bull ghost dance, a circus, and a “sham battle between the Americans and the Spaniards,” as witnessed from “Dutch Jake’s battleship, the Olympia.” Every picnic was preceded by a procession of wagons, which carried beer kegs, Dutch Jake’s cannon, and hundreds of revelers.

In the early 1900s, authorities began to crack down on gambling, saloons and risque variety theaters. Dutch Jake was an obvious target, since he presided over what The Spokesman-Review called “not only the largest institution of its kind in Spokane, but in the whole West.” One anti-saloon reformer said his goal was to “dethrone Dutch Jake as the de facto mayor of Spokane.”

Dutch Jake handled these challenges in stride. He converted the gambling hall section of the Coeur d’Alene Hotel and Variety Theater to bowling and billiards, and began to move out of the saloon business. He added two new stories to his building and in 1910 converted it into the classiest hotel in town, the Hotel Coeur d’Alene, advertised as “the place where presidents will be honored to stop” and the “Hotel With A Personality.”

That personality included a rooftop “playground for ladies and children,” built to resemble a steamship, complete with a pilot house, ship’s wheel, compass, purser’s cabin, lifeboats and, of course, Dutch Jake’s beloved cannon.

When prohibition arrived in Washington in 1916, he and Baer simply closed down the hotel bar and carried on as respectable and successful innkeepers.

Dutch Jake always said he had no use for ministers or religion, but when he died in 1927, his eulogy was delivered by Rev. W.J. Hindley, a former mayor of Spokane who made a special trip out from Seattle. Hindley called Dutch Jake a “square shooter” with a remarkable capacity for friendship and charity, earning him friends from “one end of the United States to the other.”

Spokane’s pioneer historian William L. Lewis had already summed up Dutch Jake’s life in a 1925 biographical essay, writing, “In the entire Northwest, there is probably no more simple, kindly or big-hearted individual, and probably no man better known to the public.”

Today, one of Dutch Jake’s cannons resides at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture. His elaborately inlaid “wheel of fortune” has a home at the Spokane Elks Lodge, No. 228. Meanwhile, Dutch Jake’s name lives on in Dutch Jake’s Park, a mini-park in the West Central neighborhood, which contains, fittingly, a playground.

However, if anybody in Spokane is seeking a historic name for a new casino, brewery or bar, Dutch Jake’s name – and his legacy of good cheer – is there for the taking.