Flanagan, Betty, or Betsy , is the mythical inventor of the cocktail, as identified by the early American novelist James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) in his 1821 Revolutionary War tale, The Spy, where he describes one Elizabeth Flanagan as keeping a “house of entertainment for man and beast” in the village of Four Corners, New York (modern Elmsford), in the “neutral ground” that separated the British forces in New York City and the American forces further up the Hudson River. This is, of course, fiction, but there may be a grain of truth in it.
In the 1870s, a local tradition from the town of Lewiston, New York, on the Niagara River at the state’s western border, came to the attention of the American press to the effect that Cooper had based Flanagan on Catherine “Kitty” Hustler, who kept a tavern there at which he had stayed while he was writing the book. Catherine Cherry was born in Britain, apparently of Irish stock, in 1762. She was in Philadelphia by 1777, when she married Thomas Hustler there. A sergeant in the Continental Army, Hustler served through the war and remained in the service until 1802. Around that time he and his wife helped found the town of Lewiston, opening an inn and tavern there. Cooper would have stayed there not while he was writing The Spy but in 1809 when he was a midshipman in the navy and accompanied Captain M. T. Woolsey on a small-boat exploration of the southern shores of Lake Ontario, including “some time in and about the Niagara,” as he recalled in 1846.
Unfortunately, there is no record of what Kitty Hustler did between 1777 and 1802. It is certainly possible she kept a tavern in Four Corners; it is doubtful that she would have remained in Philadelphia when the British occupied it in 1778 and would have probably followed the army north. What’s more, there is much that Cooper got right in his passage about the cocktail: he placed it in the Hudson Valley, where indeed most of the earliest references to it originate; although the mint he had Flanagan putting in the cocktail was not present in its classic iterations, the earliest descriptions display a much wider latitude (plus he correctly identified the Mint Julep as a Virginia drink); the presence of women behind the bar was much more common in eighteenth-century America, when the British model of drinking prevailed, than in the early nineteenth. In short, Catherine Hustler’s role in, if not creating, then naming and propagating the cocktail cannot be ruled out.
“About Lewiston.” Niagara Falls Gazette, February 23, 1876, 3.
Cooper, James Fenimore. Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers. Auburn, NY: 1846.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Spy. 1821; repr. New York: Penguin, 1997.
By: David Wondrich