Cheers Toe You!

Day #4 Of 31 Days of Halloween 

Cheers Toe You! 

The Sourtoe Cocktail isn’t some slick urban legend invented to spook tourists around a campfire. 

It is a nauseating, hundred-year-old Yukon tradition served up in a salt-crusted shot glass at the Downtown Hotel in Dawson City, and it centers on an actual, mummified human big toe. 

The golden rule is simple: You can drink it fast, you can drink it slow, but your lips must touch the toe.

The origin of the gruesome garnish goes back to the 1920s, during the height of Prohibition and deep freeze. 

A rum-runner named Louie Linklater was out on his dog sled in the middle of a brutal minus-fifty blizzard when his foot slipped through the river ice. By the time he made it back to his cabin, his right big toe was frozen solid as a stone, dead, and turning a horrific shade of midnight blue. 

To prevent gangrene from creeping up his leg, his brother Otto grabbed a wooden mallet, a couple of heavy belts, and a sharp axe, hacking the blackened digit clean off right at the joint.

Rather than throwing the severed stump into the stove, the brothers decided to preserve the trophy. They dropped the withered, frostbitten toe into a ceramic crock filled with overproof rum

Fifty years later, a local river captain named Dick Stevenson stumbled upon the forgotten jar while cleaning out an abandoned cabin. Naturally, instead of burying it, Captain Dick decided the only logical thing to do was drop the mummified toe into a shot of Yukon Jack and challenge the locals to drink it.

Over the decades, the legendary toe has been accidentally swallowed, intentionally gulped down by rowdy tourists, stolen, and replaced by donated toes…ranging from lawnmower accidents to frostbite victims…all dried and packed in coarse grain salt until they resemble wrinkled beef jerky you forgot in your car.

When the bartender drops that blackened, shriveled stump into your glass, it clinks against the bottom like a piece of driftwood. 

As you tilt the glass back, the whiskey goes down easy, but there’s no avoiding the main event: 

The alcohol rushes past, leaving the rough, leathery skin and the jagged, calcified nail to drag slowly across your top lip.

That shriveled, salt-crusted joint brushes against your skin, leaving a lingering, briny reminder of 100 yr old frostbite.