After using the word in an answer to a question here, I got to wondering about the etymology of the word hoosegow. I picked it up from my father (perhaps surprisingly, given that he was an german immigrant) but that didn't tell me much about where the word came from.
A search of etymonline.com turned up this explanation:
hoosegow (n.)
"jail," 1911, western U.S., probably from mispronunciation of Mexican Spanish juzgao "tribunal, court," from juzgar "to judge," used as a noun, from Latin judicare "to judge," which is related to judicem (see judge (n.)).
Oxford agrees, saying:
NOUN
North American
informal
A prison.Origin
Early 20th century: via Latin American Spanish from Spanish juzgado ‘tribunal’, from Latin judicatum ‘something judged’, neuter past participle of judicare.
I got curious about the 1911 date specified by etymonline and turned to Google's ngrams. Their results seemed to match and I started looking at the early uses, including:
A Miscellany of American Poetry
1920
Aprons of Silence
Carl SandburgI fixed up a padded cell and lugged it around.
I locked myself in and nobody knew it.
Only the keeper and the kept in the hoosegow
Knew it — on the streets, in the postoffice,
and
Dialect Notes – Volume 5 – Page 113
1918
CALIFORNIA WORD-LIST.
WORDS IMPORTED FROM OTHER STATES OR OTHER COUNTRIES.
hoosegaw, or hoosegow, n. (hods gaw).
A jail, or a prison. Slang.
'They chucked him in the hoosegow.'
Sp. juzgado > husgado > husgao > hoosegaw. Spanish American, then army usage, then general. Reported common also in middle western states.
But then I found this one from 1922:
Everybody's Magazine – Volume 46 – Page 44
1922
Lizette
By Sampson Raphaelson"That's the old hoosegow — a notorious place about five years ago. All sorts of booze parties."
"Let's stop there, Chuck, and sit on the soda water stand and read poetry."
It seems to me that the usage here is implying a saloon or similar establishment, rather than a jail. Is there another meaning to hoosegow that has been lost to time? Or is this simply a one-off misuse of the word?
UPDATE
There are some great (amazingly detailed and researched!) answers and comments and it was hard to pick one to accept — I went with Sven's for finding the earliest usage, as well as pointing out that juzgado was used as well by English-speakers.
I think that MikeJRamsey56 and JEL have the best explanation — an abandoned jail that was taken over and used for scandalous parties thereafter.
Thanks everyone!
Best Answer
As you might expect, the spelling of hoosegow was not well established during its early years of use in the United States, and several alternative spellings vied for a place in the lexicon. For example, from "The Coming City Election," in the Coconino [Arizona] Sun (April 8, 1910):
The same newspaper used the same spelling hoozegow in subsequent articles on March 27, 1914 and November 27, 2014, so this first instance wasn't simply an inadvertent typo.
A year later we have this instance from "In Lowell Courts," in the Bisbee [Arizona] Daily Review (April 12, 1911):
But the earliest anglicization of juzgado that I've come across is from the Orange [Texas] Daily Tribune, which uses the capitalized spelling Hoosgow in separate stories three weeks apart in 1903. Here is the instance, from an item headed "In the Recorder's Court" (August 26, 1903):
And here is the second, from "Hose Wagon Caught a Thief" (September 14, 1903):
That same spelling appears next in a story from the same Bisbee Daily Record that gave us hoosgaw in 1911. From an item under the general headline "Cochise County and Bisbee Suburbs" (July 14, 1907):
Other pre-1910 occurrences of hoosgow pop up in newspapers from New Mexico and Colorado. From an untitled item in the Tucumcari [New Mexico] News and Tucumcari Times (August 24, 1907):
And from "Mike Keefe Gets Jail Sentence," in the Ouray [Colorado] Herald (June 12, 1908):
The first occurrence of the word in an Eastern newspaper was in "Senor Battery Dan: Uses the Castilian Speech Only When He Finds English Inadequate" in the [New York] Sun (September 19, 1909):
The first Elephind match for hoosegow is from an untitled item in the Creede [Colorado] Candle (July 29, 1911):
That all of these spellings began as attempts to anglicize the Spanish word juzgado is clear from the occurrence of the Spanish word itself in earlier articles in U.S. publications. One such instance appears in "A Bad Mexican" the El Paso [Texas] Herald (January 25, 1901):
This example indicates that in at least one U.S. city on the U.S.–Mexico border, an anglophone newspaper editor expected his readers to recognize and understand the Spanish word juzgado in the midst of an English-language news story.