h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Whether it was the American wild west, British India, central Africa, the Australian outback, hot beverages like tea and coffee were in the vanguard and helped to assure good health with those who used them.

In the USA the beverage of choice was usually coffee and there was a popular superstition among the frontiersmen that coffee prevented diseases like cholera and dysentery.

Though the preventive effect was later discovered to have been merely a consequence of first boiling one's water, the healthful effect was nontheless real and hot beverages certainly did lend a measure of comfort to arduous conditions, so much so that if coffee and tea were not immediately available, substitutes were frequently found.