Pain medication before NSAID pain relievers was dependent on your income, your background, and where in the wide, wide world of sport you lived. Generally we can divide medicine of the pre-1930 American experience into a few catagories;

• folk medicine; to get a good idea of how folk medicine worked in practise, do read the Foxfire book series, which is a darn good read, and full of historical stuff you can do today. Folk medicine included the use of wild and cultivated plants, superstitious practises [putting a knife under the bed of a woman in labor cuts the pain in half] Sometimes things worked, such as willow bark tea being used to reduce swelling, and futher research into this practise is what gave use aspirinn today. Sometimes is was a placebo.

• faith healing; without stepping into the ant bed of ethics and personal beliefs, I'll just say it did, and does, offer a placebo effect to some people.

• OTC medicine; re: alcohol, opium/ laudinum, cocaine, and morphine. Wild prairie lettuce extract/sap, and other traditional medicines were often combined with the hard stuff, or used alone, into what we wrongly call 'patent medicines.' They could be bought at general stores or through catalogs, and often worked just fine. It was through bogus claims from some brands and through wrongfully strong doses that we get claims of death or ineffectiveness, but for the most part they get a bum rap. Some patent medicines are still sold to this day, and it is from the copyrights and trademarks of these old medicines that we get the modern advertising industry. [note, there were copyrights and trademarks, but no patent claims]. Labels, slogans, mascots, bottle shapes, jingles, and sponsorship are all derived from this fascinating industry. Coke [formerly coca-wine], pepsi, dr. pepper, and various brands of root beer all started as patent medicines.

So yeah, there were options... and wine.