The simple answer is no. If anything, nineteenth-century bottles were thicker - composed of more glass. Using one of these bottles as a club could cause a severe injury and the bottle would not likely break. I worked on the excavation of four saloons in Virginia City, Nevada, during which we recovered approximately 310,000 artifacts - so that's my direct source, but in researching for the excavations, I read a great deal of the available material on histories of Western saloons and on the related archaeology elsewhere.

The cliché of the shattered bottle that disintegrates with not-too-dramatic effect when used on someone's head is an inaccurate convention that Hollywood adopted. I understand that they used bottles that were made of spun sugar so that they looked like bottles but would easily shatter. I have not seen a reliable source on that - so let's not rely on that information too much; perhaps someone would be able to help us out with the details regarding how film achieved this effect - which in the real world would likely have been fatal.