Western Mining and Gambling

Professional gamblers joined the 'old Californians' leading the way to other mineral strikes in the Far West--- where the new strains of Argonaut society sprouted.

By 1859, Colorado had become an almighty fast country, owing to the number of fast men that have emigrated there.

In 1853, William Brewer described the public gaming in one Nevada camp in terms that that echoed earlier depictions of San Francisco, and would have applied to any number of mining towns in the nineteenth-century Far West.

The gaming halls were wide open, the crowds diverse, the dealers professional, and the games fast-paced, just as they had been in early American California until the frontier stage of society had passed.

Californians had reduced the prominence of their gaming by turning to less public, less promiscuous, and less professional forms of betting.

Reformers made the dubious claim that people simply played less frequently. If in fact Americans were not gaming as much as before on the West Coast, it may have been because they speculated more in commercial and financial ventures.

Californians rejected professional dealers, but they accepted gambling as a way of conducting their business affairs.

They passed laws that drove it undercover, but its spirit still stalks abroad, and enters into almost every avocation.

Workingmen tended to speculate with, rather than save, their earnings, and merchants inevitably had an adventurous sideline apart from their regular business.

Plainly a city of expectations during the late 1860s, the metropolis seized upon every prospect for growth as a wager on tomorrow. San Franciscans regarded their town as a bettor's windfall to the parlayed into even greater winnings.

They seemed to have gotten something, an 'instant city', where little more than nothing had existed before, and that made them distinctly intent on other chancy pursuits.

Citizens continued to speculate in real estate, attempted to corner commodity markets, staked their money on the transcontinental railroad, and bought into such schemes as the Great Diamond Swindle of 1872.

But on no sure thing did they speculate so avidly as mining stocks. By 1860, individuals' opportunities in gold and silver mining has all but disappeared as the economic activity became modernized and industrial.

In addition, gaming had become more businesslike and predictable in Portsmouth Square establishments.

In other circumstances, Californians might have resorted more and more to the gaming tables in

order to recapture the risky opportunities and the rapid fluctuations that more highly-organized kinds of mining had eliminated.

The industrialization of far western mining, however, was conducted in such a way that individuals from every social rank could still partake in the adventure by gambling on shares of mining companies.