Gambling History - Part 2
On the rough-and-tumble borders of the new country,
however, gambling was a primary diversion.
Thoroughbred horse racing, cockfights, card games,
billiards, and fighting over the outcome of such
contests were favorite past times of
eighteenth-century frontier inhabitants, and gambling,
alcoholism, prostitution, and related social vices
continued to be associated with the American frontier
as it spread westward throughout the nineteenth
century.
The 1803 Louisiana Purchase opened the western Ohio
and Mississippi, and as commerce developed on the
waterways, so did gambling. New Orleans evolved as
America's first gambling city as flatboat men,
farmers, and plantation owners played a French card
game named "poque." With a few
modifications, draw "poker" became the
quintessential American card game. Gambling was
outlawed in the rest of the huge Louisiana territory
in 1811 in the wake of a popular anti-gambling tract
written by Mason Locke Weems (better known for
authorship of the myth about George Washington
chopping down the cherry tree), but gambling remained
a critical component of New Orleans' economy and
politics for another century.
The first American gambling casino was opened in New
Orleans around 1822. Owner John Davis provided gourmet
food, liquor, roulette wheels, faro tables, poker, and
other games, made certain that prostitutes were never
far away, and kept his club house open twenty-four
hours a day. Dozens of imitators soon made gaming,
drink, and women of easy virtue the primary
attractions of New Orleans. The city's status as an
international port and its thriving gambling industry
created a new profession, the card
"sharper."
Professional gamblers and cheats gathered in a
waterfront area known as "the swamp," an
area even the police were afraid to frequent, and any
gambler lucky enough to win stood a good chance of
losing his earnings to thieves outside of the gambling
rooms and saloons. The slot machine, invented by
Charles Fey in San Francisco in 1895, first became
popular with New Orleans gamblers. Reform movements
struggled to limit gambling and prostitution to a red
light district until military restrictions put the
halls and brothels out of business during World War I.
The nineteenth-century relationship between gambling
and western expansion was epitomized by the early
West's favorite son, President Andrew Jackson. Jackson
was not the first president to gamble openly, but he
bet with such an intensity that he created an image
that came to stereotype all Westerners. He bet on
cards, lotteries, and cockfights, but he preferred
horse racing, a sport suited to his western Tennessee
roots. Jackson hated losing, and his advice to a
nephew summarized not only his personality but the
mood of entire nation during his presidential term:
"You must risk to win."
New frontier settlements risked everything for
success, and those that prospered almost always
embraced gambling. Chicago became a city in 1837, the
same year it ostensibly outlawed gambling, but gaming
"hells" continued to flourish along with
drunkenness and prostitution. By 1849, there were as
many gambling establishments in Chicago per capita as
New York City and more than 1,000 women were said to
be employed as prostitutes in 1856. The New
England-bred Mayor "Long" John Wentworth
ordered the destruction of gambling houses along
Chicago's notorious Sands riverfront district in 1857,
but the denizens simply moved to more law-abiding
sections of the city where open gambling continued
until 1904 when Mayor Carter Harrison closed all of
the city's horse-racing tracks.
Gambling thrived in the South as well. Horse racing
was the most popular sport for betting, and formal
racing sessions were organized by the upper class in
Williamsburg, Fredericksburg, Annapolis, and
Alexandria well before the Revolutionary War. Slaves
rode Southern race horses until replaced by white
riders after the Civil War, inspiring the black jockey
lawn ornaments that persisted into the twentieth
century. The development of the telegraph, especially
a modification permitting the transmission of more
than one message at a time, allowed betting from a
distance and made betting on the races a major
business in the South.
The first sports pages in American newspapers were
reports on horse racing until the rise of professional
baseball after the Civil War. Baseball, too, attracted
gamblers. The Chicago "Black Sox" scandal of
1919, which saw the best team in baseball lose a World
Series on purpose, was predated by the Louisville
Greys, who threw enough games to go from a comfortable
first place in the National League standings to late
season also-rans in 1877.
Steamboats and riverfront gambling houses along the
lower Mississippi attracted swarms of professional
gamblers. A host of companies specialized in
manufacturing and selling card cheating devices. One
riverboat gambler named George Devol was so proud of
his ability to slip a stacked deck into a game that he
once used four of them in one poker hand, dealing four
aces to each of his four opponents. Devol bragged of
his exploits in his 1887 memoir, Forty Years a Gambler
on the Mississippi. Children looked upon such
professional gamblers as heroic figures. "To me
as a boy, the gambler was an object of awed
admiration," sportswriter Hugh Fullerton recalled
of his Southern boyhood in the 1870s.
But anxious townsfolk viewed the presence of such
confidence men as a vestige of an unruly frontier
past. Five "sharps" were lynched by
vigilantes in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1835, less
for religious reasons than to preserve civic
respectability, and other river cities applied
similar, if less stringent preventatives. Still, the
riverboat gambler came to symbolize freedom in dime
novels and other popular literature, even though most
died poor.
California established a reputation for professional
gambling as well. In the wake of the state's 1848 gold
rush, European traveler Friedrich Wilhelm Christian
Gerstacker observed that "gambling houses are now
to California what slave-holding is to the United
States." Professional gamblers became so wealthy
and influential that they managed to become
controlling political forces in the state for short
periods of time. In San Francisco, gamblers played all
day and all night at games that were refined into a
high-volume industry. Rather than cheating and deceit,
the city's gambling saloons relied on percentages and
odds for their profits, foreshadowing the Las Vegas
casinos a century later.
Miners did not seem to mind. San Francisco gambling
mirrored the entire gold rush mentality that "the
fun would be worth a fortune almost," as one
contemporary wrote. Professional gamblers were an
implicit, if not sanctioned, part of the casino scene
until journalist and businessman James King launched
such a vigorous crusade against them that he was
murdered in 1856. In revenge, his alleged killer and a
professional dealer named Charles Cora were lynched by
vigilantes. Nonetheless, gaming continued in San
Francisco, on a less ostentatious scale, into the
1910s.
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