A large room downstairs contained three tables for faro, two for monte, one for roulette and a seventh for any other game desired. Parker, as a hotel, but quickly converted to a casino as the gambling craze swept San Francisco. There was the Parker House, originally built by its owner, Robert A. By the early 1850s Portsmouth Square, the center of the City by the Bay, was ringed by large gambling houses where the doors never closed and enormous sums changed hands over the tables. The discovery of gold in California and the resulting rush of 1849 attracted many of the paddle-wheel and Mississippi River town gamblers to San Francisco, the new El Dorado of the West. In a pocket of his ‘flowerbed’ vest was an enormous pocket watch adorned with precious jewels and attached to a heavy golden chain that draped across the gambler’s chest. A stickpin with a large stone, called a ‘headlight,’ sparkled on his chest. Ostentatious jewelry advertised the gambler’s prosperity. Their expensive black suits and boots were offset by snow-white ruffled shirts and dazzling brocaded vests.
#Legends of the old west showdown professional#
Jimmy Fitzgerald and Charles Starr were early standard-setters of the sartorial splendor that became a hallmark of the 600 to 800 professional gamblers plying their trade on the river. Bryant, perhaps the best-known professional gambler on the lower Mississippi, lost thousands to Cora. After winning $85,000 and breaking several faro banks in New Orleans, Vicksburg and Natchez during one six-month period, he was banned from many resorts. The foremost faro player on the Mississippi was Italian immigrant Charles Cora. But undoubtedly the most popular gambling game in the West was faro, which drew its name from the Egyptian pharaohs depicted on the back of the cards. Another, vingt-et-un (twenty-one), introduced into the United States through the predominately French community of New Orleans, we now call blackjack. One of the popular gambling games of the 19th century was a bluffing game that evolved into American poker. Bryant, Jimmy Fitzgerald, John Powell, Charles Starr and Napoleon Bonaparte ‘Poley’ White. This golden age of gambling produced some of the most memorable practitioners of the art - legendary professionals like Charles Cora, J.J. Louis and was a staple attraction on virtually every riverboat. In the early West, gambling was considered a profession, as legitimate a calling as the clergy, the law or medicine.ĭuring the 25-year period prior to the Civil War, gambling flourished in the towns along the Mississippi from New Orleans to St. The popularity of gambling in the West can be attributed mostly to the fact that all who left the relative safety and comfort of the East to seek fame and fortune on the frontier were, in a sense, natural-born gamblers.
The best-known sporting men of the West presided over and patronized gambling houses that were often the most impressive and elaborately accoutered structures of the cities. Some brothels became elegantly furnished parlor houses with attractive ‘boarders’ managed by madams whose names were famous throughout the West.
And if the community developed into a city, saloons were housed in imposing brick buildings with ornate bars, huge back-bar mirrors and brilliant chandeliers. As the towns grew and prospered, these primitive facilities were replaced by one-story wooden buildings with false fronts to make them appear even larger.
In the early camps, the structure might be only a lantern-lit, dirt-floored tent, the bar simply a board stretched between two whiskey barrels, the prostitution facility just a cot in a wagon bed for the use of a single female strumpet, and the gambling outfit only a rickety table, a few chairs and a greasy, dog-eared deck of cards. Saloons, brothels and gambling halls would appear almost overnight. Recreation for the almost totally male population inevitably meant the triple-W vices of the frontier: whiskey-drinking, whoring and wagering. As towns sprouted in the 19th-century American West - outside Army forts, at river crossings along wagon trails, in mining districts and at railheads - some of the first structures built were recreational facilities.