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Early California Gamblers' Status Quo and Gambling
Migrants to California, especially foreigners accustomed to European betting establishments where rank meant something, never ceased to wonder at the diversity of crowds patronizing the clubs around the plaza.
It was described as absolute equality reigned; bankers and porters rubbed shoulders at the same tables.
Gamblers dealt with Mexicans, miners, niggers, and Irish bricklayers. Even a few women joined the play, though more frequently they served as dealers or employees in the elegant halls.
A few private rooms were given over to more select customers, but such exclusiveness proved the exception in the general free-for-all that Gold Rush gambling saloons provided.
The wide-open policies of gamblers in early San Francisco reduced gaming to what life was all about in California. Some people dressed as gentlemen and others as laborers.
Moreover, Argonauts preferred to play at games that exposed this character the quickest.
Californians had no time for pastimes that required some little thought and reflection, just as they showed little taste for patient industry.
Players preferred faro, Monte, roulette, twenty-one, and other banking and percentage games that appealed to the fast-paced acquisitiveness of the society.
For Americans in early California, the betting experience provided by San Francisco palaces was generally new and different, and they often reacted to it in a fashion that displayed their unfamiliarity with both gambling itself and the novel shapes that California gaming assumed.
Unlike the stoic dealer and the expressionless Mexican or Chinese, Americans tended to get excited in the heat of the moment, and often ill concealed their disappointment over losses.
As many a European observed, it was not always easy for Americans to embrace the risks that they undertook.
The gambling that thrived around the plaza of San Francisco between 1849 and 1856 typified an adventuresome people devoted to chances for rapid accumulation of money.
It captured the essence of the Gold Rush frontier of the mid-nineteenth century, and it suited the style of Argonauts flocking to the Pacific Coast.
Set in a milieu as fluid and as gilded as society itself, gaming constituted a second chance for those who had not been lucky in other ventures.
It seemed to prolong the opportunities that the California frontier offered, and at the same time it distilled those characteristics that made the Far West the summation of American civilization.
While San Franciscans' devotion to their gaming palaces was strong, it was short-lived and unable to survive citizens' attempts to reestablish eastern morality. The midtown gambling house lasted only as long as the peculiar condition of the society that nurtured it.