Western Places, American Myths: How We Think About The West

9 | The Return of the One-Armed BanditGambling and the West

225 When the Western adventurer James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok was shot dead at a poker table in Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876, he became a legend. His death immortalized the combination of cards he was holding when the bullet hit him; the black pairs of aces and eights became known as the “Dead Man’s Hand.”1 The legend of Wild Bill’s life and death also contributed to the immortalization of the myth of the Western gambler—that of a mysterious, solitary man who took risks and lived glamorously on the edge in the rowdy frontier towns of nineteenth-century America. Although the reality was often considerably less glamorous than the myth portrays, the gambler nevertheless came to symbolize much of the entrepreneurial , individualistic mentality that created the American West as a distinctive place. Since Wild Bill’s days, both the frontier and the average gambler have been tamed, and gambling has become a multibillion-dollar leisure industry controlled by multinational corporations. Despite this transformation, gambling has not lost its essentially “Western” frontier flavor. Over the evolutionary course of American gambling from the sixteenth century to the present , this flavor has become global in a manner that is reshaping the contemporary West and its frontiers in a new, most fascinating way. Gambling and the Frontier American gambling was born as a frontier activity. From its onset in the sixteenth -century eastern and southern colonies to its nineteenth-century establishment in the West, gambling’s fortunes oscillated from a widely accepted 9 | The Return of the One-Armed Bandit Gambling and the West pauliina raento form of fund-raising and recreation to a morally condemned vice. During these centuries, however, gambling consolidated its ties to the values characteristic of frontier societies. In the first colonies, gambling represented social mores that the settlers transplanted from their native lands. Following the English example, lottery soon became an institutionalized and popular—although criticized—form of collecting a “voluntary tax,” of raising funds for large construction projects in colonial cities. The model of large-scale public lotteries was modified, however , to serve the requirements of the new setting. In these nascent communities , the lotteries were most often private business initiatives that supported singular, local projects. Gradually, these modifications made gambling one way to distance the colonies and their distinctive, adventurous identity from the ties to the Old World. The risk taking inherent in gambling contributed to this identity by paralleling “the chance undertaken in the larger enterprise of the movement across the Atlantic and into a new continent.”2 An example that reflects the ties between gambling and the values associated with frontier societies and their distinctive, “new” culture and identity is quarter horse racing among the Virginian gentry in the eighteenth century. In these heated, socially exclusive and carefully regulated spectacles involving substantial economic risks, the gentlemen transformed central elements of their culture into action. The racing and its gambling relationships symbolized the local society’s strongly individualistic, competitive, and materialistic values. It also helped to maintain class cohesion and erase tensions in the context of rapid social change.3 After the American Revolution, the nation’s attention turned toward the West. In this rapidly evolving general context of risk taking and adventure, gambling gained volume and acceptance. In the early nineteenth century, however, criticism against new, commercial forms of gambling was on the rise. As new ideas swept across the increasingly heterogeneous country and as many settlements sought and gained respectability, gambling was attacked with vigor. Private betting for recreational purposes was still tolerated, but professional gamblers and organized lotteries were considered corrupted and exploitative. The increasingly loud public campaign against gambling led to the banning of lotteries in every state of the Union by 1860.4 The second phase of early American gambling began in the aftermath of the Civil War. In the physical and moral devastation following the war, economic necessity brought gambling back as a means to raise funds, especially in the South. A more important catalyst for the dispersion of gambling was 226 | pauliina raento the rapid westward movement of the frontier. In the new settlements along the rivers and, later, railroads, a new species of professional gambler emerged. His trade matched the risk-oriented, entrepreneurial atmosphere of these settlements : They were full of people who had opted for taking their chances in a virgin environment, hoping to make a quick pro...