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19th Century American Gambling
The Americanization of horse racing and lottery contests, was further encouraged by the young republic, frontier conditions in the colonies.
But in the years after 1800 the West's influence on casino games, that form of public and commercial gambling that culminated in twentieth-century Las Vegas establishments, became much more pronounced.
Western society did not continue to reshape substantially betting on horses and lotteries, because these and related forms of gambling generally required more resources, stability, and organization that frontier people possessed.
Casino games, on the other hand, run as legitimate businesses and permitted by law or convention, were ideally suited to frontier shaping.
Their speed and relative portability catered to the preferences of a fluid and impatient society, and their design provided opportunities for a class of gaming operators whose livelihood remained suspect in eastern eyes.
Professional gamblers thrived in the West because rather than pay much heed to the established custom of more settled places, they changed the nature of games to suit the styles of western customers, and thus contributed to the modification of American styles of betting.
In the United States, many commercial casino games were initially played on a large scale during the early nineteenth century.
In the frontier society of the lower Mississippi River Valley, a mixture of Spanish, French, Southern, and pioneer influences, compounded with the perpetual fluidity of life along the river comprised a most fertile field for the sprouting of these new American modes of betting.
First, in the river towns between New Orleans and St. Louis, and then aboard a multitude of steamboats, a class of professional gamblers cultivated gaming as a business venture.
These entrepreneurs demonstrated that new forms of betting emerged most quickly when they were played for profit in frontier settings.
People back East certainly bet, too, but never quite so publicly or adventurously as Westerners.
In fact, reckless gaming became so synonymous with frontier settings that when successive waves of Westerners set out to bring their societies into line with eastern standards, they frequently turned first against gambling.
English colonists and southern gentlemen encumbered the activity with restriction and ritual.
Later on, the people of Vicksburg, Mississippi, and residents of other emerging settlements sought respectability by lynching professional gamblers, so closely did some of them identify wide-open betting with the instability and disorder of the frontier.
The purging of professional gamblers from the old Southwest prevented them neither from introducing organized gambling to syndicates in eastern cities nor from transporting the business to the Far West during the last half of the century.
Gambling flourished again on the mining frontier, the most speculative of all American Wests, taking particularly strong root in the golden city of San Francisco and the Silver State of Nevada.