Gambling: Two Leading States, The Best of the West
Following previous generations of Westerners, Southern Californians viewed risk taking as a crucial ingredient of their way of life.
Their attachment to chance an speculation stimulated betting games of all kinds and encouraged acceptance of new styles of play.
Gambling furnished Southern Californians with a thrill even more genuine than the movies, because it reiterated the spirit of the entire metropolis and reduced the speculation that pervaded Los Angeles to an intense and speedy interval.
The city inherited from San Francisco the legacy of California gambling.
In the twentieth century, California gambling thrived best not in the Golden State but in Nevada. Californians had been exporting their fast ways to other states since the 1850s when miners left the Mother Lode for additional opportunities on the pacific slope.
In the desert climate of the Silver State, the California style of betting finally blossomed to the fullest during the mid-twentieth century and gained nationwide recognition.
One hundred years before, this fashion of gambling had been a short-lived aberration in downtown San Francisco; now it emerged as a cultural fixture that gave succinct expression to many aspects of modern American civilization.
Prior to the importation of California gambling, Nevadans played on a small scale.
While the practice was legal from 1869 to 1910, betting tended to be a second line of business in barrooms, dance hall, and bordellos.
Rather than running wide-open, games of chance were generally relegated by law to back rooms and second floors.
Most establishments provided only a few tables for bettors, and players primarily staked only modest sums.
Table limits seldom topped two dollars, and most wagers ranged from twenty-five cents to one dollar.
The only features that set Nevada's gaming apart from most other states' were its legal status and the high rate of participation by residents of the state.
Gaming in Nevada never really took shape during the nineteenth century on a scale to match Gold Rush gambling in downtown San Francisco.
As virtual colonists of California, Nevadans shared mining as an economic base and speculation as a way of life with residents of the Golden State.
Yet, save for temporarily at Virginia City, they never built urban centers where gaming could develop as a specialized enterprise.
Even on the Comstock, people regarded San Francisco as the favored location of most gambling endeavors and spent their free time in that metropolis.
Investors in mining stocks looked not to their own towns in Washoe where the ore was mined, but
to exchanges on Montgomery and California streets where the betting line was established.