Casinos Downloads

Gambling: Better Days, Frenzied Lives

The fleeting career of the El Dorado illustrated the quick rise and fall of the new institutions.

In the late summer of 1849, the El Dorado consisted of a blue canvas tent. By November, it had grown into a commodious two-story edifice, only to be burned to the ground the following month.

A series of brick structures soon followed as the El Dorado once owned by former riverboat gambler James McCabe, ran full blast from 1850 until 1856.

By the latter year, the four-story building had begun to fall into disrepair, its upstairs windows shattered and its downstairs neglected.

The San Francisco City Hall, now located next door, gave sign that civic leaders and land developers had started to reassign the block to purposes more suited to the central district of a respectable metropolis.

In San Francisco, the changeover began as early as 1851 when such competing forms of amusement as theaters, gymnasiums, reading rooms, and private clubs began to siphon off some of the customers who had frequented gambling saloons.

The new alternatives suggested the growing complexity and domesticity of the golden metropolis as well as citizens' struggle for gamblers to foreign influences, and gradually proceeded to curtail and then to outlaw altogether public and commercial gambling.

On April 17, 1855, the state legislature made illegal most common forms of wide-open gaming. The event, in the words of Dale Morgan, 'from one point of view marks the end of California's frontier era, Frederick J. Turner to the contrary notwithstanding.'

The new laws, weak and difficult to enforce, likely had little effect on gambling in California, but they did illustrate a new spirit afoot in the state.

They resulted from an outlook that perceived gaming establishments not as evidence of cultural refinement, but as unwanted remnants of the frontier.

As in the old Southwest, the target of reformers was not so much gaming itself as the professional gamblers who made their living from the pastime.

Chance taking remained an integral aspect of life in the state, but those who made betting a career were cast out from respectable circles of society because they seemed increasingly incongruous in communities intent on conforming to eastern standards.

This process was dramatized vividly in San Francisco during the course of events leading to the rise of vigilantism in 1856.

The Second Vigilance Committee of 1856 took shape largely for the political purpose or replacing an allegedly corrupt Democratic regime with an independent businessmen's government in San

Francisco, but its reform rhetoric focused relentlessly on gamblers and portrayed public gaming as an obstacle to the stability of society.