Chinatown Vegas com
Gambling in Early California
Far Western society similarly led the rest of the country in modernizing styles of gaming during the last half of the nineteenth century.
Inspired by gold-seekers come to dig a quick fortune, newly arrived settlers embraced novel kinds of betting that suited the distinctive way of life.
They proved most inventive in early San Francisco where high-volume gambling flourished near the city center in buildings quite similar to the modern casino.
As with mining agriculture, and tourism in later years, Californians were the first Americans to organize gaming into a modern industry.
This stage in the development of betting endured only as long as the population regarded gaming as a legitimate enterprise operated by ordinary businessmen.
Once people turned against professional gamblers and, more gradually against public and commercial betting, the original innovations gave way in California to tamer styles of gaming that seemed more appropriate for a settled society.
Regarded as more legitimate endeavors, these gambles demonstrated that betting still prevailed on the Pacific Coast and served notice that the Far West would continue to act as the fountain of American gambling culture.
Despite the efforts of opponents of gaming, California society retained its predilection for betting. Gambling as a style of life gained reinforcement from the rapid growth of metropolitan Los Angeles during the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.
Southern California came to resemble Gold Rush San Francisco in some respects when it spawned a series of speculative booms after 1880 that defined the fluid and acquisitive character of society south of the Tehachapis.
At the same time that San Franciscans' preoccupation with California gold and Nevada silver diminished, a new burst of economic excitements stirred society in Southern California.
Consequently, Los Angeles and its copious suburbs became the single most fertile source of new American forms of betting.
Southern California reveled in its own Gilded Age during the fifty years from 1880 to 1930, when prosperity stemmed from unprecedented growth.
In the 1880s, the population of Los Angeles quadrupled, in the next decade it doubled, and then it tripled, doubled, and doubled again to overtake San Francisco in size.
Demographic expansion laid the groundwork for economic booms. Prior to the 1880s, businessmen had proceeded cautiously in Southern California because new demand for their services and products depended upon an unsteady stream of newcomers.
Following the start of the boom, however, entrepreneurs had to anticipate the needs of an increasing population.
They willingly made advance commitments and took speculative risks because the profits resulting from growth seemed to be a sure thing.
Angelenos gambled as capitalists on their bright future, and hedged their bets with prodigious public works like a man-made harbor and a stunning aqueduct, that assured continued growth.