-casino magic-

The Business of Gambling

American folklore has commemorated betting in the lower Mississippi Valley.

With stories of the riverboat gambler, an authentic figure who emerged primarily after the West had begun to move beyond the Mississippi.

The riverboat gambler actually imitated and streamlined the practices developed by land-based sharps who operated out of a string of frontier waterfront districts such as Natchez-under-the-Hill, and fattened themselves upon the stream of venturesome travelers flowing up and down the Mississippi.

These shore-bound entrepreneurs of the frontier era cultivated novel styles of public and commercial wagering that were borrowed by riverboat gamblers and later gained acceptance throughout the United States.

Whether atop the water or on its banks, gamblers operating along the great river became so notorious to the American public as 'blacklegs', or outlaws, during the first decades of the nineteen century.

Gambling suited the entrepreneurial and individualistic outlook of the young republic and found special favor in the old South where it became a representative ingredient of the cultural matrix that held slave society together.

People along the Mississippi Valley frontier demonstrated both national and southern inclinations to gamble at the same time that they resisted the restrictions that other regions regions placed on betting.

A mixture of influences that includes Spanish, French, Yankee, Southerner, black, and Mexican ways shaped the youthful society along the lower Mississippi in the years after 1800.

Different cultural strains came to be blended with together with the waters of the ever-changing stream that dominated activity in the newly settled lands and heightened the transiency of life there.

Between St. Louis and the Gulf of Mexico, the great river nurtured a series of towns that focused the settlement and facilitated changes in styles of American gambling.

Frontier conditions persisted in these inland ports until business flourished in the valley, bringing in its wake such technological advances as steamboats and railroads, and challenging attitudes toward cardsharps.

Once content to live with wide-open, commercial betting, settlers of the old Southwest turned against the professional gambler during the 1830s.

Now on the verge of becoming respectable Southerners in a prosperous addiction to the Cotton Kingdom, townspeople anxiously identified the sharper and his companions as a vestige of the unruly frontier they sought to put behind them.

The business of gambling remained suspect, and most states circumscribed the practice by law. Yet, while the public condemned river sharpers, it simultaneously supported the profession in the Southwest by embracing virtually all forms of risk taking and by providing a steady current of players ready to stake their money on sure thing.