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Wicked Women: Notorious, Mischievous, and Wayward Ladies from the Old West.
Poker Alice running a card game in Deadwood
Polite society in the 1800s referred to women who owned and operated their own gambling dens as “wicked.” But America’s oldest diversion deteriorated into a vice without the help of lady gamblers. In the turn of a card or the roll of a dice for all or nothing, there was a kind of daring that touched the American spirit. “The lust for work is matched…by the lust to gamble.” The affluent risked thousands in comfort; the poor risked bread money on gaming tables in slum taverns.
The gambling fever produced two opposing species. First were the predatory card sharps and confidence men and women who understood human weakness and how to exploit it; second were the masses, eternally gullible to the lure of something for nothing. Throughout the nation these adversaries met – in lotteries, over tables, at racetracks, in casinos, cockpits – and the result was nearly always the same. The suckers lost.
In 1870, San Francisco had an estimated 2,500 gambling houses, which produced as they did elsewhere, crime and degradation. And while these are hardly the by-products one would expect of a leisure activity, it should be remembered that vice can become a pastime for people who had little alternative resources.
To learn more about the wicked women on the wild frontier read
Wicked Women: Notorious, Mischievous, and Wayward Ladies from the Old West.
National Book Launch on February 21, 2015.
