Gambling Finally Emerged on the Western Frontiers
During the mid-twentieth century, Las Vegas attested the growth of American society.
Its discretion, and its distinctiveness, so to speak.
The gambling resort epitomized the restless, commercial, and middle class orientations that made Americans a singular people.
In one tourist district modeled after yesteryear and another devoted to the future, its styles evinced the borrowing as well as the innovation that has shaped American culture over the centuries.
Furthermore, its games typified the confident pursuit of fortune that had been the essence of so many American lives.
Las Vegas gambling confirmed an insight of Alexis de Tocqueville who, one hundred years prior to the legalization of casino gaming in Nevada, had speculated on the character of the citizens of the young republic.
The affinity between gambling and frontiers has been forceful from the time that lotteries funded the first permanent English settlement in North America to the years when the Las Vegas casinos embodying Southern California culture, emerged as stunning new landmarks of United States civilization.
From the seventeenth century through the twentieth, both gambling and westering thrived on high expectations, risk-taking, opportunism, and movement, and both activities helped shape a distinctive culture.
Like bettors, pioneers have repeatedly grasped the chance to get something for nothing--- to claim free land, to pick up nuggets of gold, to speculate on west real estate.
Like bettors, frontiersmen have cherished risks in order to get ahead and establish identity.
Like bettors, migrants to new territories have sought to begin again in a setting that made all participants equal at the start.
And whenever frontier society minimized risk of engendered inequality, curtailed enterprise or submerged individuality, Westerners could still turn to gambling to recreate those vanishing ideals on a different scale, in the same fashion that easterners regarded the frontier as an arena to test their luck anew.
Both groups were just as likely to lose at gaming as they were to see their expectations fade in the gamble of life, but in a historical perspective, the dogged pursuit of success, on the frontier, or at betting tables, looms larger than success or failure itself.
For a people of chance, participation in migrating and gambling counted for more than winning or losing; the game mattered more than the outcome.
Because they thrived on risk-taking, western societies have been the scene of change for betting practices throughout American history.
As a cultural form, American gambling moved from West to East, just as modern casino gaming appeared in Las Vegas and then reached out for Atlantic City.
New types of public, commercial gambling flourished throughout the country because they reinforced values and practices that were central throughout the society, but they emerged first in frontier settings where the entrepreneurial, individualistic outlook of the people found its least diluted expression.