777 Gambling Carnaval
California and Gambling - The Perfect Mix?
The Golden State's shaping of American gambling paralleled its cultural development.
Gold Rush Californians, living the epitome of the nation's westering experience, initially seized upon betting as an integral part of frontier society .
They cherished the risks and the thrills offered by 'gambling saloons' such as those clustered at the city center of young San Francisco, where Argonauts heading to and from the mines stopped to try their luck.
Early Californians lived intimately with gaming until eastern standards overwhelmed them.
Then although they continued to recognize chance as a necessary ingredient of their lives, they increasingly distinguished between respectable and unrespectable forms of risk taking.
They naturally continued to share in both kinds of adventure, but the state slowly outlawed public and commercial gambling and drove away illicit operators.
To enjoy the styles of betting that they had cultivated, Californians either resorted more and more to illegal clubs or traveled beyond the boundaries of the state.
The urge to gamble remained strong in the far West, and by the mid-twentieth century, Californians found it most convenient to satisfy this urge across the state line in Las Vegas, a city shaped extensively by the tastes of the Los Angeles residents who made up of the majority of its visitors.
Californians had finally isolated gambling from their daily lives by moving it to Nevada, but not before they remade the practice to suit emerging styles.
Nevada, but not before they remade the practice to suit emerging styles.
As gambling resort and as residential city, modern Las Vegas assumed a prominent place on the eastbound cultural frontier that originated in Southern California.
On Nevada soil suited for the cultivation of legal and open gambling, Las Vegas became a place where the outlines of the new California civilization blossomed for all the country to see.
As with cars, movies, and tract homes, Southern Californians popularized and commercialized, mass-produced gambling in the casinos of southern Nevada, and so included the practice in the novel culture they transmitted to the rest of the nation.
In Las Vegas, the California style of gambling dramatized the character of Pacific Coast civilization in the post industrializing age.
Casino betting provided players with a condensed dose of the chance, change, and anticipation that exemplified life in a golden land of opportunity, and offered a streamlined version of cultural forms taking shape in Southern California.
It was promoted to average Americans not only ion the same fashion as films and suburban living and automobility, but also as a related kind of experience.