Gambling in Vegas: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
Las Vegans both followed in the footsteps of Americans who had settled previous gamblers' frontiers.
They also represented a culmination of the westering experience---- in settling southern Nevada.
In earlier Wests, between 1607 and 1890, the rootlessness of new regions had contributed to the inclination to gamble, and the forms that gaming assumed on every frontier mirrored the changing culture of each new country.
Early American horse racing and lotteries distinguished colonists as adventurers who had broken away from aristocratic England.
Gamblers in the Southwest flourished without much interference so long as society remained as fluid as the Mississippi River itself, but when the civilization of the Slave South began to make inroads into that frontier, gamblers became more respectable, or else paid a price for their livelihood.
Californians had accepted gambling almost as a way of life during the last half of the nineteenth century, but they slowly yielded to eastern conventions and eliminated gaming from the state.
Frontier rootlessness reappeared in mid-twentieth century Las Vegas and no doubt contributed to the tolerance for gambling. But whereas the changes inherent in any new country encouraged gaming on American frontiers, gambling itself heightened the transiency and prolonged the process of resettlement in Las Vegas.
As the core of the local economy and the centerpiece of the city's image across the country, casino gaming ensured that the westering process, and the speculative state of mind intrinsic to the experience of the new frontier, persisted in modern southern Nevada.
It sparked the turbulent growth of a boom town, and made the city a precarious residence by threatening families, attracting an endless stream of transients, and fragmenting the community both spatially and socially.
Gambling helped to recreate conditions of frontier life in the desert metropolis.
If Las Vegas resembled the old West, however, it also represented tomorrow's West, for gambling evoked both the last frontier and the frontier as future.
They cherished the opportunities that casino gaming provided in Nevada, but they also paid a price for them in social and psychological terms.
Las Vegans lived in a city that seemed to threaten traditional domestic values, and often found it difficult to feel at home with the future that the resort represented.
They ultimately came to terms with the unusual city by insulating themselves from resort activities and dispelling their own doubts about life in southern Nevada.
Insisting that they dwelled not on the fringes, but in the mainstream of American life, they found great satisfaction in relatively unsuccessful attempts to normalize Las Vegas.
