Digging for gold was a difficult business—hard on both the body and the spirit. Many miners had to toil twelve hours a day six days a week just to find enough gold to support themselves. Such hard work required sustenance; miners needed not only tools, provisions, and food, but also amusements to distract them from their toilsome lives. As Peter J. Blodgett points out in his bookLand of Golden Dreams, business people quickly stepped in to fill the miners' needs:

Mining camps and towns . . . made every effort to ensure that they provided everything the miner might require. Consequently, restaurants, dry-goods stores and hardware shops shared the scene . . . with saloons, gambling halls, and brothels.

Never picking up a shovel or a pick to prospect for gold, many of these entrepreneurs became far more financially successful than the miners they catered...