James H. Carson

When prospectors began to establish camps and visit towns for supplies, enterprising gamesters set up all manner of gambling operations. Seeking amusement and diversion from the toils of prospecting, many miners succumbed to the temptation. Some miners who had struck it rich in the gold fields would lose it all at the gambling tables.

In the following excerpt from his book Recollections of the California Mines, noted essayist and anecdotist James H. Carson provides a vivid description of gambling life in the mine country.

We who have come from thesecond families in Virginia, have been taught to look on gamblers, and those who follow it as a profession, as little superior to the devil himself. This view of the members of theblack art may be good and just in other lands, but it is not applicable...