Gamblers as Investors
Californians and Nevadans invested as gamblers in Washoe strikes, and imitated the style of play that bettors had adopted in early San Francisco gaming places.
Mining stocks seemed to recreate the widespread opportunities that had characterized the Gold Rush and invited people from all classes to participate.
They spent money freely and lived life intensely, always nurturing, the expectation that tomorrow would bring fortunes. Good luck would hardly have halted their speculations, however.
Unlike Europeans who might try to purchase status or security with newfound wealth, Americans in the Gilded Age, and especially in the Golden West, aspired mainly to amass more, to stay involved in the game of accumulation as long as they could, even if their paper profits came tumbling down around them.
After frantic investment had subsided one last time during the late 1870s, observers agreed that mining stocks had served as another mode of sharp practice by which confidence men fleeced innocent players.
One big loser protested that silver mines were much bigger swindles than poker games run by riverboat gamblers, and another critic charged that the 'Kings of Comstock' had taken unfair advantage of the 'enthusiastic and speculative, free, liberal, and even extravagant' character of the population of the pacific slope.
Whatever the accusations, few failed to see that the craze had stemmed from the same pursuit of quick fortune that had encouraged Argonauts to try their luck.
Doubtless more than one person found it ironic that Westerners passed laws to suppress gambling with cards where the chances are fair and the games honestly dealt.
Furthermore, it was also tolerated and even more patronized untrustworthy stock exchanges, or 'mammoth gaming establishments', where uptight citizens were regularly victimized by rich and reputable sharpers.
Reforms had had apparently little effect on the gambling proclivities of Californians.
Comstock mining had proven once more that, while the Far West still lacked the learning and the taste to put it on a par with the more refined East, the region remained a fertile source of new forms in the culture of risk taking.
Pacific civilization had developed the mines of Washoe through innovative technology as well as through sophisticated finance that permitted average people to gamble in the adventure.
The extraction of Nevada silver became a highly advanced industry that in some regards predated the forward-looking changes in the United States during the late nineteenth century.
By pushing the logic of nineteenth-century enterprise to an extreme in activities given to high risk and reward, California and Nevada had plainly reached the Gilded Age long before other American states.
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