Gambling: As California Paved the Way
Continued migration perpetuated in California the westering mentality, the fondness for risk and change.
Of course, the need for change is nonetheless inevitable. This only opened doors for them, including the history of their gambling escapades.
Restless and ambitious individuals who accepted chance taking as a way of life populated the Pacific Coast. They continued their lives' gamble with the Gold Rush, and then branched out to speculate on mining stocks, land, railroads, and scenery.
As site of a pattern of economic growth that erased the memory of boom and bust with another boom, and as a destination for migrants bearing high expectations to a land of promise, California fostered an acquisitive, impatient outlook that heightened the urge to gamble.
As the ultimate American West and as the modern fountain of gambling practices, California passed through two cultural phases. Before 1900 the state, like other frontier areas, was a cultural backwater of eastern civilization.
Californians look to the East for social standards and national approval.
Their dependence on more established centers of culture was symbolized by the transcontinental railroad, which fettered the state to eastern ways of life and business.
However, this made San Francisco the center of Atlantic Coast civilization in the West.
During the twentieth century, in a remarkably short span of time, California developed from outpost of eastern civilization into cultural pacesetter for the country.
It seemed as if the depleted, westbound wave of culture, now broken upon the shores of the Pacific, gave way quickly to a strong undertow that swept aspects of a new California civilization eastward to the other states of the union.
The metropolis of this indigenous culture was not San Francisco, but Los Angeles, with its character determined not by emulation of eastern standards, but by the unique adaptation of the growing and affluent population to new styles and technologies sustaining unprecedented ways of life.
A new far western culture burst into bloom when Californians, now less concerned with eastern precedents, turned eagerly to embrace forward-looking changes that promised to realize the vision of the good life that had attracted so many Americans to the Pacific Coast.
By accepting cultural advances so wholeheartedly, residents of the Golden State created a new kind of society, a civilization for a postindustrial age, that foreshadowed the nation's tomorrow.
As the seat of futuristic change, Los Angeles , once heralded by Mexicans, as the preeminent settlement in Alta California before the discovery of gold directed a flood of newcomers to San Francisco , at long last became the leading city in the state.
It simultaneously assumed the lead in generating new fashions of betting.