Unlike many professions, gambling in the 19th century was not strictly a male domain. Many women, tired of Victorian society’s strict codes and prescribed roles, sought adventure in the gaming houses. Saloonkeepers quickly discovered that a pretty dealer boosted business, and many a faro bank featured a lady behind the dealing box.

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Poker Alice, despite the nickname, was a skilled faro dealer. Born in England in 1851, she turned cards in Colorado boom towns like Leadville and Creede, as well as in Tombstone, and lived to be nearly 80. In contrast, Deadwood’s Kitty LeRoy, aptly nicknamed Kitty the Schemer, died at age 28, shot by her fifth husband. Doc Holliday reportedly once lost $3,000 to Lottie Deno, a redheaded Southern belle who dealt faro in Fort Griffin, Texas. Deno was nearly 90 when she died, the wife of a bank vice president.

Perhaps the best-known woman gambler was Frenchwoman Eleanor Dumont, nicknamed Madame Mustache for her downy upper lip. She appeared in California during the gold rush, opening a posh gambling house in Nevada City to the dismay of city fathers (who thought a woman gambler scandalous) and the delight of the rough-and-tumble miners (who felt it a privilege to have a pretty lady lighten their pokes). Her Vingt-et-Un (Twenty-One) gambling house had carpets and crystal chandeliers and served free champagne; patrons were required to clean up their boots (and their language) if they wished to enter and play at the madame’s tables.

When the Nevada city boom went bust, Madame Mustache followed the gold and silver, and for 25 years she dealt games in camps throughout the West, adding to her resume, as fortunes declined, a much older profession than gambling. Madame Mustache ended her days in Bodie, Calif, where she eked out a meager existence turning tricks as well as cards. One September night in 1879, a pair of sharpers broke the madame’s faro bank, and the next morning she was found dead in her lonely cabin, a poison bottle in her hand.

Throughout the latter 1800s, faro dominated Western gambling. From $10 snaps to rich banks in the gaudy houses of Denver and San Francisco, the tiger’s roar was loud. In 1885, 200 persons worked in Denver’s gambling houses, which boasted such colorful names as the Bucket of Blood, the Morgue, the Tivoli and the Chicken Coop. Of all the banks in Denver, only six were known to be square. So popular was faro there that the county sheriff once pawned his revolver for $20 to buck a game at the Denver House. When mudslingers charged that 1888 senatorial candidate Edward O. Woolcott had lost $22,000 at faro, he replied it was his own business if he did, adding ‘Besides, I had just won the money the previous day at the races.’ Colorado loved a sporting man; Woolcott won the election.

Despite support from sheriff’s and senators, however, faro’s golden age was nearing its end. As early as 1872, an Eastern chronicler had observed that ‘no vice has blighted so many lives, has illustrated so many epics of anguish, or has cost the productive industry so many millions of money, as faro gambling.’ As civilization’s roots spread, this sentiment gradually took hold nationwide, and by the 1890s, even confirmed gambler George Devol admitted, ‘If I had never seen a faro bank, I would be a wealthy man today.’

By 1900, one of gambling’s last bastions, Arizona Territory, still contained nearly 1,000 gaming establishments, but public pressure ultimately won out. A headline in the March 31, 1907, Prescott Journal-Miner read, ‘The Tiger is Dying!’ and by midnight, Arizona’s last turn had been called. As state after state followed suit, the tiger became an endangered species whose last stand was, predictably, in Las Vegas, Nev. With legitimized, regulated gambling in place, a game with faro’s checkered past was looked at askance. More important, casino operators learned what the old-time sharpers had known for centuries: Honest faro made no money for the house. Joe W. Brown’s Horseshoe Casino ran possibly the last bank in existence in 1955.

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