H69.312.1

Games box. Description: checkers board on top; wood From the History Information Station Checkers has been a popular game since the 16th century. A forty-niner may have used this board for an evening's entertainment or a pastime in the winter months when deep banks of snow brought mining to a halt. Mining itself was something of a gamble in which a man's wealth seemed due as much to luck as to skill or hard work. And many men willing to gamble on mining were more than willing to gamble their hard-earned gold on the faro deck or the speed of the monte dealer's hand. William Swain, a minter who deplored the lax morals of his compatriots, wrote that, "It is not unusual to see hundreds of dollars staked on the turning of a single card." In Sacramento, "there are a great number of dealers in produce, but more dealers on monte. The taverns have usually...three or four tables and a man behind dealing monte, at all hours from breakfast to midnight." Bayard Taylor, who toured California as a correspondent for the New York "Tribune," said that "where there is gold there are gamblers. Our little village boasted of a least a dozen monte tables."