The Saloon: Frontier Living Room, Bank, and Battlefield

Before a frontier boomtown had a proper bank, a church, or a courthouse, it almost always had a saloon — sometimes nothing more than a tent with a plank laid across two barrels, but functioning immediately as the town's social, economic, and occasionally judicial center. Deals were struck over its bar. Disputes were settled, sometimes with fists, sometimes with worse. Miners deposited gold dust with a trusted bartender for safekeeping in the absence of any formal bank. Traveling preachers occasionally held Sunday services in the very room where cards had been dealt the night before.

Professional gamblers like Poker Alice and Doc Holliday made their livings at saloon card tables playing faro, poker, and monte, games that ran on house rules, house edges, and — not infrequently — outright cheating that could turn a friendly game lethal within seconds. A gambler's reputation for honesty, or his skill at concealing dishonesty, was often the difference between a long career and an early grave.

Saloons in cattle towns like Abilene and Dodge City did brisk, chaotic business at the end of a long trail drive, when cowboys arrived flush with months of pay and eager to spend it fast on liquor, cards, and companionship. Town marshals like Wild Bill Hickok were hired specifically to manage the resulting chaos — with mixed success, as Hickok's own fatal miscalculation in Abilene demonstrated.

The saloon's cultural afterlife has often been sanded down into a cheerful, swinging-door cliché, but the reality was rougher: poor ventilation, watered-down liquor, rigged games, and a level of routine violence that made "shot in a saloon" one of the single most common causes of frontier death recorded in period newspapers.