Creating an Exhibit for the High Desert Museum

Laughter and a raucous melody on a saloon piano, the clink of bottles and whir of a roulette wheel, a red light in a window and female voices — all were trademarks of a frontier culture beyond the edge of civil society. During the years following the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Americans and others rushed to the Far West, seeking new possibilities for their lives and perhaps even a fortune. Although thousands of families travelled the emigrant trails, most who came to the Far West were single men. They were trappers and miners, tracklayers and soldiers, buckaroos, sheepherders, and laborers in the woods and lumber mills. Many had left families behind or would never have them due to low wages and their itinerant existence. They lived out their lives in a vast and lonely landscape, sleeping in tent camps, boarding houses, barracks, or on the open range. Their existence had none of the restraint and civility of settled communities back in the East, enforced by family, church, and social order. Adrift from one mine, construction site, or ranch to the next, the men craved some sense of community. They sought escape from loneliness in the warmth and camaraderie of the saloon, a change of fortune at the gambling tables. They looked for companionship and intimacy in the dance halls and bordellos, where they found women whose circumstances had driven them to survive life as best they could. These people’s collective behaviors were beyond the accepted social and Vice flourished luxuriantly during the hey-day of our “flush times.” The saloons were overburdened with custom; so were the police courts, the gambling dens, the brothels and the jails — unfailing signs of high prosperity in a mining region — in any region for that matter. Is it not so? —Mark Twain, Roughing It, 172