Mississippi Gambling

If boatmen restrained themselves aboard their barges and craft, they gambled with abandon while on shore.

In the small towns that dotted the banks of lower Mississippi and its tributaries, and in the terminal port of New Orleans, waterfront districts evolved that catered specifically to the boatmen making their way north and south.

Each landing offered drink, food, and gaming to the homeless river travelers. Pilots customarily gave their deck hands a holiday in these inland ports in order to reward them for the strenuous work on the river.

As the only significant station between New Orleans and St. Louis or Louisville prior to 1820, the town of Natchez gained early and lasting notoriety as a boatmen's paradise.

Those journeying downstream viewed it as the end of the most difficult stretches of water and celebrated every tine they stopped there.

For men returning upriver by land, the town served as the final river settlement before moving on to the long and lonely Natchez Trace.

The hearty gambling in Natchez-under-the-Hill and other landings nourished a growing body of sharps, and gamblers armed with novel modes of betting flocked to the towns to take advantage of the steady flow of players.

For the first twenty years of the nineteenth century, Natchez stood by itself as an important river port between St. Louis and New Orleans.

American flatboatmen who floated down the Ohio and Mississippi saw few other signs of settlement. Between the rude farms of western Pennsylvania and Ohio, and the levee-sheltered plantations below Natchez, river travelers passed dense forests interrupted but rarely by rundown outposts of Spanish and French colonies.

In the second decade of the century, steamboats began to ply the western rivers, creating a host of insignificant service points.

By that time, also, a few favored overnight landings for flatboats and keel boats were beginning to emerge as logical sites for towns along the lower Mississippi.

Not until after 1815, however, did Americans begin to occupy in numbers the land that bordered southwestern streams.

The initial white inhabitants of the region came as part of the Great Migration that inundated western territories after the War of 1812.

The conclusion of that conflict in 1815 opened the southern frontier to uninhibited American settlement by securing the area from Spanish and English claims, and by initiating a series of military and diplomatic advances that forced Indians to cede their lands to the American government.

Flatboatmen floating southward would first have noticed the white man's livestock grazing along the river banks in the years around 1815, for herdsmen comprised the first wave of pioneers moving to the newly opened lands of the South.

Close upon the heels of drovers came land-hungry farmers eager to divide the vast public domain into an extension of the Cotton Kingdom.