Poker & Pop Culture: Professional Card Sharps Rocking the Boat

“Poker expresses the tension between nature and civilization, between order and lawlessness.”

So writes Associate Professor of Humanities Kevin L. Stoehr in a 2006 essay focusing on the role of poker in Western movies, “Civilization and Wilderness: Poker, Hobbes, and Classic Westerns.”

In his essay Stoehr highlights several different paradoxes of poker, many of which aren’t actually specific to the Old West such as the way luck and skill coexist as factors affecting the game, or the way players employ both logic and intuition when weighing decisions. But the paradox that most intrigues him concerns the way poker — particularly in the handful of Westerns he examines — represents a kind of isolated, curious example of civilization amid the chaos of the Old West.

In these movies, Stoehr notes, “poker plays an important role as a leisurely — though also at times deadly serious — game of chance, one that typically entertains everyday saloon patrons while keeping gunslingers amused when they’re not robbing stagecoaches… or shooting up shop windows.”

The game stands as a kind of baize-covered island of relative calm, he suggests, amid the wild and often lawless frontier communities and uncharted territories swirling around them. Meanwhile the game itself curiously combines both order and disorder — it’s “a communal, typically civilized game with well-defined rules of gamesmanship and sociability” while also “a game that calls upon a certain ‘primitive’ spirit of survival and individuality in its ‘winner-takes-all’ environment of competition and greed.”

In other words, in the Old West (particularly as depicted in classic Westerns) poker provides a kind of peaceable escape from the unruly and violent turmoil happening outside those swinging saloon doors — at least until someone is caught cheating and the guns come out. At the same time, though, the game also reflects that ongoing “tension” between civilization and wilderness always present during westward expansion — one reason why in many of these films the disputes that arise in the poker scenes neatly parallel larger conflicts being explored in the main plots.

Take a Ride on the River

What happens, though, when we leave the frontier towns and their saloon poker games and take trips elsewhere — say, via one of the many steamboats traveling the Mississippi River from Minnesota to New Orleans and back, or along the numerous tributaries extending well into the northeast, or westward throughout the newly-acquired, massive territory gained via the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

In a way, steamboats present a different sort of paradox floating through 19th century America. On the one hand, they were a marvel of human ingenuity, an emblem of industrial advancement that enabled civilization to grow and prosper as never before. But once they left their ports and moved out onto those rolling waters, they also became momentarily detached from the societies they were helping to advance, transforming into discrete worlds of their own not necessarily bound by the order-maintaining rules observed on land.

As we move over from “saloon poker” to “steamboat poker,” let’s keep in mind Stoehr’s suggestion that besides reflecting various poker paradoxes, 19th-century saloon games could be considered as sometimes providing a temporary, civilized alternative to an otherwise unruly, “wild West.” Meanwhile, we might consider the contemporaneous traveler boarding a steamboat and eventually finding the card parlor as having stepped into a different kind of wilderness — one full of marked cards, cold decks, hair triggers, and insatiable sharps.

Relative Freedoms Out on the Water

Following some initial late 18th-century trials by others, Robert Fulton’s advances helped launch the first successful steamboat run when the Clermont navigated its way through a two-day voyage on the Hudson River in 1807. By the 1810s the first major steamboats began traversing the Mississippi, and within a couple of decades more than 1,200 of them would be put into service.

The steamboats greatly facilitated all kinds of commerce, including enabling farmers to ship crops to markets far and wide in the still primarily agrarian society of the first half of the 1800s. Cities like St. Louis, Memphis, and, of course, New Orleans were among the several important ports, with the hundreds of …

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