Poker At Dawson City 1899
1899, February: The great American inventor Thomas Edison releases one of the first silent films: Poker At Dawson City. 1900: JACK POTS: STORIES OF THE GREAT AMERICAN GAME is published by Eugene Edwards, Illustrated by Ike Morgan. Dawson City faced hard times, with fewer than 1,000 residents in the mid-20th century. But tourism has sparked a revival: Some 300,000 people visit the pristine Yukon in summer. They were also known for many firsts the early documentary Divers at Work on from ARTH 334 at University of Maryland, University College.
Poker At Dawson City, 1899 To purchase a clean DVD of this film for personal home use or educational use contact us at questions@archivefarms.com. To license footage from this film for.
1871 Yukon Nuggets
They were dreamers, quacks, salesmen, cowboys, and - mostly - gamblers. Some found gold but most did not. However, a few used their gold rush experiences to good advantages in later life. Such was the case of George Lewis Rickard. He was born in Kansas City, Missouri on January 2nd, 1871. When he was four years old, his family moved to Sherman, Texas, where they ran a cattle ranch. Rickard spent his youth working on the land. When he was twenty-three, he was elected city Marshall of Henriette, Texas.
From then on he would be known as Tex Rickard. As a lawman he established a reputation for tolerance and honesty and while Rickard may haven been an honest lawman, his favourite pastime in Texas was gambling. By the mid 1890s, Alaska was ablaze with news of gold strikes. Tex saddled up and headed north with his new partner Will Slack. They arrived in Alaska in November of 1895, two years before the big news of the Klondike Gold Rush reached the outside.
While awaiting the spring thaw in Juneau, Tex. Rickard and Will Slack spent their time playing poker. In April of 1896, the two partners pushed on to the Chilkoot Pass. Tex described their journey as the coldest and most difficult task of his entire life. Slack decided to return to Juneau, but Tex was determined to make it all the way to Circle City, a town on the Northern coast that was home to thirty saloons, gambling halls, and brothels.
Flat broke, Tex was hired as a dealer in a gambling joint owned by Silent Sam Bonnifield, the North's most famous poker player. He learned a lot from Bonnifield and in the months to follow, Bonnifield had won enough gold dust playing poker to buy the biggest saloon in Circle City. Then he gave it to Rickard. When news of a strike on the Klondike River echoed across the wilderness, the price of land dropped and the value of sled dogs rose. Overnight, Circle City became a ghost town.
Rickard and his new partner Harry Ash were amoung the first to make a mad dash to the Klondike and file claims along Bonanza Creek. They sold out for nearly sixty thousand dollars and Tex used his cash to open the Northern Saloon but his luck at the poker tables turned sour. He lost every cent he had, and his share in the Northern.
The following year, he worked as a poker dealer and bartender at the famed Monte Carlo, a club owned by Swiftwater Bill Gates. Wilson Mizner was a gambler who worked with Rickard at the Monte Carlo. Mizner convinced Rickard that they could make money in Dawson by promoting professional prize fights. Although they lost money on their first endeavour, the excitement of the boxing ring hooked Tex.
Then along came Frank Slavin, an Australian and former British Empire heavyweight champion who was called himself the Sydney Cornstalk. One night he got plastered in the Monte Carlo and was knocked silly by the town bully, Biff Hoffman. Mizner and Tex broker the fight up and convinced the two men to stage a prize fight for real money. Mizner and Rickard built seats in the dance hall and sold tickets for fifteen dollars general admission and twenty-five for ringside. Slavin floored Hoffman in the first. Rickard and Mizner paid the fighters and pocketed the rest of the cash.
Rickard's next fight-promoting efforts matched two friends, Frank Slavin and Joe Boyle, his Canadian sparring partner. With all the hype he could muster, Rickard billed them as bitter enemies who hated each other. Boyle, who later became one of the richest Klondike Kings, was advertised as the man who had defied the gangster Soapy Smith in Skagway. Slavin was dubbed the 'Sydney Slasher'. The match had all the phoney attributes of today's World Wrestling Federation and it made money.
Rickard left the Klondike in 1899 in the rush to the new goldfields of Nome. He had some success there then moved to Goldfield, Nevada where he again promoted professional boxing matches but this time on a grand scale. In September 1906, he staged a lightweight title fight in which he offered the astounding purse of thirty thousand dollars and convinced the country's newspaper editors that this was the biggest sports story of the century. Sports writers arrived in little Goldfield from as far away as San Francisco and New York. Miners left their diggings in the hills to place their bets on the fight. Trains rolled in all day carrying fight fans caught up in Rickard's hype.
It was the wildest day in the brief history of the gold camp called Goldfield. The fight took place on September 3, 1906 between two long forgotten foes, but it went on for forty-two rounds. Rickard pocketed thirteen grand. Then on July 4, 1910, he staged a heavyweight title match between Jack Johnson and James Jeffries, at Reno, Nevada. The purse was one hundred thousand dollars. Rickard paid the purse and made a profit. Now he was on a roll.
In 1916, he contracted a heavyweight title match between Jess Willard and Frank Moran at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The bout attracted a gate of nearly one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, a new indoor record. Buoyed by this success, Rickard promoted a series of five heavyweight bouts at the Gardens; all featuring the future boxing great Jack Dempsey. Each match generated more than a million dollars.
Rickard, now a wealthy man, bought the original Madison Square Gardens and, with the backing of famed circus owner John Ringling, launched the Madison Square Garden Corporation, sold shares and built a new sports palace that opened in December 1925.
Poker At Dawson City 1899
He was now known as G.L. 'Tex'. Rickard, President of Madison Square Gardens. In 1926, the National Hockey League granted him a franchise to operate a hockey team for the 1926-27 NHL season. Sportswriters dubbed the club 'The New York Tex's Rangers'.
Today the hockey team that the former Yukon gambler Tex Rickard created is known around the world as the New York Rangers.
A CKRW Yukon Nugget by Les McLaughlin.
Later this year we will be publishing Poker & Pop Culture: Telling the Story of America’s Favorite Card Game, by Martin Harris. Here is a short extract:
Poker At Dawson City 1899 Silver Dollar
“Poker in the Movies”
The representation of poker in films likely has had more to do with forming opinions about the game than has any other variety of American popular culture. One could argue that when it comes to shaping ideas about poker, John Wayne, W.C. Fields, and Paul Newman have exerted more influence than anyone who has played the game.
It’s a point worth making, because even though poker can sometimes be exciting and satisfying to watch in the movies, the game is rarely presented in a convincing way, at least to those who actually play poker. A <em>Washington Post</em> article from 2017 listing the 25 best “profession-based movies” as judged by experts in the selected fields leaves off poker altogether. Such an omission might connote doubts about whether or not being a poker player should be regarded as a profession, although the list does include “chess player” and even “bank robber.” However it also could stem from a relative paucity of realistic depictions of poker on the silver screen. “Poker in movies never quite comes off,” David Spanier once wrote, one reason being that in a poker hand “the drama is an interior one, consisting of what goes on in the players’ minds” and is thus difficult to capture and present to an audience. But even when the primary focus isn’t on individual hands but on other contextual matters involving settings and players, those other elements are often also embellished, moving away from realism while reinforcing particular ideas about poker’s significance.
While some filmmakers do endeavor to portray poker realistically, that’s often a secondary concern to using the game creatively to advance plots, build characters, and/or underscore themes. In other words, unless the film is specifically about poker, the game’s portrayal often serves other purposes than showing audiences how poker is <em>really</em> played. In westerns, such distortions frequently help support romantic visions of the Old West and its rough-and-tumble card-playing cowboys….
Poker At Dawson City 1899 Georgia
Poker appeared frequently. In some westerns, the use of poker is merely ornamental. Having characters play the signature card game of the Old West is akin to making sure they wear Stetson hats, ride horses, and carry guns. It’s part of the requisite scenery, like the vast landscape shots typically serving to segue one scene to the next. However, there are many examples of westerns that thoughtfully incorporate poker not just as a casual reminder of the Old West setting, but as an important element of the storytelling. Frequently the game is associated with violence, another way of highlighting hazards on the frontier. Poker also serves as a shorthand method of sorting heroes from villains in the fictional worlds these westerns create, marked as they often are by a kind of “black-and-white” morality, a distinction sometimes even indicated by the color of Stetsons characters wear. Poker games in westerns also become linked to efforts to restore order to among outlaws, or even the cause of more chaotic disruptions.
A film from 1899 called Poker at Dawson City, one of 1,200 or so films emanating from studios owned by Thomas Edison’s companies from the 1890s through 1910s, is sometimes called the first ever “western.” It might also earn the distinction as the very first “poker movie,” even if its running time is less than it takes to play a single hand.
The title sets the game along the Yukon River in northwest Canada during the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s, although the film was shot in Edison’s Black Maria studio in West Orange, New Jersey. The 20-second, single-shot silent film ostensibly shows the aftermath of a hand gone wrong, with gun-waving players brawling with each other around a card table while a bartender tries to cool tempers by spraying them with water. It’s a suitable introduction to the topic of poker in the movies, where card playing and conflict are often two of a kind.