[danielsan]

Madame Moustache: The Amazing Story of Eleanor Dumont, One of the First Known Blackjack Players in the Old West

Eleanor Dumont, also called Eleonore Alphonsine Dumant, born as Simone Jules (1829–1879), was a notorious gambler on the American Western Frontier, especially during the California Gold Rush. She was also known by her nickname “Madame Moustache,” due to the appearance of a line of dark hair on her upper lip.

Dumont was one of the more colorful women of the Old West. Because of her accent, it was rumored that she came from France, but others think New Orleans may have been her place of birth. In either case, she turned up in in San Francisco in 1849 where she soon found herself working as a card dealer at the Bella Union Hotel.

In 1854, Dumont arrived in Nevada City, California, dressed to the nines. To the curiosity of many, she opened up a high brow gambling parlor, the Vingt-et-Un. She served champagne instead of whiskey, permitted only behaved, clean men, into her establishment, and prohibited cursing in her presence. It soon became a quite the happening place! Dumont was witty and charming, appealingly foreign, and knew how to deal cards like a pro. No women were allowed in her establishment, save herself, and women dealers were virtually unheard of.

Her place became so popular, that Dumont took on a partner and opened an even larger place called Dumon’t Palace. They also added the much more popular games of Faro and Chuck-a-luck and her second venture became equally successful.

Faro was the most popular game at this time, but required a minimum of two employees to run the game, a dealer and a casekeeper (who would count the cards for the players). Because cheating was so common and the odds were better than most games, a third employee, a “look-out” was often hired to watch the players during the game.

Back to Dumont, two years after her arrival in Nevada City, she started to develop a pronounced moustache, later earning her the unfortunate nickname “Madame Moustache.” The gold eventually ran out in Nevada, but she would follow the new strikes and she headed to Columbia, California, where in 1857 she set up a table in a hotel.

Dumont had now achieved a small fortune and she wanted to leave her profession. Though she knew little about animals, she purchased a ranch in Carson City, Nevada. She soon became taken with a handsome cattleman named Jack McKnight in whom she placed her trust and she signed her property over to him for his management. Sadly, McKnight was actually a conman and in less than a month he had disappeared, selling her ranch and leaving her with all the debts. Dumont tracked him down and killed him with two blasts from a shotgun. Although she would much later admit to the crime, at the time of the shooting, there was not enough evidence to charge her.

Lacking any money, she retuned to gambling again and in 1861, set up her table in Pioche, Nevada. Unfortunately, her youth had begun to fade and she started to put on some weight. In her youth, she would use her fine manners and flirtatious chastity to lure men to gamble with a woman, but as time wore on, women in camps became less of a novelty and the coarseness began to become more a part of her life as she began to openly smoke, take hard drink, and become more tolerant of crude miners.

At a certain point, she eventually added prostitution to her repertoire and acted as a real “Madame.” At first offering herself and later hiring girls to work in her houses. She followed the money and drifted through Montana mining towns like Bannack, Fort Benton, and Helena. She was found in Silver City and Salmon, Idaho, and Corinne, Utah. Silver strikes brought her back to Nevada where she found herself in Virginia City. Eventually, she would be found in Deadwood, South Dakota, and then Tombstone, Arizona. In Tombstone, she was known to drum up business by dressing her girls in finery and driving a fancy carriage up and down the streets, smoking a cigar, to the cheers of onlookers.

As the same miners worked the same camps she frequented, her reputation began to precede her as an attractive, but aging mustachioed good-natured French lady, fair, strong, and savvy with the cards. Stories such as her foiling multiple robbers at once, turning back plagued steamboats by gunpoint, offering hospitality to those down on their luck, or her friendship with Calamity Jane as mentor, abounded wherever she lived.

Her final stop was the notorious Bodie, California, in 1878. Her luck had run out, and about a year and a half after arrival, she borrowed $300 from a friend to open a table. After a few hours, she had lost it all. Without a word, she left the table and walked a mile out of town and committed suicide by drinking a bottle of red wine laced morphine. Her body was discovered the next day, September 8, 1879, her head resting on a rock and with a note explaining that she was “tired of life.”

Miners lamented her passing and one such penned the following epitaph: “Poor Madame Moustache! Her life was as square a game as was ever dealt. The world played against her with all sorts of combinations, but she generally beat it. The turn was called on her at last for a few paltry hundred; she missed the turn, none of the old boys were there to cover the bet for her, and she passed in her checks, game to the last. Poor Madame Moustache.”

Pics:

1 Bella Union Hotel
2 Calamity Jane
3/4 Madame Moustache
5 Ad for the brothel

(Source - Internet find)

[kellyhound]

Nice read

One sorry encounter with Dumont was recorded by steamboat officer Louis Rosche, whose Missouri River sternwheeler docked at a raucous waterfront town, the primary point of demarcation for Montana’s gold fields. Madame Dumont was approaching middle age in the early 1870s, when the young first-mate stepped ashore to tempt chance in a frontier community teeming with roustabouts, deckhands, and miners.

“I heard Madame Moustache had set up one of her gaming houses at Fort Benton,” recalled Rosche, “and I decided to satisfy my curiosity. . . . I wasn’t a gambler, because I’d worked too hard for the money I made, but I had saved up a couple of hundred dollars, and I intended to ‘shoot the works’ at Madame Moustache’s. I’d heard about miners running a stake of a few dollars into a fortune at her tables in one night. Maybe I would be lucky and make enough to buy an interest in a steamboat.”

“There’s one thing certain,” remarked a friendly woodchopper. “If you win, the Madame will pay off. She’s shrewd, but she’s square. . . . Folks say she’s a Frenchwoman. The way I’ve heard some tell it, she hailed from New Orleans, and she’s a hundred percent Creole. . . . They say she didn’t have a moustache then, just a few downy hairs sproutin’ on her upper lip that wasn’t noticeable because her skin was dark anyway. That was in 1854 when they was scoopin’ gold dust right out of the streets in Nevada City, and I heard that right away there was another gold rush—into Eleanor Dumont’s gamblin’ house.”

Rosche contemplated the woodcutter’s remarks as he walked toward the Madame’s place. “The click of dice, the rattle of the roulette ball, and the slap of cards greeted my ears,” he wrote. “With my heart beating fast with excitement, I entered the door of the weather-beaten, two-story frame building and stepped into the gambling hall.”

The boatman scrutinized the place and took a seat in the corner. “The inside of the gambling house was worse looking even than the outside,” recalled Rosche. “The bar and gaming tables were housed in one big downstairs room. . . . The place was foggy with smoke and smelled of sweating, unwashed bodies and cheap whiskey. The floor was filthy. The male customers, nearly all of whom were chewing, were remarkably bad marksmen, the spittoons, placed at strategic locations, all going unscathed. The none-too-clean-looking bar ran along one wall.”

Suddenly the medley of laughter, clinking glasses, men’s and women’s voices, and the sounds of gambling equipment died down as Eleanor Dumont entered the room. “I glanced quickly towards the door,” said Rosche. “If I had not seen the unbelievable black brush on the woman’s upper lip, I would not have known that this was the famous Madame Moustache. She was fat, showing unmistakably the signs of age. Rouge and powder, apparently applied only halfheartedly, failed to hide the sagging lines of her face, the pouches under her eyes, and general marks of dissipation. Her one badge of respectability was a black silk dress, worn high around her neck. I closed my eyes in disgust. But, after all, I told myself, I hadn’t come here to admire the Madame’s looks, but to try my luck and perhaps make my fortune.”

Mustering his courage, Rosche walked over to a raised table in the room’s center, where the Madame had seated herself and was shuffling cards with “her rings flashing.” The young boatman stepped onto the platform and emptied his poke on the table.

“Ma’am,” he uttered, “there’s more than $200 there. Let’s get going now, and I don’t want to quit until you’ve got all my money or until I’ve got a considerable amount of yours.

For the first time Rosche noticed the Madame’s brown eyes. He remembered “they, at lease, remained youthful.”

“What shall it be, young man?” asked the lady proprietor as she studied the steamboat officer. “Name the play.”

Rosche realized he didn’t play any kind of cards well enough to make a choice.

“Very well then,” she replied with a gleam in her eye. “It shall be vingt-et-un.”

Rosche recalled the sad affair. “It would be painful to exhume the memories of the hour that followed. When it was all over and my bills and gold and silver pieces were stacked neatly in front of the Madame, I got up quickly, returned my empty leather purse to my pocket, and started to leave.”

“No, no, no,” protested the hostess, waving her hands excitedly. “The steamboatman must not go before he has had his drink on the house.”

Just then the barkeeper placed a glass on the table. “I saw to my astonishment that it was filled with milk. I later found out that it was her custom after trimming a sucker to set him up with a glass of milk.”

Rosche delayed returning to his boat long enough to watch the Madame fleece the friendly woodchopper and his four drunken companions. “The inevitable didn’t take long to happen,” remarked Rosche, recalling the woodsmens’ money stacked in front of the Madame. After each woodcutter received a complimentary glass of milk, the lady offered to cover return passage to their woodyard.

[ajs11961]

Looks like a man in drag to me. Shoulders are mannish looking.