Publications [#314325] of Gunther W. Peck

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Papers Published

  1. Peck, GW. "Manly Gambles: The Politics of Risk on the Comstock Lode." Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the U.S. West (2000): 73-96. [doi]
    (last updated on 2025/07/03)

    Abstract:
    During his tour of the great silver mines of Virginia City, Nevada, in 1876, journalist and geologist Eliot Lord was both impressed and horrified by the "cool" detachment of Cornish miners as they risked their lives underground in pursuit of hard currency. Lord was particularly fascinated by the daring of one Cornishman who fell into a shaft thirteen hund red feet deep only to emerge unscathed minutes later "by an astonishing combination of coolness, strength, and luck." As he climbed out ofthe pit, the Cornishman remarked matter-of-factly, "By the bloody 'ell. IfI hadn't caught hold of the pumpbob nose, I'd a been scattered all abroad." Lord used such anecdotes to paint a portrait of the Cornish miner as a dispassionate gambIer who daily wagered his financial and bodily assets, whether in games of blackjack above ground or in earning wages underground. Wrote Lord, "The miners' fondness for gambling leads them to regard the possibility of death… as a risk that every gamester must face, and they stake their lives on the cost because they consider the chances in favor of their preservation."1 Like many middle-class professionals in the nineteenth century, Lord considered gambling to be im moral and blamed miners' high mortality rates and enduring financial insecurity upon their penchant for taking risks.2 Determining which forms of risk were morally acceptable and manly had become crucial to middle-class men's ongoing project of self-definition in the nineteenth century.3 In this respect, Lord's description of all wage-earning men as gambIers tells us more about his own struggle to define legitimate gain and manhood than it does about working-class notions of masculine risk-taking. Yet Lord's was an ambivalent moralism, tinged as it was with admiration for the miner's heroism and manly "coolness." From Lord's nostalgic perspective as a citified eastern professional, the Cornish miner embodied admirable aspects of a heroic but vanishing manliness, long associated with the frontier, in which individual bravery and manly skill rather than market laws and machines governed the productive lives of men. If Lord condemned the manly gambles miners took every day, he also venerated their risk-taking ethos that had, so the popular frontier myth went, conquered the wilderness and brought civilization to a savage desert.4

Gunther W. Peck