Containing the Earliest Description of the Game of Poker
Dragoon Campaigns to the Rocky Mountains;. Being a History of Enlistment, Organization, and first Campaigns of the Regiment of the United States Dragoon; Together with Incidents of a Soldier's Life, and Sketches of Scenery and Indian Characters. By a Dragoon.
New York: Wiley & Long, 1836.
Full Description:
HILDRETH, James. Dragoon Campaigns to the Rocky Mountains; Being a History of Enlistment, Organization, and first Campaigns of the Regiment of the United States Dragoon; Together with Incidents of a Soldier's Life, and Sketches of Scenery and Indian Characters. By a Dragoon. New York: Wiley & Long, 1836.
First edition. Octavo (7 5/8 x 4 5/8 inches; 193 x 117 mm). 288 pp.
Publisher's pebble-grain plum cloth. Spine lettered in gilt and stamped with a gilt vignette of a mounted dragoon. Fore-edge uncut. Early owner's ink figure "8" on title-page. Spine sunned. Corners bumped. Cloth with some puckering and sunning to boards. Some foxing and toning to leaves as usual for American sheets of this age. Overall, a very good copy.
"The birth of Poker has been convincingly dated to the first or second decade of the 19th century. It appeared in former French territory centred on New Orleans which was ceded to the infant United States by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Its cradle was the gambling saloon in general and, in particular, those famous or notorious floating saloons, the Mississippi steamers, which began to ply their trade from about 1811. The earliest contemporary reference to Poker occurs in J. Hildreth's Dragoon Campaigns to the Rocky Mountains, published in 1836... Pages 128-130 describe a late-night game of poker in the soldiers' barracks, beginning 'The M- lost some cool hundreds last night at poker...'. Hildreth refers to it as popular in the South and West but little known in the East. He does not specify whether it was played with the 20-card or full 52-card pack" (Historic Card Games by David Parlett).
"First active service of this newly organized regiment, commanded by Col. Dodge: from St. Louise to Ft. Gibson and the Pawnee villages. According to the third edition of Wagner-Camp, the real author was an Englishman, William L. Gordon-Miller, Hildreth being merely the man who arranged publication" (Howes).
Howes 460. Sabin 31769. Wagner-Camp 59.
HBS 69229.
$1,500.
Price: $1,500.00
Item #69229