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In 1854, she arrived in the California town of Nevada City, a few hundred miles northwest of San Francisco, a town that had sprung up from nothing when a rich vein of gold was struck in the Empire mine. Mining camps soon surrounded the town, and many of the town residents had a lot more money than brains. Within a few weeks of her arrival in Nevada City, she rented a place in the center of town, furnished it with rugs and chandeliers, and hung a sign out front that named her establishment, appropriately, the Vingt-Et-Un. Her saloon soon became the number one gambling establishment in the town, and it was the comely Madame Dumont that the gamblers came to play against. Again, according to Robert DeArment, “After closing her game, she would uncork bottles of champagne and treat the losers. More than one miner averred that he would rather lose to the Madame than win from somebody else.” A few years after opening the Vingt-Et-Un, Madame Dumont joined forces with another gambling house operator to open a much larger establishment in Nevada City called Dumont’s Palace. This was a full-fledged casino with roulette, faro, and chuck-a-luck games in addition to twenty-one. Eleanor Dumont, not yet thirty years of age, who had started out with nothing more than a deck of cards, had become one of the most successful twenty-one players in history.
In 1857, as the gold was petering out in the Nevada City area mines, she moved to Columbia where the gold strikes were plentiful. Despite prospering in Columbia, in 1859 she moved again, this time to Virginia City, and again in 1861 to Pioche, fol¬lowing the Nevada gold strikes. In Pioche, she began dealing twenty-one in a saloon owned by a man named Jack McKnight, fell in love, and married him. Shortly after their marriage, McKnight deserted her, disappearing along with all of her money.
Eleanore Dumont went back to dealing twenty-one and following the gold strikes.
She was always on the move, but now traveled with a pistol-not to protect herself from the gamblers whose money she won, but because she hoped to someday cross paths with Jack McKnight. She moved to Fort Benton, Montana, then to Helena, then to Salmon, Idaho, back to Nevada City, and finally to Bodie, California.

In the mid-eighteen hundreds, San Francisco’s Barbary Coast district had more than one thousand gambling houses, most being saloons, brothels, or some combination of saloon, brothel, hotel, and casino. We know that twenty-one was being played in the wild western states during the eighteen hundreds, and we can assume that it had come from the more civilized East, where casino gambling was technically illegal in most states, but still widespread. Some of the professional gamblers who came west with the ‘4gers were likely Mississippi riverboat gamblers looking for fresh suckers.
The first steam-powered paddleboats had appeared on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers in 1811, and by 1833 there were more than five hundred boats in service. According to Alan Wykes (The Complete Illustrated Guide to Gambling, Doubleday, 1964), by the l830s, approximately fifteen hundred professional gamblers were working the steamboats that ran between New Orleans and Louisville. That’s an average of three cardsharps on every boat. Says Wykes: “At first the cardsharp was an outcast … but as the boats’ officers became aware of the large potential income that lay at the tips of the cardsharps’ fingers … they became his accomplices.” The riverboat captains were soon competing with each other to attract not only the slickest cardsharps to their boats, but the wealthy travelers who were known to like a leisurely game of twenty-one or faro to pass the time on their journey. But with all the boats, and a growing army of cardsharps, the competition for suckers was getting worse every year. So, when gold was discovered in California in 1849, many of the gamblers went west to mine the pockets of the miners.
Eleanore Dumont is the first known professional twenty-one player in history. She was widely respected by the miners and gamblers who played against her because she was believed to deal an honest game. For all we know, she may have dealt completely on the square, and simply beat her customers as a result of the “house edge.” But most traveling card gamblers of that time did use sleight of hand, which was much more of an arcane art than it is today. Surely, there were other blackjack specialists before her, but none whose names are known and who specialized in the game of twenty-one exclusively. Throughout a gambling career of almost thirty years, Madame Mustache played only one game-twenty-one-and in the gambling dens of the old West, she became a legend in her lifetime.