Part 2 about Eleanore
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.
