Gambling Chips - a brief history
Gamblers usually carried their own set of chips with them. It was rare that saloons would keeps sets for their patrons to play with.
Saloons in the early west were often tent buildings, fairly temporary until towns became well established, especially when railroads began construction, gamblers found that there were many saloons with the same name in different towns, these were most often gambling saloons that were erected at the railheads, ( the tent town to which construction moved, the saloons were dismantled, packed into freight wagons, and moved to the next location, keeping just ahead of the tracks.
In Tombstone Arizona, there were many famous saloons: The Alhambra, The Arcade, The Bank exchange, Bird Cage, Campbell & Hatch Billiard parlor and Gambling Hall (Where Morgan Earp was shot to death), The Crystal Palace, The Eagle Brewery, The Oriental, The Palace, and others.
Dodge City, KS, had a number of gambling emporia like; The Alamo, Crystal Palace, and Lone Star Saloon, to name a few.
Wealthy gamblers, who often plied their trade on riverboats as well as in the saloons on dry land, sometimes carried sets of ivory poker chips. Ivory chips are some of the most attractive chips ever produced because each one is a unique piece of scrimshaw art. Each chip had to be engraved by hand. An alternative to ivory in the mid - 1800's and much less expensive was bone chips. They are thinner then ivory and cannot be engraved and they are porous, meaning that they were less durable, but being much lighter they were easy to carry around.
Plain clay chips were also in use at the this time. They were kept by Saloon patrons who wished to start their own poker games.
Beginning in the 1880's clay chips were useful for the game named "Faro", a game no longer played but very popular in the old west (Wyatt Earp was a big Faro enthusiast), he dealt Faro at the Oriental Saloon in Tombstone AZ.
Faro Chips do not have denominations but rely as present day roulette chips, on different colors and designs to identify players wages.
