By 
Eleanore Dumont, known as “Madame Mustache in the frontier gambling halls, it was truly one of the historical phenomena of that time. As a young petticoat saleswoman, she became a “super star” handing out blackjack on the gypsy circuit of gamblers that roamed the West.
There is debate about Dumont’s birthplace; some say she was a French-born immigrant named Simone Jules, while others say she was born in New Orleans around 1829. What is known is that Madame Simone Jules arrived at San Francisco’s Bella Union Saloon and Gambling Hall in the spring of 1850, took over a roulette table, and created quite a sensation. Forty-nine, hungry for a single glimpse of a beautiful woman, were awed by the young French woman with creamy alabaster skin, sparkling black eyes, a flirtatious smile, and long dark hair that fell to her shoulders. Within a few days, men were lining up to lose their gold dust to the demure mademoiselle who, upon very close inspection, showed a fine line of downy hair on her upper lip.
Bella’s union was filled night and day with players eager to see or play against the wonderful Madame Jules. Not to be outdone, the other gambling halls quickly imported French women to sit on their roulette wheels. In the following years, croupiers or dealers became the headliners of most of the gaming operations in Portsmouth Square. Then, as suddenly as she had appeared, Madame Jules disappeared from the scene and her name was never mentioned again in any newspaper records or reports.
Several years later, in 1854, a stagecoach rolled through the dusty streets of Nevada City, California, and a young, well-built woman emerged from it. Decked out in fine Parisian clothes and expensive jewelry, the entire city gasped at the mysterious, jet-black haired French woman who descended from the carriage. She was small and delicate, with doe eyes, a mane of curly dark hair, and just a hint of diaphanous hair on her upper lip. She said her name was Madame Eleanore Dumont and offered nothing about her background: an inscrutable and mysterious woman.
Satisfied with her transformation into Madame Dumont, the game vixen rented a place downtown and hung a sign naming her establishment, the “Vingt-Et-Un” (French for “twenty-one”). Citizens from all over the city received invitations to visit Broad Street and enjoy a game with Madame Dumont. Although there were more than a dozen card rooms in the Nevada city, the Vingt-Et-Un was the undisputed queen of the sports crowd. Blackjack was Dumont’s game of choice and she was a master at the game, sweetly expressing her regret as she racked up her winnings. When she closed the table for her, she would order bottles of champagne to treat the losers, leading most of the miners to say that they “would rather lose with Madame than win with someone else”.
Miners and townspeople flocked to the establishment, drawn as much by the lure of making money as by the charisma and wit of the French hostess. Decorum was strictly enforced, patrons were not allowed to get into fights or use vulgar language; Oddly enough, the rude crowd of miners found it impossible to resist the courteous requests of the tempting owner. In a very short time, he moved his operation to larger rooms where he added faro, chuck-a-luck, roulette tables and a team of dealers. He named his new card room Dumont Palace and hired a Nevada City gambler named Dave Tobin to be his managing partner.
Then, for the next two years, the money poured in daily, so much so that Tobin, who had moved in with Dumont at the Hotel Nacional, wanted to take control of the operation. When he tried to make the move on him, Dumont flew into a rage: just because they shared a bed didn’t make him the team leader. She gave him an ultimatum; if she didn’t like the arrangement then “get the hell out.” He certainly didn’t like the setup, so after a final deal he snuck out of Nevada City and headed back east.
When the gold in Nevada City finally ran out, Eleanore sold her operation and began a tour of the other mining camps in Northern California. She opened her game in the Yuba River settlements of Bullard’s Bar, Downieville, and Sierra City; she then moved to mining camps on the Feather River and later on the Klamath. In 1857 she traded twenty-one at George Foster’s City Hotel in Columbia for more than a year before moving to Virginia City, where she managed an elegant establishment with furniture valued at more than $30,000. It was during this series of mining camps in California that she added the “extras” to her table operations: a visit to her boudoir that required a “room charge.”
Dumont set out for the goldfields in Idaho and Montana in the early 1860s, and by the end of his tour he was approaching his thirtieth birthday. The passing of the years had not been kind to her; the long nights of cards and debauchery began to take their toll, and her once-legendary appearance slowly began to fade. Looking jaded and exhausted, she lost her hourglass figure and what years before was just a faint hint of fuzz on her upper lip had begun to darken, earning her the Nickname– Mrs. Mustache.
In Bannack, he teamed up with a man named McHarney in a two-story gambling hall that featured cribs upstairs for quick encounters with the young dancers who worked in the hall below. They had the operation going for a short time before his partner was killed in a shootout with another player named MacFarlane. To do? Without missing a beat, Dumont had the bloodied corpse dragged out, fresh sawdust strewn across the floor, and the room sprang into action as if nothing had happened. She then ran to jail to post $1,000 bail for MacFarlane, who less than an hour after the murder agreed to be his new partner. Yes sir, the French never missed an entrepreneurial opportunity.
Leaving Bannack, Dumont headed for Fort Benton, a bustling supply point for Montana’s goldfields. Here he duplicated his previous operation which included booze, beauties and gambling. However, the glitter was gone from his earlier emporiums, where elegance and decorum were paramount. He was reduced to operating in a low-cost dive. Steamboat captain Louis Rosche described Dumont’s gambling hall:
“The inside of the gambling house looked even worse than the outside. The bar and gambling rooms were housed in a large room on the ground floor. A set of rickety stairs led up to a second floor balcony where I saw doors leading they led to about a dozen smaller rooms. The place was smoky and smelled of sweat, unwashed bodies, and cheap whiskey. The floor was dirty… Faintly from one of the upstairs rooms I could hear the gibberish of a man drunk and the high-pitched, raucous laugh of a woman who was quite sober.”
Dumont hopped from place to place until he decided it was time to retire from the gambling life, so he bought a cattle ranch in California and for a short time tried to do honest work. Quickly realizing that he had no idea how to run a ranch, he hooked up with a smooth-talking man named Jack McKnight who claimed to be a savvy cattle buyer. Handsome and well-dressed, McKnight promised her that he would take care of everything, and they were married. With the ink barely dry on his marriage certificate, McKnight did just that: he took everything she had and ran away.
Forced to return to the only thing she knew how to do, Dumont hit the mining camps and finally landed in Deadwood in the fall of 1876. She traded twenty-one in various saloons and was watched by John F. Finerty, a journalist for The chicago Times. In one article, he wrote: “She had a once-beautiful face, which crime had hardened into an expression of cruelty. Her eyes gleamed like a rattlesnake’s and she raked gold dust or splinters with hands whose long fingers white, sharp at the ends, reminded me of the stubs of a harp”.
Reduced to barely surviving as a dealer in low-class gambling dens, Dumont finally arrived in Bodie, California, in 1879. By this point, she was usually drinking heavily and finding it much harder to compete against the sharp-tongued professionals who sat around her. his twenty years. -a table. On the night of September 7, in the Magnolia room, she borrowed $300 to prop her table against two black legs. Try as she might, he just didn’t have it in her; she was 49 years old, penniless, dazed by a whiskey-soaked brain, and finally, when she turned the last card, she was out of luck. Mustering as much dignity as she could muster, she pushed her chair away from the table and stood up, “Gentlemen, the game is yours.”
The next morning she was found dead next to an empty bottle of morphine. Among the personal items found on her body was a letter she had written. Along with instructions for disposing of her effects, the letter stated that she “was tired of life”. Tea Sacramento Union he summed up his entire life with these few lines: “Bodie: September 8. A woman named Eleanore Dumont was found dead today a mile from town, having committed suicide. She was well known in the mining camps.”