"The men on Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition square-danced to fiddle music. Cowboys' leisure pursuits included singing, storytelling, dominoes, reading, and foot races. U.S. Army soldiers played the newfangled game of baseball and even enjoyed debating and attending concerts. Dary's irresistible narrative recreates card games on Mississippi steamboats, New Orleans balls, frontier campfires and cafe-theatres, Santa Fe saloons, and Wyoming bicycle clubs and mineral spas, and it charts the emergence of a middle class that came to disapprove of prostitution, gambling, drinking, bear-baiting, and buffalo-hunting. An engaging chronicle". -- Publishers Weekly. "As David Dary proves in this pleasurable book, the Old West was not all trouble and toil. Much to be learned here -- from mountain men and Indians to cowboys and homesteaders -- about how to have fun, no matter the circumstances". -- Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.