Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [61]
But the gamblers didn’t need poker or any other formal game. They’d bet on anything at all. On the steamboats, they’d bet on the speed of their passage, and the afternoon’s weather, and the depth of the river bottom at the next sounding. In the port towns, they’d stagger off roaring drunk to hit up the casinos and gambling houses; if they couldn’t find a good game, they’d make any bet they could with a local, even a footrace to the end of the levee. One professional gambler, George Devol, bet a hundred dollars once on whether a fish for sale in a New Orleans market was a catfish or a pike.
They’d bet on anything; they cheated at everything. The professional gamblers routinely used marked cards, either ones they’d marked themselves or decks they’d bought commercially (these were blandly advertised as “advantage decks”), and they had dozens of dizzying ways of stacking clean decks (it was then known as stocking a deck). The gamblers’ fancy suits were as tricky as a magician’s false-bottomed box. There were whole decks concealed in the sleeves and vests, fanned out in sequence and memorized so that the necessary card could be discreetly fetched to fill a hand. The gamblers also wore mirrored rings and jewels, and they took their snuff from mirrored snuffboxes; they flashed and twinkled and glittered as they played, and every stray reflection off a silver pitcher or a glass behind the bar gave them a glimpse of their opponents’ cards.
When they weren’t cheating, they were conning. The presence of con men on every steamboat was a given: guidebooks even warned tourists to beware of any stranger striking up a conversation, because it was almost certainly going to be a con. There were con men soliciting subscriptions to orphanages and schools; there were hustlers trading in land claims and in benefits for resettled Native Americans. But probably the most vigorous and inventive of the hustlers were the medicine men. They had an endless array of products for sale: Clark’s Famous Anti-Bilious Pills, Great Worm Lozenges, Carmody’s Tonic Pills, Radway’s Ready Relief for Toothache, Wolcott’s Instant Pain Annihilator, Derby Condition Powder, Piso’s Cure for Consumption, and (a particular favorite in New Orleans) Dr. Vandeveer’s Medicated Gin and Genuine Scheedam Schnapps, which was advertised as “a wholesome beverage, and an invaluable family medicine, particularly beneficial in all cases of Dysentery, Dyspepsia, Diarrhea, Rhumatism, Gout and Fever.” It was, the bottle said, “peculiarly adapted to the use of females and children.” As a satirical poem of the time put it:
For us, new countries are the best,
Hence we perch down in this far West;
This is, despite of your attacks,
A famous stamping ground of quacks.
The poem was “Letter from a Thompsonian Doctor” by James M’Chonochie. Thompsonian doctors—the steam doctors—were a big presence on the river. On the steamboats they couldn’t hustle their famous saunas and hot baths; instead they had whole traveling stores of herbal remedies. Their placards read, “If you wish genuine poisons, call at a Genuine Mineral Drug Store; but if you wish genuine Botanic Medicine, call at a genuine Anti-Poisoning Botanic Drug Store.” Since orthodox doctors actually were feeding people poisons then (primarily arsenic and mercury), the Thompsonians had a point; in fact, they would have been the most valuable health providers on the frontier if their treatments had only worked. Unfortunately what they were selling were random herbal mixtures, in vials labeled with cryptic numbers, that left people either untreated or worse off than before. Their general efficacy was all too justly summed up by M