Read The Great American Steamboat Race Online
Authors: Benton Rain Patterson
The Great American Steamboat Race (19 page)
George H. Devol, whose daring exploits made him one of the most famous Mississippi River steamboat gamblers. Many steamboats had a rule that prohibited gambling after 10
P
.
M
., but the rule was largely ignored, and it was not unusual for card games to last through the night and into dawn of the next day. The most common card games were poker, brag, whist, Boston, blackjack and chuck (Library of Congress).
than merely an unusually skillful player — were the key to his sure-thing success at cards. Dealing from the bottom of the deck in order to give predetermined hands to anyone at the table, was a technique believed to have been developed by a man named Wilson and first made its appearance on the Mississippi and other western rivers around 1834.
Detection, or even suspicion, of cheating was the chief occupational hazard of the Mississippi River steamboat gambler. Stories about threats to the gambler’s life abound. One gambler, who had been particularly successful happened to overhear several of his victims conspiring to kill him and take back the money they had lost to him. He slipped away and found a place to hide near the pilot house, then bribed the boat’s pilot to have him pull over close to the river bank at the first opportunity and let the gambler jump off the
boat. The pilot did so, and the gambler leaped from the boat. He landed in shallow water and sank to his waist in the mud of the river bottom, trapped by the muck while his angry victims, having discovered his escape, began firing pistols at him. The steamboat continued on its way, and the gambler was soon out of range of the gunfire. He was finally rescued by slaves who had been working in a nearby field and were drawn to the river bank by the sounds of the gunfire. Responding to his yells for help, they got a long pole and pulled him to safety. He then waited on the bank for another passing steamboat to stop and pick him up.
That same gambler, George H. Devol, who had begun his career on the Mississippi River as a steamboat cabin boy, was later in a similarly dangerous situation aboard another boat he was working. The men he had fleeced had become drunk and set out to find him and recoup their losses. He came out of his hiding place on the boat long enough to find some dirty clothing, which he put on, then smeared his face with grime and mixed in with the boat’s roustabouts on the main deck. When the boat tied up at its next stop, he hefted a piece of freight and fell in with the roustabouts filing down the stage, hauling freight ashore. Thus he escaped once more, while his menacing victims searched for him on the upper decks.
In his memoir Devol told his own story of outwitting a desperate passenger who pulled a pistol on him after losing his entire bankroll to Devol playing monte, a game in which three cards are placed on the table face up and the bettor, after selecting one of the cards and having the dealer shuffle and manipulate them face down, then must pick from the three face-down cards the one he had selected:
I was playing monte one night on the
Robert E. Lee
when a fellow stepped up to the table and bet me $800.... When he had lost his money and spent a few moments studying, he whipped out a Colt’s navy [pistol] and said, “See here, friend, that is all the money I have got, and I am going to die right here but I will have it back.”
I coolly said, “Did you think I was going to keep the money?”
He replied, “I knew very well you would not keep it. If you had, I would have filled you full of lead. I am from Texas, sir,” and the man straightened himself up.
Pulling out a roll of money, I said, “I want to whisper to you.” He put his head down, and I said, “...I didn’t want to give you the money before all these people because then they would all want their money back, too. But you offer to bet me again, and I will bet you $800 against your pistol.”
That pleased him. “All right,” he said, and the $800 and the pistol went up in my partner’s hands. Over went the wrong card. I grabbed the pistol, and told my partner to give me the stake money. Pulling the gun on him [the Texan], “Now,” I said, “you’ve acted the wet dog about this and I will not give you a cent of your money, and if you cut any more capers, I will break your nose.”
14
The gambler wasn’t always the winner, though. He could be outsmarted occasionally. The hero of one story, apparently an old one on the river, was a bank clerk who left New Orleans bound for Pittsburgh on bank business, carrying $100,000 in cash in his trunk. Several professional gamblers found out about the clerk’s mission and bought tickets on the same boat with him. Once the trip started, it wasn’t long before the gamblers had drawn the clerk into a game of brag, at which they allowed him to win several hands to set him up for the kill. At what they figured was the right moment, he was dealt a very good hand, and one of the professionals was dealt an even better hand. The betting went back and forth between the clerk and the professional until at last the clerk had bet all the money that he had on the table. At that point the gambler raised him five thousand dollars and when the clerk said he was out of money and asked the gambler to show his hand, the gambler refused and demanded the clerk come up with five thousand dollars to see his bet or forfeit the pot.
“I go you five thousand better and give you five minutes to raise the money,” the gambler told him.
The clerk slowly got up from the table and strode to his stateroom, went in and unlocked his trunk, then returned to the table with a package containing the money that he was taking to Pittsburgh. “You will not give me a sight for my money?” the clerk asked the gambler.
“No, sir,” the gambler replied. “I went five thousand dollars better and gave you five minutes to raise the money. One minute of the time remains.”
“Then, sir,” the clerk declared, tossing the money package onto the table, “I see your five thousand and go you ninety-five thousand dollars better — and give you five minutes to raise the money!”
Unable to come up with that huge amount, the gambler and his partners abruptly withdrew from the table, leaving the pot — and the money package — to the clerk. At the boat’s next stop, the gamblers got off to return to New Orleans, outmaneuvered and several thousand dollars lighter, but ready to take a new ride on another grand steamboat.
The Hard-Working Life
William Wells Brown was born into slavery in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1814 and when he was in his twenties, he worked aboard the Mississippi River steamboats
Missouri
,
Enterprize
and
Chester
, and on the Missouri River steamer
Otto
for a while. In 1847, after fleeing to freedom in Ohio and later having found a home in Boston, he wrote his autobiography, giving glimpses of life on the Mississippi as he saw it.
Brown was the son of a white plantation owner and a black slave woman and was sold as a child to a relative of his father. He moved with his new master from Kentucky to Missouri and was hired out to a Major Freeland, who in turn hired him out to work aboard the steamer
Missouri
, which ran between St. Louis and Galena, Illinois. In his book, a slender volume titled
The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave
, Brown calls that steamboat assignment “the most pleasant time for me that I had ever experienced.” He later was hired out to the captain of the
Enterprize
to work as a waiter. “My employment on board,” he wrote, “was to wait on gentlemen, and the captain being a good man, the situation was a pleasant one to me — but in passing from place to place, and seeing new faces every day, and knowing they could go where they pleased, I soon became unhappy, and several times thought of leaving the boat at some landing place and trying to make my escape to Canada.”
Although he apparently received little or no ill treatment himself while working as a waiter, he got a close look at how other slaves were treated and the conditions in which they were hopelessly trapped. It was the cargoes of fellow slaves that bothered him most. “On our downward passage,” he recalled, “the boat took on board, at Hannibal, a drove of slaves, bound for the New Orleans market. They numbered from fifty to sixty, consisting of men and women from eighteen to forty years of age. A drove of slaves on a southern steamboat, bound for the cotton or sugar regions, is an occurrence so com
mon that no one, not even the passengers, appear to notice it, though they clank their chains at every step.
“There was on the boat a large room on the lower deck,” Brown wrote, “in which the slaves were kept, men and women, promiscuously — all chained two and two, and a strict watch kept that they did not get loose; for cases have occurred in which slaves have got off their chains, and made their escape at landing-places, while the boats were taking in wood — and with all our care, we lost one woman who had been taken from her husband and children and having no desire to live without them, in the agony of her soul jumped overboard and drowned herself. She was not chained.” The part of the boat where the slaves were kept, Brown noted, giving an idea of the conditions under which the slaves traveled, was almost impossible to keep clean.
Brown was but one of many slaves who worked aboard Mississippi River steamboats. Historian Thomas C. Buchanan posits that if the crews of the 93 steamboats docked at St. Louis in September 1850 were representative of the 700 to 1,000 steamboat crews working on the western rivers by the middle 1800s, there were about 2,000 to 3,000 slaves and 1,000 to 1,500 free blacks at work on western steamboats at any given time. “The crew lists of these 93 boats,” Buchanan reports, “indicate that 230 free blacks (6 percent) and 441 slave workers (12 percent) out of a total workforce of 3,627 toiled on these vessels.”
The remainder of the steamers’ crews were composed of American-born whites (43 percent), Irish-born (24 percent), German-born (11 percent) and 3 percent from an assortment of other foreign countries. The figures also show that 57 percent of steamboat crewmen worked as deckhands, 20 percent were cabin workers, and 1 percent were independent contractors, working for themselves as barbers or bartenders. The 2 percent of the crew members who were women worked as chambermaids.
1
The rest of the crew members were the boats’ officers.
In the early days on the Mississippi practically all crewmen were white, but according to Herbert and Edward Quick, authors of an early twentiethcentury book on Mississippi River steamboats, “Gradually, the negroes replaced all others as deck hands. They began as servants in kitchen and cabin and the more brawny found jobs as firemen.... As waiters their grins and native flattery were more pleasing to the officers and passengers than the grim condescending attendance of the whites; as cooks they were more satisfactory, and as firemen they would put up with more heat and abuse. They supplanted the white stewardess....
“It was not long until the happy, unworldly negroes made up more than half the crew of the steamboat. They cooked and served the meals, made up the bunks, stoked the fires and rolled the freight up and down the gangplank, working as stevedores in the hey-day of high wages for no more than fifty dollars a month. But they were free, and perhaps better off than the slaves who were always to be seen traveling on the main deck, having been bought by a slave dealer who was taking them to sell somewhere else.”
2
The racial and ethnic mixes of steamboat crews often made for explosive situations aboard the boats, as evidenced by the stories of racial violence sometimes published by newspapers. In June 1839 the
Picayune
in New Orleans reported that “a coloured man casually employed on board the
Maid of Orleans
, was wounded with a knife and much beaten on Friday night. The cause, we learn, was his attempting to eat supper with the white ‘hands’ on board.”
3
In another case reported by the
Picayune,
this one resulting in the death of a black crewman, “One of the white deck hands undertook to beat the negro and ... another one drew a knife and stabbed the negro.”
4
The reason for that altercation was not reported. Often the cause of fights was little more than racial bigotry. A free black who was a cook aboard the steamer
Aunt Letty
in 1857, drawn into a fight between white deckhands and a black fireman, bellowed a menacing challenge as he went to the fireman’s aid: “I can whip any goddamn white-livered son of a bitch on the boat if they would give me a white man’s chance!” Minutes later, the white deckhands having been reinforced by the boat’s mate and at least one other officer, a free-forall erupted. White crewmen attacked a group of blacks that included the cook, now armed with a knife, the steward, also armed with a knife, and several waiters. After the initial clash, the black crewmen, except for the steward, fled the fray. The steward, holding a sixteen-inch knife from the kitchen, stood alone to face the white crewmen, who quickly overwhelmed him and were about to cut his throat when the boat’s clerk, armed with a gun, threatened to shoot the first man that moved toward the steward. That ended the confrontation, at least temporarily, but the threat of violence remained. Not long after that incident, six of the
Aunt Letty
’s free-black crew members quit their jobs and went ashore after the boat’s mate declared that he would “kill every nigger on board the boat.”