Roll the Bones by David G. Schwartz

Author:David G. Schwartz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2020-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

The first professional gambler elected to Congress, John Morrissey (1831-1878) parlayed

the profits from his faro houses into something close to respectability.

During the years that New York gamblers thronged to Morrissey’s houses and faro was “winning the West,” many accomplished gamblers made names for themselves in the Midwest. In Cincinnati, wolf traps split gamblers with rondo houses and keno parlors. Rondo was a simplified form of billiards that could be played as a house-banked mercantile game. To play, players shot nine balls from one corner onto the opposite pocket. To win, a player had to guess whether there would be an even or odd number of balls remaining. This uncomplicated game may have originated as a cross between the numerous Native American odd/even games still played in the nineteenth century and billiards. Rondo was found throughout the American South (including gaming centers like New Orleans and Hot Springs, Arkansas), the Midwest, and even as far west as Arizona and California, where it appeared as a forbidden game in the section of each state’s respective penal code that outlawed mercantile games. It was played through the early years of the twentieth century.

Keno parlors also proliferated throughout the South at this time. This game was markedly different from the keno played today. Players bought preprinted cards, with spaces divided into from three to five rows and the unique ticket number printed in the middle row in large red type. Each row had five numbers, taken from a pool of one to ninety, on it. No two cards were the same. To play, the roller placed ninety balls into a wooden sphere called a goose, shook it, and started drawing numbers. The first player to cover five numbers in a row shouted, “Keno,” and won the prize. This game was also known as lotto, and it was likely descended from lotto-style lotteries. It is more recognizable as a bingo ancestor than as a forerunner of today’s keno, and was popular among small-stakes gamblers wherever it appeared.

Wolf traps, rondo rooms, and keno halls kept the populace of Cincinnati enthralled until around 1850, when a growing number of first-class house operators demanded that the police, to whom they paid protection money, close these rival attractions. During the years before and after the Civil War, many riverboat gamblers would retire to Cincinnati to open gambling houses; as long as payoffs to the authorities continued, the Ohio River town was a quite friendly place to do business.

Throughout the region, just about every city of prominence sheltered at least a few members of the gambling fraternity: St. Louis, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Fort Wayne, St. Paul, and Minneapolis all had significant reputations as gambling centers. Even small towns had their share of the action. In a typical burg, sporting gentlemen declared themselves a “club” and met weekly in the back of some shop where they played the popular games of the day, including the social diversions of poker and its forebears, brag, euchre, and all-fours, whist, and the mercantile games of twenty-one and faro.

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