George Devol: The Riverboat Cheat Who Wrote It Down

His 1887 memoir opens the card room door. It also asks readers to trust the man who profited from deception.

Most card cheats would prefer the workings of their business to remain private. George H. Devol put a version of his into print. His 1887 book, Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi, advertised a life of cheating, fighting and taking money from fellow passengers. Even the sales pitch is evidence.

The book is not a neutral history of poker. It is a participant's memoir, assembled as an entertaining account of his own career. Lapham's Quarterly describes some of its material as implausible. That makes it a source to interrogate, not a collection of facts to repeat without qualification.

A game inside a larger performance

In Devol's telling, the deck is only one component. Partners, introductions, accomplices and a passenger's confidence all matter. He describes prepared cards and arrangements that could make a game look spontaneous when it was nothing of the kind.

You do not need a tutorial in his methods to understand their purpose. The victim was evaluating one contest while the people running it were organising another. The visible card game supplied a plausible explanation for money changing hands.

The author wants a particular verdict

Devol could describe cheating and still present himself as a man with a code. That tension is one of the book's most useful features. It shows how readily a narrator can make his own conduct sound reasonable while treating the losses of strangers as comic material.

A Library of Congress engraving from 1887 gives the account a contemporary face. The portrait and the memoir belong to the same historical moment. Neither proves the truth of every adventure, but both help us see a gambler actively shaping the story that would outlive him.

What the Bandit takes from it

Transparency is useful, but a vivid confession is still a sales pitch if it controls which facts you see. I want evidence that can be checked outside the storyteller's own account. That applies to an old riverboat memoir and to a modern claim about a casino's generosity.

Read this file beside Canada Bill's story. The same narrator can supply illuminating detail and a thoroughly partial defence. Keeping both possibilities in view is how a good archive avoids becoming another confidence game.