Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi

“Some men are born rascals. Others have rascality thrust upon them.” George H Devol was an infamous gambler — though “cheat” would be a more accurate word. In his “Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi” Devol recounts dozens of anecdotes of how he plied his Three-Card Monte and sharp dealing skills to cheat the cheaters and/or suckers on steamboats and in river towns over more than four decades in the mid-nineteenth-century South.