Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi

George Devol left home at ten, learned to stack a deck before he learned much else, and spent the next four decades working the steamboats between New Orleans and St. Louis. Soldiers, planters, judges, and fellow sharps all sat down at his table, and nearly all of them stood up lighter. When cards failed, he was famous for settling matters with his skull: by his own account, one of the most dangerous head-butters on the Mississippi.

His 1887 memoir is a machine gun of short, outrageous episodes: rigged games, narrow escapes, disguises, double-crosses, and the occasional flash of conscience, told with the pride of a man who considered separating fools from their money a public service.

It is also a document that needs a referee. Devol exaggerates, self-mythologizes, and glides past the era's ugliness. Our annotated edition supplies the fact-checking, the context of the riverboat economy he preyed on, and the parts of the story he'd rather you didn't dwell on.