Poker & Pop Culture: George Devol, the Ultimate Steamboat Sharp

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Updated: August 2, 2016

We concluded last week with the thundering words of card sharp John Backus in Mark Twain’s “The Professor’s Yarn” echoing in our ears. “I’m a professional gambler” he loudly proclaimed after outcheating an opponent in a hand of poker aboard a 19th-century steamboat.

It’s an emphatic line, suggesting not only that Backus believes himself worthy of the respect due to someone in his “profession,” but also that being able to cheat successfully is in fact one of the requisite tricks of his trade. So, too, is the ability to defend oneself as Backus does by holding aloft his cocked revolver to accompany his words.

As we’ve already seen in our earlier survey of saloon poker, cheating was a constant in the 19th-century version of the game. The contemporaneous rise of steamboats and preponderance of poker and other gambling games aboard them even further established the “card sharp” as a highly recognizable character in American society, for better or worse.

If you think about it, if you were to cheat in a saloon poker game, your tenure there would likely only last as long as you were able to avoid being discovered. That would be the point at which the guns could well come out, and if you were lucky enough to make your exit you’d likely never return to the scene of your crime.

Getting caught cheating on a steamboat, however, didn’t mean you couldn’t return to the waters right away to involve yourself in another of the hundreds of floating card games on offer. Wait long enough and you could even return to the very same vessel from which you were ejected, given the constant turnover of passengers — a much less static crowd than the regulars at a given watering hole.

Probably the best known example of such riverboat-riding risk-seekers during the heyday of steamboat poker was George Devol, his reputation made and preserved thanks primarily to his popular and undoubtedly embellished 1887 memoir Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi.

“I Felt As If I Were Fixed for Life”

Born in 1829 in Ohio, Devol would spend nearly his entire life in transit, mostly on steamboats, then later on trains on the country’s growing railroad lines. In his book Devol shares his life story in roughly chronological fashion via 177 short chapters of three pages or less, each presenting a brief anecdote from his colorful life.

“Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi” by George Devol

The result somewhat resembles 18th- and 19th-century British bildungsroman or “coming-of-age” novels featuring a central character winding through a serious of episodic adventures and learning various lessons while growing to adulthood. It also establishes a pattern of sorts followed by later “poker memoirs” like Doyle Brunson’s The Godfather of Poker and more recently Mike Sexton’s Life’s a Gamble (reviewed here) — that is, a life presented through a series of gambling stories.

However, unlike Tom Jones or David Copperfield — or Brunson or Sexton, for that matter — Devol’s character doesn’t evolve all that much throughout his narrative. In fact, he seems to have adopted self-assured philosophy at a very early age, mostly sticking to it throughout the four decades’ worth of stories he shares.

A runaway at age 10, Devol finds work as a cabin boy among various steamboats, immediately learning various card games and how to cheat at them. “I learned to play ‘seven up’ and to ‘steal card’ so that I could cheat the boys,” he explains in an early chapter. “I felt as if I was fixed for life.”

He eventually learns other card-based gambling games like “red and black” and three-card monte while remaining mostly on steamboats, working in various capacities for the next seven years. During that time he also discovers other means of cheating including how to “stock a deck.” He derives additional income running games of faro, keno, and roulette.

A short stint back home helping his brother caulk steamboats does little to convince him to give up the gambling life. After dramatically dumping his caulking tools in the river, Devol declares his life plan to his brother.

“I told him I intended to live off fools and suckers,” Devol writes. “I also said, ‘I will make money rain;’ and I did come near doing as I said.”

George Devol, Gambling Superhero

Poker soon emerges as the game Devol finds most lucrative, whether playing “on the square” or — more often than not — with some ill-gotten edge. With barkeeps and deck hands working as accomplices on seemingly every boat — in addition to the more steady partners with whom Devol worked over the years — the stream of cash flowing into Devol’s pockets seems to roll without ceasing, not unlike the Mississippi itself.

Devol’s reputation begins preceding …

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