Democratic Sentinel, Volume 14, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 January 1891 — The Original Three-Card Monte Man. [ARTICLE]

The Original Three-Card Monte Man.

I found a man in my Bounds recently, says a correspondent, who was well acquainted with “Canada Bill, ” the original three-card monte man, now dead. “The three-card monte game,” he said, “was first worked by ‘Canada Bill * in 1869. Bill was a Canadian, as his name Indicated, and he was as stupid a looking man as one could easily find. Bill worked his game on the trains usually, passing himself off as a cattleman from Texas. In 1873, after making a vast sum of money at his trick, ‘Canada Bill-< conceived the idea of organizing all. the men inclined to be 4 crooked ’ in the various points about which he plied his vocation. He called it, as all men of his calling now do, ‘squaring the head’—that is, * fixing ’ the head officials of a town if possible, establishing a fence, having a •fixed’ lawyer, and ready ‘straw-bail property holders. ’ At one time he had working for him 1,600 men on the trains and in towns and cities.” We quoted a current item about the experience of Dr. Alanus with a vegetarian diet, and his attributing disease of the blood vessels to his use of that diet. We expressed doubt of any relation of cause and effect between euch diet and softening arteries. Now Dr. Holbrook writes that probably it is a “fake” item, since the German vegetarians never heard of Dr. Alanus, and no such name appears in their medical directories. Dr. Foote’s Health Monthly. An ancient statuette of Diana, said to be by Praxiteles and valued at $50,000, is on exhibition In New York.