Begins Life as "Candy Butcher."
Mike McDonald began life as a "candy butcher" on railroad trains before the war. He sold peanuts and popcorn and mysterious packages not to be opened on the train, and fine gold watches at $3.75 apiece.
Mike ran on many different railroads, although it must be said for the sake of truth that his customers were often very sorry to board a train and find that the energetic little candy butcher who had sold them jewelry on the last trip they had made had left and gone over to some other railroad. Mike's old customers used to beg him to return to them. They even dared him to come back.
Patriotic for a Price.
The candy butcher made money and saved it, and during the war he settled down in Chicago. Mike was very patriotic. He sent many men around to the enlistment offices, especially when big bounties were offered for volunteers. The trouble with the gallant soldiers that Mike put into the service was that after they got their bounty money they lost their enthusiasm and faded from view, like an evanescent mist.
Mike made much money out of his bounty-jumpers, but lost a good deal of it gambling. At this time he trained with "Tip" Farrell, Charley Miller, John Sutton and Matt Duffy, who figured more or less in the police records of that time. Sutton was shot and killed in front of Pete Page's saloon, on Clark street, in 1864.
Toward the close of the war McDonald and a notorious St. Paul crook lost $600 in the famous game that Colonel Cameron was running in Chicago. McDonald found out that the cards were stocked against him, and it discouraged him with having anything more to do with poker playing from the front of the table. Colonel Cameron had taught him, at the expense of $600, that the money in gambling was in running the game, not playing it. From that day Mike McDonald never gambled. He straightway opened his own game.
With Dave Oaks he started a game of faro at 89 Dearborn street. It was a nice, little, modest game, with only those two as the entire crew of the place. They took turn alternate days as dealer and roper in. The suckers who played the game used to complain frequently that the firm of Oaks & McDonald worked sleight-of-hand tricks with the faro deck, and the unkind police used to raid the game every day.
Solved Gambling Problem.
This frequent raiding cut frightfully into the profits of the enterprising firm of Oaks & McDonald, and set the junior member thinking again. He had already solved the great problem that it is better to run a brace game than to play one, but he found there were thorns even in running a game. Therefore he set to work to discover how these thorns could be removed.