-
How Dodge “Dodged” the Sharpers
- Louisiana State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
119 How Dodge “Dodged” the Sharpers M. G. Lewis The star of this story is the euphoniously named Ossian Euclid Dodge. Dodge achieved a significant measure of fame in the early 1850s as the socalled Boston Voice. Though primarily known as a singer, often performing songs with a comic theme, Dodge was also a journalist and newspaper publisher . Arguably, he achieved his greatest moment of notoriety when he bid $625 in a public auction to hear Jenny Lind sing when she gave her first concert in Boston in 1850. Shifts in musical taste meant that Dodge eventually returned to obscurity, but this sketch of his experiences with three riverboat captains playing at being gamblers (later reprinted in Southern and SouthWestern Sketches, “edited by a Gentleman of Richmond” [Richmond: J. W. Randolph]) was published at the height of his fame. Readers may also be interested to note that the “Peter Funk” referred to by the boat captains was a popular term for a confidence man (technically, one used by auction houses to bid-up lots). For more information, see Philip D. Jordan, “Ossian Euclid Dodge: Eccentric Troubadour,” Historian 31.2 (February 1969): 194–210. Where’s the man residing in any part of the United States, that has not heard of OSSIAN E. DODGE, the joker, vocalist, and delineator of character? Echo answers, whar?—we will therefore give a dodge of Dodge’s. Some few years since, when the demoralizing habit of gambling was still greater than at the present day, the inveterate punster and Yankee vocalist found it for his professional and pecuniary interest to remain for some time in the flourishing villages to be found along the banks of the muddy, though world-renowned Mississippi—on whose waters men are done, overdone, and undone—water only taken by the deck passengers and divers into eternity , and where the “papers,” “documents,” “pocket companions,” “hymn books”—in vulgar parlance called cards, and all games pertaining thereunto, are as plenty as brass buttons and bogus pennies in a contribution box. It being a fine field for studying human nature, and enjoying an occasional bit of private fun, the vocalist travelled incog., that he might, like the wise man in the parable, double his talents and pick up all the percentages that an overruling Providence might please to fore-ordain for his especial benefit. His travelling apparel has once undoubtedly belonged to the ton, but alas! Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men 120 it now looked more like the last remaining stock of an old woman’s curiosity shop; his bell-crowned tile, judging from its size, must have been the measure alluded to when our forefathers were so affectionately spoken to, concerning their valuable light being hid under a bushel. His flaxen hair (or rather that of his wig,) fell in rich profusion over a huge stock—enclosing a dickey double starched, and standing erect, like the sail of a sloop in a fog, and apparently conscious of its power in operating on the ears like the teeth of an old wood-saw, so that in front, the comical looking face had the appearance of being enclosed in a pen, or of peaking at the beholder through the interstices of a worn-out cotton carpet. The shortwaisted , long-skirted, swallow-tailed blue coat, with large brass buttons and high greasy collar, sat on the square-shouldered and sinewy frame of the wearer like a door mat on a pitchfork; while a dingy cotton skirt, covered in front with a ruffled frill, gave a finishing touch to a pair of bottle-green pants, with a narrow flap, and still narrower bottoms, ornamented with a large golden watch-seal hanging pendant on a leather string from the watchpocket , in a manner that would have made graver men than travellers on the Mississippi roar with laughter. In fact, it was too big a man for so little cloth, and what little there was seemed to have a strong tendency to meet midway, and discuss whether it would be better to stand the strain, or stretch a feet or a feet and half further, and reach the “insect killers,” now visible below the pants in a pair of boots that would have answered very well for lumber and coal river boats for a wholesale dealer. Our hero came on board of the fine (and at the time, very popular,) steamer G—— W——, bound down to New Orleans, (as she was wooding up at one of the...