Excerpt from Fort Wayne Gamblers: 1865-1900 Long's formative years as a professional gambler were spent in the company of experts from New York, Chi cago, Detroit, St. Louis, and Cleveland, who had been at tracted to the wide-open games that could always be found in downtown Fort Wayne in those days. Long declared, how ever, that after Ryan's precipitate flight the confidence men deserted Fort Wayne, and this city began to lose its prominence as a gaming center. These thieves had lost a large part of their booty to the professional sports, and when they departed, the gamblers found themselves shortof victims. The thieves robbed the greenhorns and in turn lost their 'swag' at the faro bank or the poker table, taking to the road as soon as they were 'broke' for the purpose of replenishing their exchequers. Those were indeed lively times in Indiana. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.