The Anaconda Standard

THE GAME OF CRAPS.
First Played in New Orleans Over a Hundred Years Ago.

From the Savannah News.

If there is one game to which the Savannah negro is devoted above all others it is craps. City or country, it is all alike.

On Sunday the country negroes gather in little groups in the shade of the trees, out of sight of the "big house," and play all day long or until the wages which they received on Saturday night are gone. In the cities they gather on the wharves, in the corners of warehouses or any favorable spot out of sight of the "cop" and play for any amount they may possess, from coppers to dollars.

The Savannah bootblacks and newsboys, like those of any other city, gamble away their earnings, and many a game is carried on in the lanes, the players often becoming so interested that they lose all thought of the policeman until that worthy appears in their midst and nabs a couple of the players. White boys play the game, too, but negroes of all ages and sizes "shoot" craps. There is only one other game which equals craps in fascination for them, and that is policy, and as policy is more liable to be interfered with by the police, craps has all the advantage.

There are fascinations about the game peculiarly African. It is not without its intricacies. The ordinary "come seven, come eleven" plan of the game is simple enough, but there is a crowd around the players, there may be half a dozen interested in the game and a dozen side bets. How they manage to keep run of the game is a mystery to the ordinary observer, but they do so with unerring accuracy. Fights over crap games are rare.

The expressions common to the game are amusing. "New dress for de baby," exclaims one. "See my gal Sunday night," exclaims another. "De little number 2," says one as that unlucky number shows up. "I eight you," says another, meaning that he bets that number will not turn up before the "lucky seven." And so it goes.

The city council of New Orleans has just passed a law making the game of craps illegal. It does not matter where it is played, whether in the streets, in the club or at home, craps is specially singled out as the most depraved of gambling games, not to be tolerated anywhere. This game, according to a writer in Harper's, is of New Orleans origin, and more than a hundred years old. Bernard de Marigny, who entertained Louis Philippe when he came to Louisiana, and who stood 70 years ago at the head of the creole colony of the state as its wealthiest and most prominent citizen—he was entitled to call himself marquis in French—was the inventor, or father, of "craps," and brought it in high favor as the fashionable gambling of the day.

When he laid off his plantation, just below the then city of New Orleans—it is now the third district, but was then the Faubourg Marigny—and divided it up into lots, he named one of the principal streets "Craps" and explained that he did so because he had lost the money he received from the lots on that street in this favorite game of his. It remained Craps street until a few years ago, when a protest was raised against such a disreputable name for a quiet and very respectable street, especially given to churches.

"The Crap Street Methodist church" sounded particularly bad. After Bernard Marigny's death craps as a gambling game descended in the social scale, and was finally monopolized mainly by negroes and street gamins. Some five or six years ago, however, some Chicagoans who happened to be on the "levee" in New Orleans, were struck by the game as offering novelties to the jaded taste of dice players, and took it home with them. It crept into favor at once in the west, and "craps" now rages from the Mississippi to the Pacific, and no well regulated gambling house is without a "crap" room. But while it has flourished elsewhere it has been tabooed in its birthplace. And now, not content with the ordinary laws against all gambling games, the council has declared "craps" especially prohibited, and not be played for money, even in one's back bedroom, with the blinds pulled down in front.

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