The Sheep Rancher Who Broke the Bank
A mysterious visitor from the Yakima sheep country creates a stir in a Seattle faro parlor, outplaying the professionals and baffling the house.
Seattle Telegraph: Like the little brokers watch the movements of Plunger Partridge on the Chicago exchange, so have the small fry that frequent the local faro banks watched the play of a young man who has within the past two weeks handled something like $7,000 over the green cloth in Beede’s faro bank in the Butler block. The faro plunger looks somewhat like a granger, but as one of the 'case keepers' remarked yesterday, 'there are no flies on him.' He is a man of medium height, dresses in a semi-rustic style and the most conspicuous feature in his appearance is a pair of brown, bushy eyebrows. It was about two weeks ago that he drifted into town from his ranch down in the Yakima section. He answers to the name of Anderson, and when he was introduced into Beede’s bank, the dealer smiled a cheerful welcome. Mr. Anderson purchased a 'stack of reds' and played them like a prince. In a short time, the visitor cashed in $1,500 worth of chips. This sort of thing was kept up for a day or two and the gambling band became alarmed. Yesterday he was some ahead, and the gamblers were happy. One of them said: 'We’ll get him yet, and he'll go back to his sheep ranch broke. See?'
“The faro plunger looks somewhat like a granger, but as one of the 'case keepers' remarked yesterday, 'there are no flies on him.'”
This vignette of the 'plunger from the sticks' highlights the porous nature of 19th-century boom towns, where ranch wealth and urban vice often collided. It serves as a reminder of the culture of high-stakes gambling that occupied central downtown spaces before prohibition.
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