Third Thursday Lecture

Not long after the first commercial steamboat found its way from Pittsburgh to New Orleans in 1812, the popularity of steamboat travel up and down the Mississippi soon became an easy and affordable means of travel. Merchants and businessmen traveling from city to city became an easy mark for professional gamblers. In this presentation, author and historian Derby Gisclair will trace gambling in the city and its move from the clandestine casinos hidden in every corner of the city to the hundreds of steamboats where there was greater anonymity and less legal enforcement in a floating world of fortune and fraud. Many of the vignettes are drawn from his book “New Orleans Steamboat Stories.”

A lifelong resident of New Orleans, S. Derby Gisclair is a member of the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) and its 19th Century, Minor Leagues, Deadball Era, Oral History, and Pictorial History Committees. He heads the Schott-Pelican Chapter of SABR in Louisiana and is on the Nominating and Selection Committees for the Greater New Orleans Professional Baseball Hall of Fame. He is the author of several books including: Baseball in New Orleans, Baseball at Tulane University; and Early Baseball in New Orleans – A History of 19th Century Play, and The Dixie Series.