The candy butcher made money and saved it, and during the war he
settled down in Chicago. Mike was very patriotic. He sent many men
around to the enlistment offices, especially when big bounties were
offered for volunteers. The trouble with the gallant soldiers that
Mike put into the service was that after they got their bounty money
they lost their enthusiasm and faded from view, like an evanescent
mist.
Mike made much money out of his bounty-jumpers, but lost a good deal
of it gambling. At this time he trained with "Tip" Farrell, Charley
Miller, John Sutton and Matt Duffy, who figured more or less in the
police records of that time. Sutton was shot and killed in front of
Pete Page's saloon, on Clark street, in 1864.
Toward the close of the war McDonald and a notorious St. Paul crook
lost $600 in the famous game that Colonel Cameron was running in
Chicago. McDonald found out that the cards were stocked against him,
and it discouraged him with having anything more to do with poker
playing from the front of the table. Colonel Cameron had taught him,
at the expense of $600, that the money in gambling was in running the
game, not playing it. From that day Mike McDonald never gambled. He
straightway opened his own game.
With Dave Oaks he started a game of faro at 89 Dearborn street. It was
a nice, little, modest game, with only those two as the entire crew of
the place. They took turn alternate days as dealer and roper in. The
suckers who played the game used to complain frequently that the firm
of Oaks & McDonald worked sleight-of-hand tricks with the faro deck,
and the unkind police used to raid the game every day.