Following The Pea Through History.pdf

Following the Pea through History by Whit Haydn Charles Dickens wrote of England’s Hampton racetrack as it was in the early 1800’s, and refers in passing to a game of “Thimble-Rig.” He describes “a little knot of bystanders gathered around a pea and thimble table to watch the plucking of some unhappy green horn.” This little scene has been re-enacted countless times both before and since. The game of Thimble-Rig is mentioned as early as 1716 in John Gay’s Trivia, or, Walking the Streets of London, and the swindle certainly goes back much further. In the 1840’s, as the sleight-of-hand technique began to change, the game evolved in the United States into the famous “Three Shell Game.” The Three Shell Game is still seen on street corners around the world. The walnut shells have given way over the years to bottle caps, paper cups, and various other easily disposable items—present day operators don’t like to be caught with incriminating evidence. However, the gist of the game has never really changed—“Follow the little pea, gentlemen, and place your bets…” The actual origins and evolution of this game are probably lost to history, but it is tempting to theorize on the basis of what we do know. We will try to follow the pea through history. Thimble-Rig is almost certainly a bastard child of the ancient magic trick known as the “Cups and Balls,” practiced long ago by the ancient Greeks and Romans, and possibly much earlier in Egypt. In the Deipnosophistæ, Athenæus writes of a cups and balls performer in the aisle of a theater: A certain man stepped into the midst, and placed on a three-legged table three small cups, under which he concealed some little white round pebbles such as are found on the banks of rivers; these he placed one by one under the cups, and then, I don’t know how, made them appear under another cup and finally showed them in his mouth.

The Romans called street magicians acetabularii from the Latin word for cups. In the first century, the philosopher Seneca enjoyed these sleight-of-hand performers and expressed pleasure in the mystery of the tricks, “If I get to know how a trick is done, I lose my interest in it.” It is even said that the emperor Nero wrote a treatise on the performance of the Cups and Balls. From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, itinerant jugglers and gypsies performed the Cups and Balls throughout Europe. This ancient trick has always been— and still is—an important part of the performing magician’s repertoire.

Yet, at some unknown point in history, this innocent entertainment was turned by some long-forgotten rascals into a betting scam or “take-down” game. An example of the Cups and Balls used as a money-making con game is given in Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin’s book, Les Tricheries des Grecs (published in English as Card Sharpers). Robert-Houdin tells of an early nineteenth-century swindler who, in a cheap dining place in the suburbs of Paris, begins a series of magic tricks with soup plates and rolled balls of bread—a version of the Cups and Balls. The “professor” announces that he will make a ball of bread disappear from under the plate without touching the plate, but the spectators notice that he has unknowingly knocked the bread-ball onto the floor in the act of covering it. One of the spectators—a shill—picks up the ball and winks to the others as he slips it into his pocket and whispers to the man next to him, “Bet him that the ball is already gone from under the plate.” The other diners find this chance to take advantage of the magician even more attractive because during dinner he had taken several of them with “various wagers of the equivocal kind” (proposition bets). Eventually, a spectator challenges the magician. He claims that there is no pellet under the plate, and offers to back his opinion with a small bet. The magician acts insulted, and instantly doubles the bet, and then offers to accept any similar wager from anyone in the room. Six or seven people place bets against the magician, secure in the knowledge that they know something the magician doesn’t. Finally the plate is lifted, the bread pellet is shown to be still under it, the magician collects his winnings and leaves, and the shill and the magician later meet to split the take. This is one of the classic stings of Thimble-Rig. The elements of play that make up the plot of Thimble-Rig were probably already present in the Cups and Balls as it was performed in much earlier periods. This seems self-evident for several reasons. In the first place, the nature of the trick itself, especially when it is repeated over and over for the same crowds, lends itself to a sort of guessing game—“Now where’s the ball?” The less skillful and less artistic the performer, the more likely the plot is simplified in this way. The amateur who attempts a “pass” to vanish a coin is often seen to turn this feat of magic into just such a guessing game—“Which hand is it in?” This same sort of artistic debasement could easily change the classic vanishes, appearances and transpositions of the Cups and Balls plot into the “my hands are faster than your eyes” challenge of Thimble-Rig.

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In the second place, every magician knows the type of spectator who interrupts the performance and insists he knows where the ball rests and is willing to bet on it. It would be quite natural for smart performers to see the potential and set a trap for these contentious types, and we can safely assume that the street performances of the Cups and Balls had some element of this from very early on, if not from the beginning. Finally, we know from paintings such as Hieronymous Bosch’s The Conjurer (c. 1500) that the performers of the Middle Ages were probably associated in the public mind with pickpockets, cut-purses and other petty crooks. Certainly, some such “debased” version of the Cups and balls was the direct ancestor of the streamlined, miniaturized version we know today as Thimble-Rig and eventually, the Shell Game. We first hear of thimble-riggers in the early eighteenth century. They used a hard, dried pea, and three thimbles of wood, brass, or tin. These props have the advantage over the traditional Cups and Balls apparatus of being cheaper, more portable, and better suited to circulating around a public house, race track, or marketplace. The sleight-of-hand used in the Cups and Balls trick had to be changed to deal with the smaller peas and thimbles. A pea could be apparently placed under the thimble from the front, while being secretly pinched between the fingers. Alternatively, the thimble can be set down in directly in front of the pea instead of over it, and the pea pinched between the thumb and forefinger. This action created the illusion the thimble had been set down over the pea, due to the small diameter and relative tallness of the thimble. The three thimbles would then be rapidly mixed around the table and the pea held out, until some spectator chose a thimble and made a bet. Once the chosen thimble was shown empty, the operator released the pea behind a different thimble as it was lifted. It appeared that the pea had been hiding under that thimble. When the tall and elegant silver-haired Doctor Bennett raked in a fortune on the Mississippi steamboats in the 1840’s, he had already been making a living with the thimbles for more than forty years. Originally from Shreveport, Louisiana, he was known as the “King of the Thimbles” and the “Napoleon of Thimble-Riggers.” Bennett had a kindly demeanor and snow-white hair. He liked to use balls of paper under his thimbles, and sometimes used a tiny scrap of paper stuck to the inside edge of a thimble to sucker the wealthy planters. When he pulled this thimble backwards, the tiny triangle of paper would peek out from under the front of the thimble for a second, where he apparently couldn’t see it. The suckers would tear their pockets trying to get money out to bet on this thimble, as Bennett’s eyes twinkled above his wire-rimmed spectacles. The ball of paper was resting

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securely under a completely different thimble. “Sometimes I can be very severe, other times not quite so sly…” The European magicians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including such luminaries as Conus and Bosco, used cork balls in the Cups and Balls trick, and some of the sleight-of-hand methods they employed with these cork balls were appropriated by the “sure-thing” hustlers. One such move was to snag the ball from under the cup by gripping it between the nail and the flesh of the little finger. The thimble did not provide enough cover for these sorts of sleights, and at some point in the 1840’s, the trickster brotherhood began substituting the larger diameter walnut shells for thimbles. “Lucky Bill” Thornton was the best known and most successful of these grifters. Operating throughout the Southwest during the 1850’s, he is known to have won as much as $24,000 in a two month period in Sacramento, California. Thornton wore a deerskin covered tray at waist level suspended from a leather strap around his neck. On this he manipulated a little black cork pea and three small brass cups shaped like large walnut shells. He always kept his fingernails long in order to assist in snagging the cork pea. A tall, broad-shouldered, man with curly black hair and large gray eyes, Thornton cut a handsome figure among the Forty-Niners. In addition to his deft hands and theatrical voice, he had supreme self-confidence, an innate knowledge of human nature, and a glib line of gab. Nevertheless, “Lucky Bill” was hanged in June, 1858—for cattle rustling and murder. In the late nineteenth century, the firs rubber peas were used by “Clubfoot Hall,” V. Bullock Taylor, and others. Hall and Taylor were both teachers of the great “Soapy” Smith, who parlayed his little Three Shell Game into an incredible career in which for a time he and his gang ruled the towns of Creede and Denver, Colorado, and later—during the Gold Rush—Skagway, Alaska. He was a friend of the famous and powerful. During his career, he made fortunes with his shells, soap scam, and other cons, which he would promptly lose on the Faro tables. J.J. Johnson, author of an exposé of gambling published in 1927, believed that Soapy was the greatest thimble-rigger of them all: Soapy Smith was without a question the one and only con man who cleaned up with this. He took them as fast as they laid their money on the layout. His boosters dragged the suckers in, and Soapy put the axe to them, where Nellie wore the beads…Soapy Smith was beyond doubt the slipperiest of the slippery with his line of bull con and the simple little walnut shell game.

Soapy’s amazing career ended and his gang of over a hundred trained con men was scattered, when he was shot to death in Skagway on July 8, 1998 in a gunfight with a member of a vigilante group. He was only thirty-eight years old.

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The rubber peas used by Smith and his mentors were carved out of the rubber from printing press rollers. These black-colored peas were natural rubber, and compressible. They had the huge advantage over cork that they could crawl in and out of the shells almost on their own. In fact, these peas could only with great difficulty be made to travel under the shell. A very light touch was required, since any pressure would cause the pea to pop out from under the shell. In the 1930’s sponge rubber peas came into much use, both on the streets and in magician’s exhibition routines. In the early 1970’s, Karl Norman of Buffalo, New York introduced peas made of sponge rubber covered with a coating of green latex. In the late eighties, “blown” latex peas appeared. These were hollow inside and were first created by London dentist Lionel Russell. Both of these types of latex peas have been utilized by the magic fraternity, and were a big improvement in that they combined the compressibility of sponge rubber with the solid look and color of a real “pea.” The disadvantages are that latex deteriorates and loses its grip fairly quickly, and that a magician’s close-up mat is required for these peas to work properly. We have talked to many shell game operators that work the game for money. Few of them use sponge and none the latex covered sponge peas common in magic performances. These operators most often work with peas molded from art gum erasers, or carved from even stiffer pencil erasers as these work on more surfaces than sponge and do not “give out” during a routine as eventually do the latex covered peas. The first injection-molded “hard” rubber peas that we have seen were produced by Vernet Magic of La Plata, Argentina. These are excellent peas, and were a great improvement over hand-carved rubber peas. Unfortunately, these peas were very dark and did not show up well on some backgrounds. They also had a pronounced ridge around the circumference—a result of the molding process. It has taken a great deal of experimentation and effort to come up with what we at The School for Scoundrels call the Perfect Pea. These peas will work on any surface— including glass and marble. They do not lose their grip over time or with use. They are washable and durable. They can be stored easily for long periods of time without deteriorating. These peas are not as compressible as the latex and sponge peas, but with properly shaped shells, like our Golden Shells, Silver Shells and Street Shells, they can be stolen invisibly and soundlessly from the shell even on a glass surface. When used with a soft close-up mat, the Perfect Pea will work with any shells. Since both latex and

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sponge peas require a mat for proper use, we believe that the compromise of compressibility for versatility and dependability is a good bargain. Unlike hand-carved or latex-covered peas, these peas are uniform in size and shape, making them much easier to switch in and out. This roundness and uniformity also offers many new possibilities for obtaining peas from droppers—as in our new The Sharper a “Sharpie” pen that will indetectably deliver up to five peas one at a time into the hand. We also believe that magic and gambling demonstrations will be enhanced by the excellent look and feel of these peas. Although what has been traditionally called a pea in the shell game has seldom looked like a genuine pea—especially in color—in the imagination of the average spectator, the game is played with three shells and a “pea.” The Perfect Pea looks exactly like a real green pea, and so it satisfies this false, but persistent preconceived notion of the spectator. Further, the pea looks and feels as if it is a solid object that could not easily be removed from a shell without being visible to the observant spectator. More importantly, the color is bright and shows up well from a distance and against many different colors of backgrounds. We provide matching “straight” peas which can be left on the table for spectators to examine. These will not come out from under the shell. We also provide “magnetic” Perfect Peas which can be used with a hidden magnet as hold outs, or with our magnetic Golden Shells and Street Shells. We hope that you enjoy working with these peas and with the incredible Golden Shells and Street Shells.

(This document was written to accompany the original release of our Golden Shells and Perfect Pea in 1998. The history of the Cups and Balls trick and the historical quotes at the beginning of this paper are taken from the research of Henry Ridgely Evans and John Mulholland published in Tom Osborne’s book, Cups and Balls Magic, 1937. Publisher, Mitchell Kanter.)

© 1998 School for Scoundrels/Tricks of the Trade, Inc.

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