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Ben Marks and The Dollar Store
Benjamin Marks was born in Little Fort, Illinois (later renamed Waukegan) in 1848. At the age of thirteen he served as a dispatch bearer in the Civil War. During the year 1867, at the age of nineteen, he worked his way westward to Cheyenne, Wyoming, from a home in Council Bluffs, Iowa—dealing three-card monte on a board suspended from his shoulders.
Marks—like Doc Baggs, Canada Bill Jones, Frank Tarbeaux and the others with whom he teamed—called himself a gambler, but was in fact a confidence man. His object was to steer his victim into a trap, lead him to believe he was on the inside of a “sure thing,” and then milk him dry.
But in Cheyenne, during the days of the Hell-on-Wheels horde, he found the competition in the gambling tents too tough. He hit upon an idea that, according to Maurer, was “to revolutionize the grift, an idea which was to become the backbone of all big-time confidence games.”
Ben Marks posted a sign on a Cheyenne building reading, “The Dollar Store.” The store’s window exhibited all sorts of goods, each item worth much more than a dollar. Inside, Marks and his cohorts would wait. Bargain hunters and “something-for-nothing chumps” soon appeared.
Once inside, the sucker’s interest was switched from the dollar bargains to a three-card monte game being dealt on a wooden barrel. Since no customer ever left the monte game with any money in his pocket, none of the merchandise was ever sold.
These monte stores caught on, and were copied all over the country. Steerers and ropers would operate at hotels and the rail and stage terminals to find suckers and bring them along to the bargain store. In an ironic development, one such store in Chicago eventually found itself making more money selling items for a dollar than running scams, and the owner founded a national chain of legitimate department stores.
Scores of monte stores in cities throughout the West, South and Mid-West continued their profitable operations up until the First World War. After the turn of the century, a well-known swindler named Farmer Brown made hundreds of thousands of dollars in Chicago monte-stores, mostly from ranchers and farmers who came into town.
Doc Baggs used the concept of the store to promote the sell of his gold bricks. He and others also used the “mitt” store in which a sucker was engaged in a game of poker and cold-decked. Ben Marks developed the “race” and “fight” stores where they set up rigged foot and horse races or prizefights, and offered the sucker an inside track on a “sure thing.”
Ben Marks had considerable success in his various con games, but was later in life to become an excellent businessman. He was considered a political heavy, a man who could make or break a man politically. He was well-respected as a “gambler and philosopher, and a good judge of men, land and horses.”
Marks, like Tarbeaux said of his gambling cronies, was a “pretty hard baby.” According to W.R. Mynster, Council Bluffs ministers prone to sermons about prostitution, temperance and gambling, would get a kindly visit from Ben who would give them a long talking-to with occasional quotes from the
scripture and one assumes liberal financial contributions. On occasion, he offered more tough stuff.
With “plain or garden reformers,” Marks recommended that the aggrieved go to the office of the reformer “…and be sure you are alone. Then tell him that you are sorry he is acting the way he is, and if he acts different it will be to his advantage—if not it’s apt to cause a lot of trouble. If he gets big and blustery, just get up and go over and shove a gun in his ribs. Then tell him in plainer and more forceful language. Promise to come back if necessary, and if he has been a sinner tell him about it. Be convincing, and prod him a bit with the barrel.”
Ben and Mary had a big three-story log farmhouse in Elks Grove just outside of Council Bluffs straddling the county line. The “Hog Ranch,” as it was called, was not only their home but a well-known and popular casino and brothel—Mary was a successful madam and considerable character in her own right. The law officers of one county would raid the place to find everyone had moved to the other end of the room—across county lines and out of jurisdiction. This house still stands outside of town.
When he died, Marks had extensive properties of farmland in South Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska.
Like Doc Baggs and Frank Tarbeaux, he was one of the rare success stories in the con game business who did not throw everything away through high-living and gambling. Ben Marks and his wife Mary lived near Council Bluffs, Iowa until his death from liver failure in 1918. He was seventy-one years old.
Maurer writes about Ben Marks’ contribution: “Thus, in a very crude form, developed what we know today as the ‘big store’—the swanky gambling club or fake brokerage establishment in which the modern payoff or rag is played.” The movie The Sting was based on this sort of “big store” con. Doc Baggs took the store concept to great heights.
Doc Baggs’ “store” would be an office—elaborate and rich looking. It had the best obtainable in furnishings, with an immense safe that appeared to be built into the wall, its front flush with the far side of the main office. This safe was no less than seven feet square, and as the massive doors were left conveniently open, the viewer could see in its interior depths the shelving, boxes, and pigeonholes usual and customary in all such safes.
But this one was different. It was nothing but a cleverly executed painting. It consisted of a number of thin wooden panels about the size of a cigar-box lid; all joined together by a surface of silk upon which had been painted the safe—including the fancy curlicue lettering, delicate flowers, and elaborate emblems of the period. In the case of a police raid or other emergency, it could readily be ripped off the wall and carried into hiding folded under one arm.
Doc’s heavy oak desk stood right in front of the safe, while in the forepart of the room, where the visitor would enter, were solid oak counters and a railing and gate of similar material. At least, so it looked. All of these could collapse for quick storage or convert into other completely different furnishings. Clerks seated on high stools behind these counters scribbled busily into papier-mâché ledgers. Glass panels in the doors leading out of the room bore such inscriptions as Private, Manager, Attorney and Actuary. These doors were constructed from movable partitions that could quickly disappear into hiding places inside the walls.
When a sucker returned to Doc’s office with the sheriff in tow—perhaps in a matter of twenty minutes of being sheared—he would be confused when he burst through the door to find instead of an office, the plainly furnished interior of a lady’s bedroom. A terrified Chinese servant would valiantly try to explain in his broken English, “Missy not here.” The victim would end up foolishly trying to explain to the lawman—probably on Doc’s payroll—that the brokerage office “must be around here somewhere.”
--Republished from The School for Scoundrels Notes on Three-Card Monte by Whit Haydn
--Most of the biographical info on Ben Marks comes from:
Roenfeld, Ryan: Benjamin and Mary Marks Hog Ranch. State Historical Society of Iowa, Western Historical Trails Center. Unpublished monograph.
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WhitHaydn
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