FARO BANK

ca. 1865

X1925.03.01

In writing about faro in 1894, John N. Maskelyne-an English magician who was ardently opposed to all serious forms of fraud-stated: "There is no game in which money is lost and won more readily. Above all, there is no game in which the opportunities of cheating are more numerous or more varied." In spite of, or maybe because of, this fact, faro was the most popular gambling game in the West during the nineteenth century. Its play required a faro board, an abacus-like device known as a "casekeep," and a fifty-two-card deck. Although gambling was always opposed by many Montanans on moral grounds, it was not made illegal until passage of the state's 1917 gambling laws. By 1920-when this faro board was seized in a raid on a Miles City saloon-the sale of alcohol had joined gambling as a strictly forbidden vice.