America’s First Gambling Boat Operated in Whiting-Robertsdale Waters

John Hmurovic
November 2021

Whiting just isn’t what it used to be. Crime is worse. Thugs from Chicago come across the state line and cause problems. Young people are out of control. Morals are going to hell. The year all of this was said was 1905. The complaints filled the local newspapers. To make matters worse, a gambling boat was operating illegally off the Whiting shoreline and using the city as an escape route from the police.

The gambling boat was the City of Traverse. Almost every day that it operated, 200 to 800 men placed bets on horse races. For almost three years the boat operators played a cat and mouse game with Chicago police, who were determined to shut down the illegal operation. The boat was clearly visible from the Whiting-Robertsdale shore, but most local residents had bigger problems to worry about.

“Society is Shocked,” read a February 1905 headline in the Lake County News. A young lady, the paper said, “has been seen recently at disreputable dances and has acquired a taste for drink.” When her father found out, he got violently angry. His wife tried to intercede, but he would have none of that. He beat his wife, and then the wife attempted suicide. The newspaper blamed it all on the daughter. She destroyed a happy family. The paper warned that more Whiting families would soon be ripped apart. “This ‘style’ is becoming a pronounced one among some of the young girls who frequent dance halls and wine rooms,” the paper said. It laid blame on the “foreign district” of Whiting, where many of the city’s Slovak and Polish immigrants lived and where the dance halls and drinking establishments were located.

Crime was up, and Mayor William Warwick was under pressure by local church groups to do something. The newspaper demanded change. “It is hoped that a crusade against this thing will be instituted.” The mayor put the blame on Chicago gamblers coming to Whiting’s saloons and causing problems. There were fifty saloons in Whiting in 1905. Most operated day and night. Mayor Warwick shut them down for two days at the end of 1905. It was the first time in the city’s 25-year history that saloons were closed.

Respectable Whiting residents were appalled by news reports about Chicago’s gamblers. Many saw gambling at the root of all evil. In Chicago, reformers screamed for the city leaders to shut down the gambling. The leaders responded by clamping down on poolrooms, as they were called. In the slang of 1905, poolrooms were not places where people played billiards. They were places where people pooled their money to make bets on just about anything.

Poolrooms were often in the rear of cigar stores, barber shops, and sometimes in vacant buildings, hidden away from the police. Yet, police raids on poolrooms were common in the first decade of 20th century Chicago. One poolroom on Clark Street was raided three times in one day, and it was not uncommon for some to be raided twice a day for several days in a row. What is not certain, however, is why they were raided. Some said Chicago politicians were responding to the wishes of the reformers, the “good government” people of that era. Others said it was because Chicago politicians wanted to please the bookmakers, the men who ran the gambling operations. Competition was fierce among Chicago bookmakers. What better way to put a rival out of business than to snitch on him to the police, and to offer the cops a little something extra to encourage a raid on their rival’s establishments.

Every time the police raided and made arrests, it cost the bookmakers a fair amount of money. They lost business, and they had to pay legal fees. It cut into profits. That’s why bookmakers, Bud White, Harry Perry, and Charles “Social” Smith decided to set up a gambling operation on a ship that would sail on Lake Michigan, out of reach from the Chicago police.

The City of Traverse was built in 1871. In its first decades, it transported people and freight across Lake Michigan. The ship had an oak hull, and some described it as elegant. Betting on horse races was the most popular form of gambling in early 20th century Chicago. Thanks to the telegraph, it was easy to get race results from across the country. But in 1905, telegraph signals were mostly sent over wires. Sending signals wirelessly to a boat was a technology in its infancy.

The American de Forest Wireless Telegraph Company was more than willing to take on this challenge for the bookmakers. In less than a decade, American de Forest Wireless would be known as one of the most corrupt businesses in America, engaging in stock fraud and other deceptions. But that was a few years off from 1905. In 1905, it gladly took the bookmakers’ money to run a questionable gambling operation.

Transmitting from the Railway Exchange Building on Michigan Avenue, the de Forest Wireless signal was able to reach a boat forty miles out on Lake Michigan. Meanwhile, the White-Perry-Smith syndicate outfitted the City of Traverse for a life as a gambling boat. All was ready for the launch on June 29, 1905.

“The people of Chicago at least have been provided with a practical opportunity to throw their money into the lake,” the Chicago Tribune wrote on opening day. The City of Traverse left its dock at 12:40 P.M. A band played ragtime music on deck as 200 gamblers waited for the betting to begin. They had to wait until the boat passed out of Illinois waters and into Indiana waters. By doing so, they were outside the jurisdiction of Chicago. The city police, theoretically, couldn’t touch them.

When they reached that point, Bud White climbed on top of a chair on ship’s deck. “Gentlemen,” he said in his loudest voice, “we are now outside the jurisdiction of Illinois. Start doing business.” The men cheered, and a board was brought out which showed the latest odds for a horse race that was soon to start in Buffalo. The odds were updated as soon as they were received from the wireless telegraph. Everything worked perfectly as the ship moved gently along the Whiting-Robertsdale coast.

This was not the first time that Chicago bookmakers fled to Indiana to conduct business and evade Chicago’s police. In the 1890s, they built a horse racing track just inches from the Indiana-Illinois state line in the Roby section of Hammond. It was located just south of Indianapolis Boulevard in an area that is now occupied by the eastbound entrance to the Indiana Toll Road and by a set of powerlines on the east side of State Line Road. In 1901, the bookmakers also opened the Long Beach Turf Exchange. It was built adjacent to the railroad tracks east of Whiting near Buffington Harbor. It looked like a fort with its 12-foot-high walls. It was protected by a pack of ferocious dogs that patrolled an area between the outer stockade and an inner fence. The only way to get to the Long Beach Turf Exchange was by special trains run from Chicago by the Lake Shore Railroad, which stopped right at the gates of the gambling hall.

In 1905, Indiana had one of the most socially conservative governors in its history. J. Frank Hanly was a national leader in the fight to make liquor sales illegal. As governor, he pushed through laws to fight gambling and public corruption. In 1916, he ran for President of the United States as the candidate of the Prohibition Party. But he was also a strong believer in local control of local matters. He said he hated that Indiana was being used by Chicago bookmakers, but it wasn’t the state’s job to do anything about it. It was up to local authorities. Given Lake County’s long tradition of corruption among its public officeholders, it’s reasonable to suspect that county officials looked the other way while claiming they were powerless to fight the bookmakers. But the cities along the shore, Hammond, Whiting, and East Chicago, (Gary wasn’t established until 1906), also lacked the ability to raid a boat operating in their waters. Besides, it was seen as Chicago’s problem, and Whiting and the others were already dealing with what many saw as a serious crime problem and a decline in moral standards.

The Chicago police were clueless about how to stop the City of Traverse, and for much of the remainder of 1905 and into 1906, the biggest problems the bookmakers faced were the occasional breakdowns of their wireless service. Those problems, though, gave someone an idea.

 On August 8, 1906, a tugboat named the Andy, followed the City of Traverse from the moment it left its dock. The men on board the Traverse saw it and wondered why it was following them. When the larger ship crossed the state line, the Andy pulled up alongside it. On board the Andy was a foghorn. The men on the Andy sounded the foghorn, making sure it was on maximum volume.

Wireless technology was in its infancy, and someone apparently believed that a loud noise might interfere with the signal the City of Traverse was receiving from shore. Without a signal the bookmakers onboard could not receive the race results, and without those results they were out of business.

It didn’t work. The wireless signal was unchanged. The gambling continued. The passengers on board were annoyed by the noise of the foghorn, but some came on deck and laughed at the men onboard the Andy for their failed attempt. Being on the receiving end of laughter was the least of the problem the crew of the Andy faced. The foghorn was clearly heard in Whiting and everywhere along the shore and on the water. Those who heard it, thought it was a disaster signal. “Sailboats, launches, motorboats, and an armada of small craft rushed to the rescue,” the Chicago Tribune reported, while people lined the shore fearing a disaster. News bulletins went out, saying the “City of Traverse was burning.” A life-saving crew set out from Jackson Park, and another one from South Chicago rowed five miles at top speed to help. None of them were happy when they discovered that it was basically a false alarm.

The police said they were not responsible for the Andy incident. The White-Perry-Smith syndicate suspected it was one of their bookmaking rivals. But throughout 1906, just as in 1905, the police tried every scheme they could come up with to shut down the gambling boat. The bookmakers rolled with the punches. The police raided the telegraph office and smashed the equipment, so the gamblers made moves to set up back-up sites in Michigan City and another at Commercial Avenue and 92nd Street in South Chicago. The police used laws on liquor sales to take the bookmakers to court, arrested some of the boat’s employees, tried to stop the railroads from running special trains for the gamblers, and had a grand jury indict the boat’s owner and operators. The constant harassment of the ship drove up the legal costs for the bookmakers, but they emerged from every court case with a victory.

In 1907, Chicago police adopted a new tactic. They went undercover, boarded the ship, and gathered evidence. Then, when the ship arrived at its dock in Chicago, other policemen were on shore to arrest the gamblers. If you can’t beat the bookmakers, the logic went, arrest their customers. But the cat and mouse game continued. The bookmakers hired a fleet of tugboats to carry the gamblers to shore, but instead of landing in Chicago, they took the gamblers to piers in Whiting and Indiana Harbor. From there, the gamblers caught a train back to Chicago.

The next move in this chess game was made by the police. They knew the tugs would land in Indiana and that they were powerless to make arrests outside their jurisdiction. But their plan was to board the tugs, follow the gamblers, and arrest them as soon as they stepped across the state line. That was the plan on June 6, 1907, setting up what may be the most bizarre scene ever to take place on Whiting’s beach.

Everyone knew what the police were up to. They even announced their plan in the newspapers that morning. “When they realize that a trip on the City of Traverse will inevitably be followed by arrest and a night in the police station,” said Chicago Police Chief George Shippy, “I think they will abandon this form of recreation. I will put that boat out of commission.”  

That day, only 175 gamblers were brave enough to board the City of Traverse and risk arrest. Bookmaker Bud White spoke to them as a tugboat waited to take them to shore. He thanked them for coming despite the threats of the police, and said he’d pay the legal costs if they got arrested. He also said the tugboat would land in Indiana and he would pick up the cost of the ten-cent fare to ride the train into Chicago. Gamblers, police officers, and reporters then crowded onto a tug which set out for Whiting.   

The tug stopped alongside a Standard Oil pipeline, where the passengers got off. It was only wide enough for the men to go single file. Once they reached land, some gamblers dashed off at full speed for the train station that was located near the Front Street entrance to Whiting Park. Chicago police officers followed in pursuit, unable to make an arrest in Indiana. But as soon as the train crossed into Chicago, two of the gamblers were arrested.

If gamblers have any talent, it’s understanding the odds. Most of them knew that their odds of escaping arrest were much better if they stayed off the train. Many took off on foot across the Whiting beachfront, and then across the Robertsdale beach. On this mid-summer early-evening, beachgoers witnessed gamblers huffing and puffing, hearts racing, legs aching, as they raced in the sand toward the state line, chased by plain clothed policemen.

Some of the gamblers had a better plan to escape the police. They ducked into Whiting, tried to hide by blending in with the crowd, and then caught a trolley back to Chicago. One jumped on a slow-moving freight train that was going through town. Some who continued to be chased by the Chicago police, stopped at the state line and simply waited for the police to give up on them. A few completely fooled the police and helped their fellow gamblers by racing to the state line, stopping there, and once there were no more gamblers from Chicago coming their way, turned around and walked safely to their Indiana homes in Whiting, Hammond, and East Chicago.

The Chicago police only arrested six gamblers that day. It was a victory for the bookmakers. Their next plan was to hire more tugboats and return their gambling patrons to multiple spots along the Indiana shore. Illinois officials again asked Indiana Governor Hanly to help. Still a believer in local control, he contacted Lake County Sheriff Fred Carter, asking him to take action. Carter showed little enthusiasm for the job. He told the governor that he would be happy to wade out into Lake Michigan as long as the state supplied him with rubber boots. Obviously, the Lake County sheriff wasn’t going to help, so Hanly began to consider taking action on his own, and said he might call out the Indiana Naval Guard. But then something happened within the bookmaking community in Chicago.

The White-Perry-Smith syndicate changed their course. Maybe they saw changes in the city that made it possible for them to earn a profit on dry land again. Or, maybe the police decision to go after the boat’s patrons was having an impact. “What profiteth it a man,” the Lake County Times wrote, “if he earn six dollars aboard the City of Traverse and pay out three times that sum when the boat docks and the police gather him in?”

Whatever the reason, less than two weeks after the low-speed chase on the beaches of Whiting-Robertsdale, the City of Traverse stopped sailing. A month later, it returned to a peaceful life, carrying passengers across the lake and transporting peaches and apples from Michigan to Chicago. But it had earned a place in history: It was the first boat in the United States devoted entirely to gambling. Gambling remained illegal in Indiana until 1991, when the state lottery was established. Then in June 1996, the Empress Casino boat was launched from the Robertsdale lakefront in Hammond, with legalized gambling on board.