Part 39

There is no telling how much money these individuals took away from the unsuspecting public, but it is estimated at over $1,000,000. Of this, 20 per cent went to the police, 40 per cent to the roper, and 40 per cent to the firm. The latter furnished straw bail, witnesses and juries, and other protection, and the confidence gangs reported to it and received orders. In 1875 "White Pine" Martin shot and killed "Sir James" Gannon in front of "The Store" while quarreling over the division of the proceeds of some job.

THRONE IN "THE STORE."

The firm of McDonald, Lawrence and Martin had opened up the resort known as "The Store" on Clark street, on the northwest corner of Monroe street, where the Hamilton Club stands today. The first floor was operated as a saloon, and the floors above as gambling rooms. After public sentiment became aroused over the bunko business of the firm, Lawrence and Martin drew out, leaving McDonald to run "The Store" alone.

"The Store" was the most famous place in Chicago in those days. It was not only the rendezvous of all the sporting men, politicians and denizens of the underworld in Chicago, but it was virtually the city hall, for from his little office in "The Store" McDonald managed the affairs of the city.

Every form of gambling known flourished on that wonderful second floor. The most expert manipulators of cards that ever dealt a second or shifted a cold deck sat behind the tables. They were Clif Doherty, Frank Gallon, Billy Tyler, Charles Winship and George Noyse.

High-ball poker, in which the roller holds the high ball in his fist and rolls it to the cappers continuously, and faro, with fifty-three cards in the deck, so that the odd could be dealt, were said to have always prevailed in "The Store."

"There never was an honest card dealt in the place," is the epitaph one old-time gambler has written on its dead proprietor.

Big as the place was, it was always crowded. McDonald is said to have coined a very common phrase when, on one occasion, one of his dealers protested against putting in more tables and increasing the size of the gambling rooms.

"I tell you, Mike," he said, "we won't have enough players to fill up all the games."

"Ah, don't worry," McDonald is said to have replied, "there's a sucker born every minute."

In politics McDonald's first great triumph was when he elected Colvin mayor on the democratic ticket. Then he put the elder Harrison in the mayoralty chair, and after that he had plain sailing. His control lasted during the entire Harrison administration of eight years. In all that time there was no bigger man in Chicago than Mike McDonald.

The only time he met with a serious set-back was in 1882, when he tried to elect William J. McGarigle, then chief of police, sheriff of Cook county.

THE BIG COURTHOUSE "JOB."

Another disappointment of McDonald's political career was when he got a bill past the county commissioners and city aldermen authorizing Harry Holland to paint the outside of the City Hall and County Building with a mixture which was guaranteed to prevent the stone from decaying.

Holland applied his marvelous preparation, but when the time came to pay the bill a newspaper man, John J. Lane, who died only the other day in St. Louis, had dug up evidence tending to show that Holland's preparation was nothing but water and chalk, and not quite so efficacious in preventing the decay of stone as prune juice or ice cream would have been, but much cheaper. The county has never yet paid the $80,000 that Holland wanted for the job on the county building.

After the close of the Harrison administration a new day began in Chicago. The independent voter broke the power of party bosses. Mike McDonald's rule was broken. He could no longer do what he pleased with city administrations and be unofficial chief of police.

He bowed pleasantly to the inevitable, and stepped down and out. He was wise in that he saw the handwriting on the wall, and gracefully submitted instead of "kicking against the pricks" and wasting his time and his money, as did other gamblers and sports, who were finally crushed out simply because they could not recognize that new conditions and new men had come.

McDonald quit every sphere of his old life and went into business.

It was he who, with William Fitzgerald, built the first elevated road in town, the Lake street "L." Then, in 1891, he thought he would like to be an editor. He bought control of the Globe, a daily morning paper, and ran it for over two years. It was not a financial success, and finally McDonald gave it up. "I guess I was never cut out for a literary man," was his laughing remark. "There are other things I know more about."

DOMESTIC LIFE ROUGH.

A great deal has been said about McDonald's domestic unhappiness, but it was not until his body had been buried that the truth was known.

His first wife was Mary Noonan, whom he married in the days when "The Store" was the sporting and political Mecca of Chicago.

It was a great scandal in the community later when she suddenly disappeared, and it was reported that she had run away with "Billy" Arlington, a minstrel man. It was the greater shock because her devotion and loyalty to McDonald had been the talk of the town.

One time she had stood, with a pistol, in her husband's gambling house, and defied the police when they raided the place under instruction of some blundering chief of police, who did not realize that he was toying with the lightning when he laid violent hands on anything that belonged to McDonald. Mary McDonald had held her ground at the door in "The Store," and declared she would shoot the first policeman that attempted to enter. She was as good as her word, and one of the officers was carried to a hospital with a bullet through his arm. Mrs. McDonald, through her husband's pull, was never prosecuted.

McDonald went to San Francisco and brought his wife back and installed her in the house he had built at Ashland avenue and Harrison street, considered in those days a veritable palace. McDonald gave it out to the world that he had built the mansion for his wife, and his taking her back after she was reputed to have run away with another man was accepted as a wonderful instance of his great-heartedness and magnanimity.

SAM BARCLAY TELLS "HOW MIKE MCDONALD'S COIN WON DORA AWAY."

"Sam" Barclay (Harry is supposed to have been his baptismal name) was one of the great ball players of the long ago, and the shadows of the drama that wrecked his life are, therefore, interwoven with the world of sport, and even with the career of Charles Comiskey, "the master of the White Sox."

Barclay, a trim and graceful fellow, came into prominence twenty years ago and played with Pittsburg and St. Louis. At St. Louis he was under the command of Comiskey, who therefore knew him well, and was always interested in his doings.

On two or three occasions quarrels over the contracts of Sam Barclay nearly wrecked organized base ball. He was a wonderful second baseman, and one of the fastest and most scientific players of the day.

In 1889 Barclay's knee went back on him, and, while he regained full use of the leg, he was never fast enough to play his former game. He also began to take on flesh, and was glad to retire from the diamond.

OPENS SALOON IN CHICAGO.

Coming to Chicago, Barclay opened a saloon on West Madison street. Back in 1894, West Madison, from Halsted to Elizabeth, was the real red-light district, full of saloons and concert halls. Barclay's place was the headquarters of revelry, but Sam himself kept a good name for personal honesty and unbounded generosity to his friends.

When the red-lights went out on Madison street, Sam leased a saloon at 15 North Clark, where for some time he held the same kind of sway he had maintained west of the river. This place was ultimately lost, and he went over in Garfield park district, without much success.

"Sam" Barclay, former husband of Mrs. "Mike" McDonald II, 451 West Lake street, freely discussed his life with Mrs. McDonald.

It was an interesting story, in which he told of Mrs. McDonald's attempt to commit suicide once in Kansas City, of brawls in his saloon, the "Half Moon," and of how "Mike" McDonald, assisted by "Bunk" Allen, lured his wife away from him. Here is what he said:

"They have printed stories that are not true about this case. Mrs. McDonald's mother was a Mrs. Feldman, who at one time lived at 619 Harrison street. At the time I knew her Mrs. Feldman had been divorced from her husband and he was living in the Ghetto.

LIKELY LAD OF 200 POUNDS.

"It was in '89 that I met Dora. I was in the Kansas City ball team, and was a likely lad. I weighed 200 pounds, trained down, and it was a good man who was able to floor me.

"Dora came to visit her brother-in-law in Kansas City. He is Dick Vaughn, and a very good 'pal' of mine. I met her there at his house.

"We took a liking to each other, so I used to have her in the best seat every day at the games when we played on home grounds.

"And she never was slow, I tell you, of giving me credit when I made a double play or lined out a hot one.

NOTHING LIKE REAL LOVE.

"Well, the season came to a close. I liked the kid, but I didn't feel nothing like real love for her. I was going to leave Kansas City, and nothing was said about taking her with me. I noticed that big tears came in her eyes when I told her, but she didn't say much. That night they sent for me. They told me that Dora was dying.

"I got to Vaughn's house and found her unconscious. She had taken laudanum, the doctor said. She was in a stupor. The first chance I got, I asked her what was the matter, and she said to me, as the tears rolled down her cheeks:

"'I don't want to be left alone.'

"That, you know, touched me. We got married. I've got the license right here. It was all doped up by a fellow in the Washingtonian Home, who thought he owed a lot to me. He certainly did some fine pen and ink decorating with birds, and shadings and such things.

"So, after I quit the national game, I went into the saloon business at 292 West Madison street, first, and then started the 'Half Moon.'

"I'll tell you the truth about how Dora met Mike McDonald. She went to McVicker's theater one day with Harry Summers, who is now treasurer of the Illinois theater.

"Dora was with Mrs. Elliott. She used to be a model in Ryan's store, at Madison and Peoria streets. Summers introduced Dora to Mike McDonald, and that's the way they started.

DAY OF HARRISON FUNERAL.

"Well I remember the time--it was on the day that Carter Harrison's funeral went past the house, at 319 Washington boulevard, where we were living at that time.

"'I met an old gentleman today who has lots of money,' Dora said to me, as we looked out of the window.

"'It's funny how a man gets up in the world and then loses it all when he's laid away in the narrow box,' I said, keeping my eyes on the hearse.

"I was thinking, then, but not about what my wife said. Afterward the words came to me, but I didn't realize the meaning of her expression or what it had in store for me then.

DEEP GAME WELL PLAYED.

"A few years passed. They went quick, then. Money made the time fly, and Dora certainly was a spender. Then one night they pulled off the game that was to separate us and give Mike McDonald a young wife.

"I was boozy with wine. Bill Hoffman and 'Bunk' Allen were masters of the ceremonies. They bundled me in a cab and drove me to a place on Wood street. Detectives came in, and my wife, too, and they there and then laid the basis of the divorce suit which ended the game between Dora and I."

Barclay then told of a fight in his saloon, in which one man was almost killed and another badly wounded. Then he said:

"That's how they wound up the 'Half Moon.' Jimmy Quinn said he was my friend, but he stabbed me in the back. I was getting too strong in politics, so he got me and I was put down and out."

Barclay had seemed perfectly happy with her, but one night when he was living in rooms over his saloon at 15 North Clark street he learned that Mike McDonald had come into her life, and it was not long before the ball player's romance was ended.

WIFE GETS DIVORCE.

Mrs. Barclay obtained a divorce--with McDonald's money, so Barclay always said--and the ball player was left alone. The blow proved his utter undoing. Barclay lost ambition and energy. He spent hours in his rooms, gazing mutely at a huge crayon portrait of his wife, taken a year before she left him, and he seemed to have no desire or ability left for business.

SECOND WEDDING IN MILWAUKEE.

Mrs. Barclay was married to McDonald in Milwaukee. At the time she was in the chorus of the Chicago Opera House. Her mother is Mrs. Fanny Feldman, 338 South Marshfield avenue. She has two brothers, Harry and Emil Feldman, both known in West Side political circles. Harry Feldman was employed in the city clerk's office during William Loeffler's term.

When McDonald took his new wife to his house on Ashland boulevard there was a red-hot family row. Guy, the elder of the two sons of McDonald, had a pitched battle with her, and the fight was carried into the street. The boy was victorious at first, but his father sided with the stepmother, and eventually the boy left home.

Harold Barclay, 10 years old, Mrs. McDonald's son by her first marriage, was adopted by McDonald, and with his two sons, Cassius and Guy McDonald, has an equal share in the estate.

INDUCES HUSBAND TO DISINHERIT SON.

Shortly after her marriage to McDonald, Dora became angry at her husband's son, Harley. The latter objected to his father contracting further matrimonial alliances, and did not hesitate to say so. Mrs. McDonald prevailed upon her husband to disinherit the son, and later, of her own initiative, caused the arrest of the young man.

The charge was threats against her life. The case came up at the old Armory police court, and the young man was placed under bonds to keep the peace.

The breach between father and son is said never to have healed. Young McDonald went into the sign painting business soon after the episode.

Guy married Miss Pearl Flower, and lives in Chicago. Mrs. McDonald once had Guy McDonald arrested on the charge of writing threatening and obscene letters.

The case was hotly fought in the United States court. A juryman, and warm personal friend of Mike McDonald, saved him from conviction, which would have carried with it a penitentiary sentence.

THE STING AND CURSE OF ILL-GOTTEN MONEY.

"Mike" McDonald, the king of gamblers, was buried like a king of men. There were flowers, tears, friends, orations and processions. But as clothes are not, neither is a funeral, an index to character--nor even is the obituary column.

Strangers, reading the story of the last day above the sod of McDonald's body, might has thought that Chicago had lost a leading good citizen. They were told that McDonald had amassed wealth, but they were not told how he got it. They read of the great men whom he had befriended, but they were not told of the men whom he had ruined. They were not told that Mike McDonald living, had violated the laws of the land, of society and of the home.

"Mike" McDonald died worth a million dollars. A young man beginning life, familiar only with the post-mortem, story of McDonald, and seeing no condemnation of his method of getting rich, might feel encouraged to hold to the idea that the accumulation of money bars all criticism for the way it is acquired.

Though the publicity of cold type has put no brand on the dead McDonald, the story of "Mike" McDonald's life and fortune is not yet finished.

Suppose he did die worth a million dollars, whom will it benefit? What good will it do?

There will be a fight in every dollar, a quarrel in every penny.

There will be a strife among men and women over this fortune.

Much of it will go to lawyers to defend a woman charged with murder. Much more of it will go to other lawyers who will try to break his will. As McDonald's money was ill-gotten, so will it be spent to no good purpose.

In a few years McDonald will be forgotten except by those whom in life he ruined. His fortune will be gone. No one will remember him for the good he did, if he did any good.

Let not "Mike" McDonald's success in securing money encourage you to follow his method.

If you, young man, had an opportunity of entering a gambling venture, with a certainty of securing for yourself a fortune of a million dollars, you would be a fool to take advantage of that opportunity.

There is nothing in the life of even a successful gambler worth imitating and nothing that he does worth admiring.

"Mike" McDonald may have been better than the ordinary class of gamblers, but the occasional good deeds that men of his character do are always exaggerated.

Ninety-nine gamblers out of a hundred that amass fortunes die paupers. The money that a few accumulate, even as McDonald did, is, as a rule, a curse to those that inherit it.

But if McDonald had sense--and we believe he did have sense--in the closing years of his life he cursed the day when he started on a career that wrecked him, socially and morally, and left him in his dying hour a bankrupt in everything but the possession of a few hundred thousand dollars, which he could not take beyond the grave.

And what has happened after McDonald's death, and what will happen in the courts of law, will prove to men that ill-gotten money carries a sting to its possessor and a curse to those who inherit it.

WIFE NO. 1, WIDOW; NO. 2, REPUDIATED.

BURIAL OF "MIKE" MCDONALD SERVES TO OPEN NEW CHAPTER IN HIS TROUBLES--OLD SCANDALS DENIED.

MARY NOONAN NOW CLAIMS INNOCENCE AND FIGHTS TO PROVE DIVORCE ILLEGAL.

The grave out at Mount Olivet that closed over the body of "Mike" McDonald refused a final sanctuary to the life-tragedy of the political boss and millionaire gambling king.

The same hand of death that closed his eyes on his triumphs and afflictions raised the curtain on an unforseen last act in this drama of Chicago life.

In this new part of the plot Mrs. Dora Feldman McDonald, who turned the old gambler's head and broke his heart through the shooting of Webster Guerin, appears as a wife solemnly repudiated in death-bed rites. At the same time Mrs. Mary Noonan McDonald, the divorced and exiled first wife, steps upon the scene to cleanse her name of the scandals to which it has been linked for twenty years.

While the two wives and the relatives stood before the coffin it came out that McDonald, shortly before his death at St. Anthony de Padua hospital, had uttered a formal repudiation of his second marriage, in the presence of the Rev. Maurice J. Dorney, pastor of St. Gabriel's Catholic Church, and several witnesses, in the persons of hospital attendants. This having been done, McDonald was permitted the last sacraments of the church and burial under the Roman ritual.

FIRST WIFE DENIES CHARGES.

As the second wife passed under the ban, the first one came forward to claim that of which she had been dispossessed by human passion. Sitting in her apartment last night at the Vincennes hotel, Vincennes avenue and Thirty-sixth street. Mary Noonan McDonald gave her version of the romance and tragedy that have measured forty years of her life.

"For the sake of my two boys, it is now my duty to tell the world the truth about the slanders with which my name has been blackened," she said. "I am not perfect, and I have done things for which I am sorry, but I am guiltless of the charges with which I have been hounded about the world for twenty years. This I can prove, and to do so I shall remain in Chicago as long as necessary."

REPUDIATION OF SECOND WIFE.

It was after the solemn requiem mass over McDonald's body in the Church of the Presentation that the Rev. Father Dorney consented to tell the story of the gambler's dying repudiation of his second wife.

"I told 'Mike' McDonald before his death," said Father Dorney, "that in the eyes of the Roman Catholic church there was no such thing as divorce; that he had but one wife, the mother of his children--Mary Noonan. I told him he must publicly repudiate this other woman, and only when he said he did so could he receive the last sacraments, penance, holy eucharist, and extreme unction.

"Although he was critically ill, he said, firmly, that he would do as the church wished: that he was sorry for his sins, and he wanted to receive the last sacraments. Then, in the presence of witnesses, as is required, he made the repudiation. Later he went to confession, but what he told there I can never reveal.

"Afterwards the other woman, Dora Feldman, came to see him at the hospital, but if he was conscious he never recognized her. He was true to his promise, true to his resolution to put her out of his life."

CHURCH NOT INTERESTED IN WILL.

Father Dorney's attention was called to the fact that McDonald probably had left a considerable portion of his estate to his second wife.

"I suppose he did, but this is a legal matter in which the church is not interested. Mike McDonald and Mary Noonan were legally married in the eyes of the law, and the church, in a Catholic church edifice. We never recognize divorce. Of course, we know it is impossible at times for men and women to live together, and the church permits them to reside apart, but remarriage is impossible as long as both of the parties are still alive.

"McDonald never remarried in the eyes of the church, because his first wife was not dead. By his actions with Dora Feldman he gave great scandal, but before his death he repented of it. If Dora Feldman followed Mike McDonald to his grave, she could not do so from an ecclesiastical standpoint, and in my sermon this morning when I referred to the wife of the dead man I meant Mary Noonan McDonald, the mother of his children."

MRS. MARY MCDONALD CHANGED.

No greater contrast could be conceived than that between the woman reputed to have deserted her husband in turn for a renegade French priest and a minstrel, and the woman who rose to greet the interviewer who called at the Vincennes hotel for Mrs. Mary Noonan McDonald. Twenty years of sorrow have left snow white hair that still crowns her head with the same wealth as that of younger days, and twenty years of struggle to support herself have dulled the fire of those gray eyes that once looked over a smoking revolver with which the girl wife held at bay the police raiders of her husband's gambling house. But the slender figure appeared as erect as ever, though standing forth with an added frailty beside her stalwart, brown-faced son, Guy, and her face, though pale and sad, scarcely confessed to her 60 years of age.

This is the woman who began her career in Chicago as the helpmate of an old-time gambling king, and is ending her days in the work of rescuing wayward girls; this is the woman who was driven to abandon the name of McDonald and bury her identity for the last fifteen years under the alias of Mrs. Grashoff, holding communication only with her children and secretly visiting Chicago periodically to see them.

TELLS HER STORY AT LAST.