In our last episode, we explored Gallatin Street—the notorious waterfront district where Bridget Fury and some of nineteenth-century New Orleans' most dangerous criminals made their names. But Gallatin wasn't the city's first den of vice. Decades before the steamboat transformed the riverfront, there was another place where gamblers, thieves, prostitutes, and rivermen gathered on the ragged edge of the Crescent City. They simply called it the Swamp.
Hidden in the city's old backswamp stood rough saloons and gambling houses built from cypress planks and dismantled flatboats, where fortunes disappeared as quickly as they were earned. Among the district's most notorious establishments was the Sure Enuf Hotel, where an afternoon card game between a towering Kentucky flatboatman named Bill Sedley and two gambling brothers erupted into one of the bloodiest stories ever told about old New Orleans—a tale that perfectly captures the brutal world that gave rise to Gallatin Street itself.
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