Capt. George P Burnham, Memoirs of the United States Secret Service, provided biographies of notorious bank robbers, counterfeiters, and other quarry of that agency. In the late 1830s, one William Dow, an ambitious "sharp-eyed, handsome boy of 16 or 17" was eager to earn money. In Concord, New Hampshire, he tended stables, worked at a restaurant, and did other odd jobs to support his interests including horses (of the riding, not racing kind).

At the restaurant it was common to receive in trade various private bank bills of questionable authenticity. Rather than make a fuss about them, the restaurant owner considered them to be "as good money as any," and passed them along to his customers, while young Bill Dow watched.

And thus the boy's eyes were first opened to the chances before him. If these bogus rags could thus readily be passed in that establishment, he mentally argued that there was a bigger field of operations to be easily found, if one but took a little time to prospect for it!

And, as the young man thought this affair over at his leisure, he concluded he would not purchase the horse he coveted, at the earliest convenient moment, and then turn his attention to something promising larger pecuniary results than were attainable in the meagerly rewarded service of a drudge in an eating saloon.

He had previously formed an acquaintance with a New York horse-man, who came to the saloon in Concord frequently, and he had seen him and other's "shoving the queer" [passing counterfeits] there so often, that he fancied it wasn't a difficult process…