Soapy
The bad seed of a family of wealth and education (the family comes to America from England in 1760 ... a grandfather is a Georgia senator and plantation owner, his father is an attorney, and there are other family members that become lawyers, doctors, and a minister), Jefferson Smith is born on November 2, 1860, in Coweta County, Georgia, near the town of Newman. The Civil War which starts soon after the boy's birth ruins any chance of the youth leading a normal life, and finances in tatters, the family transplants to Round Rock, Texas in 1876. Left to his own devices when his mother dies in 1877, Smith begins his career as a bunco artist in Fort Worth, Texas the same year, finding a formula that pulls together other miscreants into a gang of thieves and shills bent on separating the frontier unwary from their hard earned assets, to the extent that the teenager from Georgia is soon known as the "king of the frontier con men." Modus operandi successful for over two decades across the West, Smith uses his gift of gab to sell bars of soap from a display case on a tripod for $1 (worth no more than five cents) to marks that think they might get the lucky bars that have dollars hidden inside their packaging, but have actually been switched through sleight-of-hand ... only shills, secret members of Smith's gang, ever win (the sobriquet "Soapy" becomes attached to Smith when an arresting policeman can not recall the first name of his catch and writes "Soapy" down in police logbook). The winnings are then used to finance bigger cons, buy legitimate businesses, pay off his gang (including intimidation types like gunman and Wyatt Earp friend, John "Texas Jack" Vermillion), and buy protection from the local authorities ... and the crook enhances his ability to operate by keeping the local citizenry out of his bunco games while making "loans" to poorly paid police officers and feeding the destitute locals. And if things should get too hot between a town's law and order faction, with his motto "Get it while the get'ins' good," Smith and company simply pull up stakes, move to a new frontier town, and set up operations again.
Soapy
Texas Jack
The first town to get the full Soapy experience of rigged businesses and games, overseen by over 100 gang members, is Denver, Colorado. Arriving in what will become Colorado's capitol in 1879, Smith is king of the town's underworld activities by 1882 and owns a saloon and gambling hall on the southeast corner of Market and Seventeenth Streets called the Trivoli Club (the establishment will bear the Latin warning, "Caveat Emptor" ... indeed, "Let The Buyer Beware!" ... it is also close to Union Station, where "marks" are immediately recognized for fleecing), sets his younger brother Bascomb up operating a cigar store that fronts for dishonest poker games, runs a fake stock market investment firm called The Exchange, and commands his minions from a business office he sets up in the town's Chever building (delightful characters like "Reverend" John Bowers, "Professor" William Jackson, "Big Ed" Burns, and "Sure Shot" Tom Cady). And he also maintains a secondary, secret life in which he is loving and faithful husband to Mary Noonan, and a doting father to the couple's children (when the secret is exposed by a local newspaper, Smith shows his displeasure by fracturing the skull of the paper's president, Colonel John Atkins, with a walking stick ... put on trial for attempted murder, he will of course be acquitted). Two assassination attempts, his personal notoriety for drinking and gambling, and the efforts of the community's reformers to police saloons and gambling cause Soapy and company to leave the burgeoning city in 1892 for the wide open revels of a new mining town in the San Juan mountains of southwest Colorado, and Creede becomes the next spot for the criminal to plunder.
Soapy In Action
Denver Base Of Operations
Using Denver prostitutes to secretly buy up main street lots, Soapy soon has Creede under his thumb. Never a dull moment for a silver camp running 24/7, during the conman's one year reign, Smith will own or lease out prime real estate in the area, his brother-in-law, William Sidney "Cap" Light becomes the town's deputy sheriff, he fights off another assassination attempt that costs gang member Joe Palmer a shot off thumb, he opens up a pleasure palace called the Orleans Club, and for a dime, sells viewings of a fake petrified man he claims miners dug out of the nearby mountains (a ten foot tall statue called McGinty). Business good (at one point, Smith controls thirty-nine of the forty saloons in town, the sole holdout is a bar named the Denver Exchange run by gunfighter Bat Masterson), Soapy nonetheless leaves his latest conquest when he hears the political scene in Denver has changed and many in the city would like to have him operating once more (and just in time as many of the properties Smith owned, including the Orleans Club, are burnt to the ground in the summer of 1892). More of the same for both good and bad, Smith's second run in Denver includes Soapy briefly becoming a deputy sheriff (who loves removing protesting losers from his establishments, clashing with Colorado's new governor, Davis Hanson Waite over authority in the city in a battle that goes down in the history books as the "City Hall War," and trying to swindle Mexican President Porfirio Diaz into hiring a foreign legion of American toughs full of Smith Gang members, overseen of course, by Smith himself (an $80,000 scam that nearly comes to fruition). Governor not a fan, new underworld rivals surfacing, and attempted murder charges pending, Soapy pulls up stakes again in 1895. He resurfaces in the Klondike in 1896 (there are stops before in Dallas, Houston, Cripple Creek, Butte, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland) and begin's operating in the gold mining gateway of Skagway in 1897, just as the rush to the area is getting underway.
Creede, Colorado - 1892
Just Another Con
Fire Damage Cleanup
Governor Waite
Business as usual, in the tent city of Skagway (first known as , Smith and company put the town's deputy U.S. marshal on the payroll, starts a charity to feed the hungry (including stray dogs), pays for a town watchman out of his own pocket, runs his organization out of a saloon called Jeff Smith's Parlor (a small former bank building that is only a 18 feet by 40 feet space), and enhances his gang's conning operations by creating a telegraph site that sends and receives no messages (an actual telegraph line to Juneau will not begin functioning until 1901) for $5 a pop (a bargain for the naive, wanting to inform those back home that they have found pay dirt), but is instead used to identify marks for immediate fleecing of one sort or another. When a vigilance committee is formed by locals to deal with the lawless situation in the city (the "Committee of 101"), Smith counters the move by forming his own law and order outfit, which has 317 members within its rolls. ... and to cater favor and make sure he remains in charge, when the Spanish-American War breaks out in 1898, Smith receives the approval of the United States War Department, and President William McKinley to form a military unit called the "Skagway Military Company," with the command of the men as the group's captain. Riding a gray horse at the head of his company during the town's 1898 celebration of the Fourth of July, Smith helps preside over the holiday from atop a grandstand where he sits beside the territorial governor and other local and state officials, unaware that he has only four more days to live.
Early Skagway
To The Gold Fields
Members Of The Smith Gang
Headquarters - 7/4/1898
The trouble begins when a sourdough named John D. Stewart arrives in Skagway on July 7, and wants to convert some of his Dawson gold dust in to currency (about $2,700.00 carried in a canvas pouch ... a sum worth roughly $78,302.00 in 2018)) into more manageable currency, but runs into some of Smith's men, John L. "Reverend" Bowers, W. E. "Slim-Jim" Foster, and Van B. "Old Man" Triplett. Jeff Smith Parlor booze, games of three-card monte, and a need to see the actual gold dust to continue with the fun end of course with Triplett absconding with Stewart's pouch. Unlike most marks though, Stewart protests, first to Deputy U.S. Marshal Sylvester S. Taylor (on Smith's payroll), next to U.S. Commissioner Charles A. Sehibrede (stationed in the nearby town of Dyea), and then to anyone who will listen to his tale of woe ... with some folks who hear Stewart's story, willing to help the old miner get back his money, the local vigilance committee revives and calls a meeting for that day. First planned to take place at Sperry's Warehouse in town, the meeting is adjourned until later when hundreds of upset citizens show up at the too small venue ... the followup will take place later in that night at a bigger warehouse on Juneau's Wharf (the wharf extends almost a half mile into the bay, is between 15 feet to 20 feet wide, and stands between 6 feet and 10 feet over the town's tidal mud flats and gravel beach), a location that can also be more easily protected from Smith and his followers. As unrest in the town starts to mount, Smith makes his way about Skagway, promising some people to see that Stewart gets his poke returned, and to others claiming the miner lost fair and square at a game of chance and he doesn't deserve recompense in any form, and certainly not from Smith. He becomes incensed when he finds out the Committee of 101 has resurfaced and is going to look into Stewart's complaints.
Wharf Area - Juneau Wharf Is Second From Left
Last Pcture of Soapy - 7/7/1898
Enraged when he is told by William Saportas, a reporter for the Daily Alaskan, that the vigilance committee is meeting, and in his cups, Smith grabs a Winchester Model 1892 .44-40 rifle and his Colt double-action revolver, and with a handful of his armed gang following, leaves the Jeff Smith Parlor and makes his way down to the wharves, thinking he can break things up with his intimidating presence. At around 9:15 in the evening, Smith arrives at the Juneau Wharf, tells his men to wait, then stalks out on to the structure carrying his rifle on his shoulder, pointed upwards. On the boardwalk, he orders two guards out of his way (the men jump down to the beach), makes his way past two more guards, ship's captain Josias Martin Tanner and White Pass and Yukon Railway employee Jesse Murphy, then finally confronts Frank Reid, a 54-year-old former bartender at the Klondike Saloon, who tells him he can not advance further. A harsh argument of seconds ensues and then suddenly words are not enough for either man. Bringing his rifle off his shoulder, Smith tries to club Reid in the head with the weapon, but the guard manages to block the blow and grab the rifle's barrel, yanking it away from his head and downward with his left hand while pulling his own revolver with his right. "My God, don't shoot," Smith proclaims, but Reid ignores the admonition and pulls the trigger of his gun ... which doesn't fire due to a defective round. Then the men fire on each other almost in unison. Freeing his rifle from Reid's grip, Smith fires on the guard, who in turn, fires again at the conman, now with bullets that actually work. In the quick exchange of lead, Reid takes a bullet to one leg and a mortal wound to his lower abdomen and groin (in great pain, it will take him twelve days to die) from another, while Smith is hit in the left arm, the left thigh just above the knee, and in his left side. Confrontation not quite complete, guard Murphy rushes over, wrests Smith's rifle from his grip and turns the weapon on its owner, firing an immediately fatal bullet into the gang leader's heart. Close to more casualties as armed men begin pulling their weapons all about the wharf (the vigilance meeting breaks up at the sound of gunfire outside), Smith's associates quickly vanish into the night when a voice yells, "They have killed Soapy, and if you don't clear out quick, they will kill you too." Soapy Smith's hold on Skagway has been broken ... the conman is 37 at his death.
Frank H. Reid
Conrontation
Death
In the aftermath of the shooting, over twenty of Smith's gang are rounded up, put on the steamship Tartar, and sent south to Seattle, sent on their way with the warning that they will be shot on sight if they are ever seen in the Skagway region again (attempting to escape, "Slim" Jim Foster is almost lynched to death by a mob that gathers at the jail, saved at the last moment by a detachment of U.S. Army infantry that Sehlbrede has brought to town to police the city). Bowers, Foster, and Tripp are all arrested and sent to Juneau to serve prison sentences that ranged from one to ten years, and the missing poke is given back to Stewart, short $600 of its original total, discovered of course during a search of Soapy's Jeff Smith Parlor. As for the two combatants, Reid is buried in the local cemetery under a large monument that reads, "He Gave His Life For The Honor Of Skagway," while Smith is buried nearby beneath a rough board that reads simply, "Jefferson R. Smith, Age 38, Died July 8, 1898." Simple graves, that are visited by thousands every year as over 1,000,000 tourists a year now seek out the former mining town from the luxury of their cruise liners ... and Smith gets annual celebration ever year on the anniversary of his demise ... in Skagway the citizens gather at Soapy's grave and drink champagne provided by members of Smith's family, and the Magic Castle nightclub in Hollywood, California, throws a Soapy Smith Party featuring costumes, magic shows, and charity gambling every July 8.
Corpse
Autopsy
Posed For Viewing
Funeral
Big News
Skagway Memorial Marker
At Soapy's Grave
Soapy In Skagway - Center, Hat In Hand
The Shootout on Juneau Wharf, Skagway, Alaska ... 7/8/1898!
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Great Story
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