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Books: Skagway’s Skull

3 minute read
TIME

THE REIGN OF SOAPY SMITH—William Ross Collier & Edwin Victor Westrate—Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Only a few summer tourists now go to Skagway, Alaska, but at the height of the Yukon gold rush (1897-98) 75,000 of them tumbled hopefully ashore to seek their fortune or somebody else’s. Today Skagway is a ghost town, but one of its ghosts has left his mark—a 30-ft. skull carved on the face of a cliff. That is Skagway’s memorial to Soapy Smith.

Though Skagway was his last resting place, Denver still remembers Jefferson Randolph Smith as one of the most picaresque figures of its bad old days. A slight, dapper, persuasive man, with a silver tongue and a front of brass, his original racket was selling soap on the street. He sold two kinds: in one pile an ordinary “miracle-working” soap, at 25¢ a cake; in the other, bars at five dollars, whose wrappers enfolded an occasional banknote. The crowd of suckers could see Soapy wrapping his wares in real money, sometimes a $50 bill, but somehow none but his confederates ever won more than a couple of dollars. The Denver police never bothered Soapy, but competitors sometimes did, and when the Colorado silver boom started he moved to the mushroom town of Creede, prospecting for prospectors.

In Creede he set up business in a modest way, running a shell game. His organizing ability, nerve and personal charm soon made him boss of that lawless town. When the Sherman Silver Act was repealed and the bottom dropped out of the silver market, Soapy went back to Denver and started a high-class gambling house. He called it “an educational institution! The famous Keeley institute provides a cure for the drinking habit. At the Tivoli I have a cure for the gambling habit. The man who steps into my place is faced with the sign, ‘Caveat Emptor’ which hangs upon the wall.” For the improperly educated, Soapy translated the Latin text into real life. When Denver finally decided it was tired of Soapy and his kind, he moved on again, this time to Mexico, where he almost sold old Porfirio Díaz the services of a Mexican Foreign Legion, which Soapy, for a good round sum, was to organize among the riff-raff of the border.

When gold was discovered in Bonanza Creek in Canada’s Yukon Territory, Skagway became the port of entry for the trek up over White Pass toward sudden wealth. Friends warned Soapy Alaska would be a tough proposition, but to Soapy it looked like his big chance. With his time-tested crew of bunco-steerers, con men and cappers he started a saloon in Skagway, set out to captivate that leaderless town. He did it, but it was hard going. The thugs and strong-arm men he could not control gave Skagway such a bad name that the law-&-order element grew restive. Finally, when a green prospector was robbed in Soapy’s own saloon, the storm gathered. A meeting of sober citizens was called. When Soapy, singlehanded, went down to remonstrate with them, his speech was cut short by a bullet.

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