“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” 
      John Ford, director, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962.

I first learned the legend of Soapy Smith in October 1978 when I traveled to Skagway to conduct some archaeological excavations for Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, which was then only two years old. Like most researchers who were trying to learn as much as they could about one of our newest National Park Service areas, I read most of what I could get my hands on. That included the study that National Park Service Chief Historian Edwin Bearrs had completed for the park in 1970, along with Pierre Berton’s seminal work, Klondike Fever, which was published in the United States in 1958 and revised in 1975. I had a great deal of respect for both gentlemen, the first for his obvious scholarly position within my agency, and Berton for his gift with the written word and knowledge of his subject. Bearss relied heavily on the latter, in addition to his own first-hand research in our nation’s capital. I had no reason to doubt either’s depiction of Jeff Smith’s exploits in Skagway in the winter and spring of 1898.[1]

Twenty-seven years later, I retired from the National Park Service, still interested in the Klondike gold rush, and still conducting historic research on the lives of the people of Skagway. It was not until I began to do research in the primary documents related to Skagway’s mayor Chris Shea, who published one of the first stand-alone versions of the Smith story, and Josias M. “Si” Tanner, who was instrumental in rounding up Smith’s gang in the days after the con man’s death, that I began to understand the local political and historical contexts of the early days of Skagway. With that background, I began to understand subtle but major contradictions in the various versions of the story. These were not minor alternatives, simple variations that might occur because different people observed the event from different vantage points. I found major gaps, deliberate miss-tellings, sometimes lies meant to obscure a truth to which no one would admit. What were these truths that were being withheld? And why? [2]

As I began to ferret out previously obscured portions of the Soapy Smith story – such as the fact that Frank Reid was not the only one who killed Soapy Smith – it became obvious that those who wanted to protect Reid’s honor were so intent on doing so that they were willing to raise Smith to the status of an uncrowned King in order to elevate Reid to the standing of a martyr.

What a thought.

Start with a town that in 1898 has some major publicity problems in southern ports. Find a local criminal, and turn him into an irredeemable Villain, the cause of all the city’s problems. Kill the Villain. Suddenly, the publicity problem is gone, because the Villain, who epitomizes all of the town’s evils, is gone. One of the town founders dies in the process of killing the Villain, so the town’s leading citizens turn him into a Martyr. Frame the encounter of the Villain and the Martyr in the guise of a redemption tale, in which no one, at the turn of the twentieth century, can fail to miss the point. Wash away the sins of the past by honoring the fallen Martyr. A legend is born.

Ten years later, about the time the town’s citizens are starting to forget all of this happened, a politician resurrects the morality play. Shades of the evil days are starting to emerge again. So he publishes a booklet on the story, to remind folks of what can happen when factionalism, political corruption, and social anarchy ruled the town… as in greedy merchants, and vigilantes and Soapy Smith.  And in the years that followed, town tourism promoters continued to tell the story over and over again, adding their own embellishments, all in the interests of assuring tourists that Skagway was a safe place to visit. The legend lives on.

It was a story that could not fail to interest either the citizens of Skagway or the visiting public. And it did. It still does. I mean to show the reader why.

Who was Soapy Smith? Born Jefferson Randolph Smith in Coweta County, Georgia in 1860, his family moved to Round Rock, Texas in 1876. Not to stay in one place very long, the young man soon picked up and moved about the Middle West where he earned a living as a bunco and sure-thing man, learning to bilk gullible people from their hard-earned dollars with card tricks and slight-of-hand. By 1879, he had found his way to Denver, Colorado, where he picked up the trick of wrapping a cake of soap in a five dollar bill, covering that with a plain paper wrapper, mixing it with a number of other plain-wrapped cakes, and selling off soap for a dollar apiece. It was in Denver that he earned the nick-name “Soapy.”[3]

In the years that followed, Smith set up his soap-selling, pea and walnut shell, and three-card monte games in Denver, Leadville, and Creede, Colorado. Each place he went, he earned a reputation for petty con games and graft ameliorated by an indubitable charm. In each of these mining camps today, the modern tourist will find odes and tributes to a legend created by a mixture of his roguish charm and Robin Hood-like deeds.[4] It is no different in Skagway, Alaska. In those places, as much as in Skagway, his legend is due as much to the fact that he died a violent death as to his personal charm. I do not believe that it owes anything to any greatness on his part or the fact that Jefferson Randolph Smith was a cut above any other criminal of his stamp who lived during the late nineteenth century. Through his considerable charm, he just managed to garner a bit more self-serving press than the usual con man, giving hagiographers somewhat more material with which to work.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “legend” as “a traditional story popularly regarded as historical but which is not authenticated.” Their second definition is “an extremely famous or notorious person.” I use the word in both meanings in this book. Certainly by the time the first full-length biography of Smith had been written in 1935, nearly four decades after the events it portrays, much of the story had become legend, and the hagiographers assembling his tale did not attempt to authenticate it by listing their sources, nor had any of their predecessors. In fact, the first account to include a bibliography was not written until 1944, and that one was not a detailed rendering of the story. In fact, not until the chapter in Pierre Berton’s 1958 Klondike Fever, written 60 years after the death of Soapy Smith, did anyone make a partial effort to list some of the sources for his telling of the legend, most of which had been filtered through secondary sources. And so it appears, also, with the second major biography of Smith, that written by Frank G. Robertson and Beth Kay Harris in 1962. Their bibliography included twelve books, none of which were primary sources, eight magazine articles, only three of which might be considered primary sources, and nine newspapers, only one of which was from Alaska. As I later came to find, the one Alaskan newspaper they used, The Skaguay News, is archived in very spotty and parsimonious issues, and cannot hope to convey to the researcher the true conditions of Skagway during the winter of 1897-1898. All that Robertson and Harris really had to work with was unauthenticated legend. [5]

As I began my own efforts to verify the Smith legend in Alaska, I discovered that it had been told and retold in print about a hundred times (see my Chronological Bibliography). Within these pages you will not find a new version of the tale, but an expose. I have attempted to return to the original tellings as much as possible – the primary sources – and have noted them as such on the chronological bibliography I include at the end of this book. I have separated out those sources that are derivative of previous versions (what we historians call “secondary sources”), and have gone back to original accounts by direct witnesses. I also looked at other primary historical documents: lands files, court records, deed records, lot claim records, military files, diaries, letters, and photographs that appear not to have been examined in an effort to authenticate the legend.

Also, for the sake of the reader, I have evaluated the authority of individual eye-witnesses. Every author came to tell his or her version with certain biases, and not all accounts can be accepted on equal footing. Due to economic and political pressures at the time of their writing, many of which could not be known to modern readers, these biases were not always readily apparent. As time went on, minor squabbles, deliberate inside jokes, and political sarcasm became lost to history, but the bigger morality play, the larger legend, remained. The character and identity of the individual witnesses became lost.  I have, in helping both myself and the reader understand how the perception of basic premises changed, researched the lives and histories of the major contributors to the legend.

What I discovered in my attempt to authenticate the legend was a repeated effort to reinforce a morality tale at the expense of a more complicated story of town formation, government-building, and the creation of law and order. This morality tale – the redemption of a lawless town made safe for all visitors – was much to the liking of economic boosters who worked hard to banish a bad reputation instigated by rival port cities on the northwest coast. Willing to sacrifice their past image to a future one of law, orderliness, and public safety with the death of one criminal, Skagwayans did little to correct the perceptions of the months that preceded July 1898. They exaggerated the power held by one common criminal, killed all crime when they killed him, and made their town a haven of propriety and public safety when they cleaned him and his gang from their streets.

In the following pages, I examine the Soapy Smith legend as summarized in the Preface to this book. The main ingredients of the legend are as follows:

1) Skagway was without law and order before July 8, 1898;

2) Smith saved a bartender from being lynched by a group of Vigilantes in early February, 1898;

3) From this point on, Skagway was ruled by Smith, its uncrowned King, who succeeded in driving the Vigilantes underground;

4) The climax of Smith’s popularity was on the 4th of July, when he served as Grand Marshal of the parade and sat at the podium with the Governor of Alaska;

5) Smith’s gang stole a gold poke from returning miner J.D. Smith; Smith refused to return the gold; the Vigilantes reformed, and as a result, their leader, Frank Reid killed Soapy Smith;

6) Skagway became free of crime after Smith’s death, and was thereafter safe for all travelers.

Throughout the years and in the various accounts, facts, both verifiable and not, have been added to this outline. In the following pages, I will lead you through what I have and have not been able to authenticate of this basic structure. Then, with the facts at hand, I show how I believe the morality play was conceived. After that, I demonstrate how it was to the advantage of the people of Skagway to perpetuate the legend as molded by the morality play, casting history aside in the interest of the greater good.

In the end, you may conclude differently than I. I believe that the Soapy Smith legend continues to play a basic role in the story of Skagway’s history. I hope you also agree, however, that there are other facts that bear contemplation, and other individuals who have, for far too long, been ignored in the telling of this town’s story.