Dr. Fenton B. Whiting extracts a bullet from the dead Soapy Smith, July 8, 1898 (Courtesy J. Bernard Moore Family papers, Rasmussen Library, University of Alaska - Fairbank).
Matthew Sundeen's account in the June 23, 1941 issue of the Fairbanks Daily News Miner, p. 5.
Well, enough people had remembered seeing Reid kill Soapy through the years to put into question one old miner's 43-year-old memory.
Except Sundeen claims no one else but him, Smith, Reid, Tanner, Murphy and Landers were on the wharf approach when the killing occurred, Soapy's gang having skedattled when the first shots rang out.
And Tanner, Murphy and Landers all agreed to lie to the officials to let Reid think he'd died a hero.
Well, that makes a certain amount of sense, but there was just Matt Sundeen's word for it.
Or was there?
Postscript in the letter written from Major Samuel Steele to his superior in Ottawa on July 11, 1898, naming Jesse Murphy as Smith's killer on Tanner's authority.
And why would a whole community conspire to conceal the true identity of Smith's killer? I have several hypotheses, all of which I explore in Soapy's Legend. You can get a taste of one of them in what I intend to be an intertaining version in my upcoming novel The Unterrified, the story of one of Smith's biographers, Chris Shea. Read "Aces and Eights" and see if it doesn't sound at the very least plausible.
In his recently published book, Alias Soapy: The Life and Death of a Scoundrel, The Biography of Jefferson Randolph Smith II, Soapy's great-grandson Jeff Smith tries to make a case that Soapy was "murdered" by Jesse Murphy. Unless he can have the case reopened by the federal courts in Alaska, he will not be able to prove his case. It has already been adjudicated at a legal hearing.
Smith and his father first debated this issue with author Howard Clifford in Skagway, Alaska on July 8, 1998 with inconclusive results, according to a news report by The Skagway News of July 24, 1998.
If you have any information about who killed Soapy Smith, please contact Cathy at
montdawn@msn.com
Note: This makes it official. Reid killed Smith, according to a legal finding by a duly established court of law. Second-guessing by anyone outside a court of law over a hundred years later is an academic excercise.
Caught a day late by a newspaper man who failed to foresee the importance of a developing story, the News' rival, The Daily Alaskan, never did catch up. By July 11, it printed essentially the same story found in the News: Hero Frank Reid had rid Skagway of it nemisis.
A lithograph plate from Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly of January 1901, depicting Frank Reid killing Smith (p. 219).
Headlines from The Skaquay News, July 15, 1898.
Major Samuel B. Steele commanded the Northwest Mounted Police at Lake Bennett in British Columbia and at the summit of the White Pass in the early summer of 1898. U.S. Commissioner Charles Sehlbrede sent word to Steele upon the killing of Smith and asked him to watch for certain members of the conman's gang and take them into custody. Steele immediately began to write to his superior in Ottawa with daily reports. On July 11, 1898, he enclosed a copy of The Skaguay News, dated July 8, indicating it provided most of the details of the killing.
He added a postscript. "According to the information I received from the Deputy Marshal, a man named Murphy is credited with the killing of Smith & not Frank Reid as reported in the newspaper. SBS"
By this time, J. M. Tanner was universally accepted as the Deputy Marshal of Skagway.
