Soapy Smith: Skagway's Scourge of the Klondike

Geoff Hamilton is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of
British Columbia.

Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith was a late-19th-century con man and
entrepreneur. Sauerwein follows Smith from his days as a teenage
wrangler in Texas and Kansa, to his first experiments with shell-game
frauds in the American West, to his role as crime boss in the lawless
boom town of Skagway, Alaska, during the Klondike gold rush.

This fascinating introductory text, which includes several
black-and-white photos, offers a compelling look at the life and
misadventures of one of the most outrageous scam artists in American
frontier history. An extraordinarily intelligent, creative, and ruthless
man, Smith embodies the dark side of individual freedom in the land of
opportunity. His exploits are detailed in clear and charming prose, and
one gains a vivid sense of the wild milieux in which this overreaching
swindler and his cronies operated. Particularly well-evoked is Skagway
itself, the site of Smith’s rise to criminal eminence as well as his
eventual demise: “The streets were often an impassable river of men
wandering about in search of diversion. On one street they might
encounter Alexis, a trained dancing bear, and its Russian handler. On
another street, a man selling balloons, or Billy Moore’s granddaughter
being pulled about in a wagon by a yearling moose. They might encounter
Peter the Apostle fighting to save souls, or a prostitute in a red
petticoat. Saloons were on every corner. And at night gunshots became so
common that no one bothered to investigate whether the cause was a
murder or a celebration.”

This is a brief popular coverage of Smith’s life, so it
understandably lacks much serious analysis of its subject’s
personality and motivations. A map of the relevant regions would have
helped significantly in understanding the movement of the characters
over the Alaskan frontier.