Soapy Smith's Skagway: The Con Man Who Ran a City

Jefferson Randolph Smith II arrived in Skagway in the summer of eighteen ninety-seven with a well-practiced criminal infrastructure and a nickname. Soapy, from a soap-selling con he had worked in Denver, where he palmed the prize-winning bars while the crowd watched the shuffle.

Skagway in the summer of eighteen ninety-seven was exactly what he needed: a tent city of ten thousand men who had just arrived in Alaska with money and no idea where they were. They were heading north toward the Klondike goldfields. They would not be here long. They were distracted, anxious, and easy to fleece.

Smith organized quickly. He opened the Jeff Smith Parlor, a saloon where the gambling was rigged and the drinks were measured short. He established a fake telegraph office, complete with a wire strung to nowhere, that collected fees from stampeders who wanted to send messages home, messages that were never transmitted. His men met arriving boats at the docks and steered strangers toward the rigged games, the false offices, the confidence traps that honeycombed the town. The city government was, for a period in the spring and summer of eighteen ninety-eight, effectively his.

On July eighth, eighteen ninety-eight, a citizens' committee that had formed to expel Smith organized a public meeting at the Juneau Company Wharf. Smith showed up, carrying a rifle. A committee member named Frank Reid also carried a weapon. They shot each other almost simultaneously. Smith died within minutes. Reid died twelve days later. Both are buried in Skagway.

Smith's grave became a tourist attraction almost immediately. The town moved on. The fake telegraph office is now a museum.

What Soapy Smith built in Skagway was not unique to him. It was the operating structure of every Gold Rush boomtown in American history: the criminal economy that follows wherever desperation and mobility coincide.