Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (55 page)

He took five men with him as a nucleus for a new organization. His closest henchman was the “Reverend” Charles Bowers, who had been with him since Leadville days, a notorious bunko man whose saintly appearance, gentle voice, and benevolent mien made it possible for him to masquerade as a man of the cloth. Bowers’s whole being exuded sanctimony, but he was as hard as sheet steel beneath the velvet exterior. There is a story that he once shot a peace officer, whom he recognized only when he had rolled him over. “Looks like I shot the sheriff,” Bowers drawled, placing his foot on the corpse. “Ain’t that too bad.” Because of his personality Bowers was a first-class “steerer”: he guided suckers to the various fake business establishments where other members of the gang lay in wait to fleece them. He was also known as a “grip man,” for he had mastered the secret handshakes, signals, and distress signs that embellish most fraternal orders. Once Bowers had disarmed his victims with the fraternal signal, they were putty in his hands.

Two other long-time confreres of Smith went along to the North – Syd Dixon and George Wilder. Wilder, who acted as advance man for the gang, gave the impression of being a prosperous businessman, his personality suggesting such financial well-being that he was useful in playing the role of a stockbroker letting a new-found friend in on a sure thing. Actually he was a shrewd and thrifty man, and the only one in Smith’s entourage who had a bank account and drew interest on it. Without his available funds, the sextet would never have been able to quit Denver. Syd Dixon came from a wealthy family and looked the part; a playboy and a globe-trotter, he had been driven to the gutter by an opium addiction and had taken to fraud only to raise money to buy more drugs. His dress, his manner, and his obvious gentility made him a valuable member of the gang. These men and two newer members, Slim Jim Foster and Red Gibbs, formed the hard core of the organization that was to dominate Skagway.

On arrival, Smith went about his plan with care and dispatch, charting the ground as meticulously as any military commander bent upon conquest. Before settling definitely on Skagway as a seat of operations he moved up and down the Panhandle, examining both Wrangell and Juneau, each of them swollen by the flotsam and jetsam of the stampede. Juneau he discarded at once as a community too well established to lend itself easily to the kind of thralldom he had in mind. Wrangell, at the Stikine’s mouth, lawless, mercurial, and utterly disorganized, was made to order, but Smith dismissed it, rightly, as a dead end. He quickly saw that Skagway would retain its position as the main floodgate through which the human torrent would surge in and out of the Yukon Valley. It commanded all American territory from the source streams of the Yukon to the salt water of the Lynn Canal, and the only law in all this region was a single U.S. marshal and his deputy. It was on Skagway that he pounced, with his walnut shells and his marked decks and his sure-thing games and his bogus establishments. Success was instantaneous; by October he was so well established that he was able to inveigle a missionary from a leading U.S. church into a shell game on the White Pass trail and separate him from all of his money.

2

Alias Robin Hood

One of the keys to Smith’s success was that he never appeared to be what he was. His willowy physique, his broad-brimmed hat, his dark, conservative clothing embellished by a heavy gold watch-chain, his pleasant baritone and soft, grammatical speech all gave him the appearance of a Southern planter. He cultivated journalists, clergymen, and small children. Whenever an opportunity presented itself, he contrived to appear on the side of law and order, and his career is peppered with examples of his continuing resolve to maintain an aura of respectability. It had been his habit in Denver to send new twenty-dollar bills to needy men and widowed women at Christmas, to make donations and raise funds among his followers for churches, and even, on one occasion, to address a men’s Bible class – ingeniously using himself as a bad example of what could happen to a man who eschewed a Christian life.

When a slim, sharp-nosed, and mysterious cowpoke named Ed O’Kelly shot down Bob Ford on the main street of Creede, it was Smith, playing the role of a man who respects the law, who saved him from a lynch mob. “Stand back! Let this man alone! Justice is going to be done!” Smith cried piously, and the mob obeyed him, for he was a man who always commanded authority.

On one of his early voyages up the Alaskan coast, when he was casing the various gold-rush towns, Smith again placed himself on the side of constituted authority and earned the everlasting gratitude of Dynamite Johnny O’Brien, the two-fisted skipper of the steamer
Utopia
. O’Brien, perhaps the most colourful sea captain on the Pacific coast, had a history so garish that it tended to read like one of the more florid sea novels popular at the time. He had narrowly missed being eaten by cannibals; had fought off Chinese pirates with cannon fire; had supped with the royal family of Hawaii; had made love to a Tahitian princess; had been offered a partnership by King O’Keefe, the famous white emperor of the island of Yap; and had shipped with the hairy and villainous Robert O’Malley, prototype for Jack London’s
Sea Wolf
. But when Smith encountered him, Dynamite Johnny had reached the low point of his career. He had managed to survive an operation for a burst tumour which had been performed in a hut on the shores of Cook Inlet, Alaska, by a pseudo-doctor whose makeshift instruments were a knife and a pair of scissors honed to razor sharpness. He was lying in his bunk in Seattle harbour, burning with fever and without enough ready cash to buy fuel for his ship, when Smith appeared with a bankroll and two heavy-framed revolvers, the two items that O’Brien needed most. The bankroll purchased enough cheap coal to raise steam and head for Juneau with Smith aboard; the revolvers helped stem a mutiny which sprang up because of the wretched quality of the fuel. When the crew stopped the ship, eight hours out of Seattle, Smith, a revolver in each hand, guided the ailing captain to the deck, where the two men browbeat all hands into continuing the voyage. From that moment on, Smith’s men travelled aboard O’Brien’s ships en route to Alaska, striking up acquaintanceships with wealthy stampeders, who were marked for subsequent plucking.

It was aboard the
City of Seattle
, in January, 1898, that another made-to-order incident occurred which allowed Smith to pose on the side of constituted authority. He had taken advantage of the midwinter lull in the stampede to return to St. Louis and Washington, D.C., partly to visit his family, partly to recruit more men in anticipation of the second wave of the gold rush. One of the passengers aboard ship had been swinging in the halyards and in doing so loosened a heavy lamp, which plummeted down, striking him neatly on the head and killing him outright. This was all that was needed to provoke a dangerous situation on the overcrowded vessel, where, as on every ship that plied Alaskan water that winter, the passengers nursed a burning hatred for the ship’s officials. In a high state of agitation, they called a mass meeting and prepared to launch a fifty-thousand-dollar damage suit against the company. Smith seized the occasion to present himself as a man who believes in order and fair play. He went through the corpse’s pockets and produced a packet which he claimed the victim had stolen from him.

“Now, you scum,” he cried, brandishing this evidence, “if you want to stand up for a man who is a stowaway, a cheat, and a bum, I’m off with you.” The meeting broke up, and a few days later the champion of law and order was hard at work in Skagway cheating his fellow passengers.

He was back in Skagway only three days before a double shooting occurred that served to demonstrate the unseen power that he wielded. The affair started when Andy McGrath, a worker on the Brackett toll road across the White Pass, put a bill down for a drink in a saloon and was refused change – a standard practice in Skagway that winter. When McGrath protested, the saloon-keeper, John Edward Fay, threw him out. McGrath, a stubborn man, sought out the deputy marshal, a man named Rowan, who at that moment was seeking a doctor to deliver his wife of a child. As the marshal was away and there was no other law officer available, Rowan postponed his quest long enough to accompany McGrath to the saloon, and in doing so sealed his fate. As the two men burst through the doors, Fay shot them both. McGrath fell dead, and Rowan was mortally wounded. To add to the confusion, a night watchman named Jones, on hearing the shots, drew his gun and shouted: “If there’s shooting to be done, I’m in it!” whereupon he fired at random into the street, hitting a saloon habitué in the knee.

Within an hour the town was in an uproar. Rowan lay dying in the office of Dr. J. J. Moore, who had just delivered his wife of a child. Fay had escaped during the confusion and was being concealed by his gambler friends, all of them in loose association with Smith. A mob was combing the alleyways for the saloon-keeper and howling for his blood.

Smith threatened a general slaughter if Fay were lynched. “We muster upwards of two hundred men with their guns, and if anyone tries to put a rope over Ed Fay’s neck he’ll get a bullet in his own head mighty quick,” he announced. Then he laid plans secretly to control the lynch mob and at the same time curry general favour with the populace.

Fay surrendered the following day, and a mass meeting was called that evening in the Union Church to bring him to justice. Smith did not attend, but he dominated the affair. A committee was appointed to guard Fay and another to investigate the murder and empanel twelve jurors to try the culprit. The names of these committeemen were suggested to the chairman of the meeting by the editor of the Skagway
Alaskan
, who, unbeknown to the townspeople, was in Smith’s pay. As a result Fay escaped the town’s vengeance and was spirited off to Sitka, where he stood trial and received a light sentence.

While all this was going on, Smith was raising a purse for Rowan’s widow, with his own name at the head of the list of subscribers. Thus, in a single stroke, he was able to pose as an enemy of mob rule, a friend of destitute widows, a contributor to charity, and – by virtue of saving Fay’s neck – a refuge for criminals.

These matters astonished the Reverend J. A. Sinclair, a Presbyterian minister who arrived shortly after the event to spread the gospel in Skagway. “A lynching bee held in a church!” he wrote his wife. “And the Robin Hood of the town controlling that meeting’s proceedings and practically nominating the committee; and the desperado at the same time protecting the murderer and taking up a public subscription for the relief of the widow of his victim.” In such a community, Sinclair realized, a minister’s work would be cut out for him.

3

The
Committee of 101

In the six weeks that followed, a seesaw battle was waged between the gamblers, saloon-keepers, and confidence men of Skagway, on the one side, and the more law-abiding citizenry on the other. For although the stampede had attracted the grifters and the sharpers, the camp-followers and the hoodlums, it had also acted as a magnet for a quite different type of man. This was the restless wanderer, the frontiersman and Indian-fighter, who moved just ahead of the tide of civilization, settling for a few months or a few years at one place, accepting a sheriff’s badge occasionally, and then pushing on as the frontier advanced. Every mass movement since the California rush had benefited from this breed: they shot straight, feared nobody, were generally incorruptible, and had the interests of the community at heart. Such a man was Frank Reid, the city engineer of Skagway, and it was around this granite-faced and cool-eyed wanderer that the opposition to Smith rallied.

Reid was in his mid-fifties, but he had been one of the first men on the beach when Skagway was founded. Indeed, it was he who laid out the townsite over the protests of Captain William Moore. Born in Illinois, he had been working his way west and north for most of his life. He had gone to the University of Michigan, moved across the plains, fought the Indians in Oregon during the Bannock-Piute wars, settled as a school-teacher among the pioneer families of the Willamette Valley, and stampeded north at the first news of the Klondike strike. He was a good surveyor and construction engineer as well as a fine outdoorsman and a crack shot. He feared nobody, and it was said that he was the only man of whom Soapy Smith was ever wary.

Reid and his two close friends, Major J. M. “Si” Tanner and Captain J. L. Sperry, both former police officers and Indian-fighters, were at the core of the vigilante movement which sprang up in Skagway, as it had in every U.S. mining camp since the days of California. On January 31, one week after the Fay incident, a group of aroused citizens petitioned Washington for federal troops and asked that the town be placed under martial law. The infantrymen were dispatched on February 8, and the newly formed vigilantes, emboldened by the federal support, decided to drive the underworld element from the town. Suddenly most of the confidence men and gamblers seemed to melt away, and the committee felt that its brief efforts had been more than successful.

Incredibly, Smith himself was not asked to leave. Some of the committeemen thought him harmless. “Jeff’s a good fellow, generous and public-spirited,” one of them said. “When his gang is gone he can do no harm.” Others were undoubtedly afraid to put the finger on him. At one mass meeting he had suddenly appeared with a drawn gun and single-handedly dispersed the cowed assemblage.

The gang had not fled; Smith had merely sent them out onto the trails, where they preyed upon the stampeders. By now the lawless element in the community, realizing that there was more profit and less risk in being part of a single organization, had accepted Smith as their leader and protector. By late February he was able to write to a friend in Seattle that “we have got them licked and mean to rule absolutely.” At the same time the following news dispatch appeared in the nation’s press: