Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (56 page)

   “Seattle, Feb. 25 – Officers of the steamer
Noyo
from Skagway today reported conditions of lawlessness at Skagway beyond description. Soapy Smith and his gang are in full control. Law-abiding people do not dare say a word against them. Holdups, robberies and shootings are part of the routine. Eight dead bodies were picked up on the White Pass on February 15.”

   On March 6 a man was sandbagged outside his home on Broadway, Skagway’s main street, and the following morning there were twelve robberies and a murder on the White Pass trail, the victim shot at such close range that there were powder burns on his face. Again the vigilantes called a mass meeting, and the militia, which had been reluctant to interfere in Skagway’s civic affairs, was called in. On March 15 infantry officers posted notices closing the gaming-rooms, and at one p.m. two companies of soldiers arrived from Dyea to enforce the order.

Emboldened, the vigilantes held a second mass meeting and, the following day, posted this notice:

WARNING

A Word to the Wise should be sufficient. All con men, bunco and sure-thing men and all other objectionable characters are notified to leave Skagway and the White Pass Road immediately and remain away. Failure to comply with this warning will be followed by prompt action.

(Signed)
The Committee of 101

Smith now moved to confuse the issue so completely that no one would know who represented law and order in Skagway. His strategy was to form his own vigilante committee, which he titled “The Committee of Law and Order.” (Significantly, the name was the same as that taken by the corrupt element which defied the vigilante movement in San Francisco in 1856.) Although Reid, for one, had been in Skagway from the very first, Smith shrewdly manoeuvred himself into the position of protecting the “business interests” of the town against “newcomers,” the business interests being the barrooms and gaming-houses. There were no less than seventy saloons in operation in Skagway, all of them outside the laws of Alaska, which forbade the sale of alcohol.

Within a few hours of the posting of the vigilantes’ warning, Smith placarded the town with posters of his own:

The business interests of Skagway propose to put a stop to the lawless acts of many newcomers. We hereby summon all good citizens to a meeting at which these matters will be discussed. Come one, come all! Immediate action will be taken for relief. Let this be a warning to those cheechakos who are disgracing our city. The Meeting will be held at Sylvester Hall at 8 p.m. sharp.

(Signed)
Jefferson R. Smith, Chairman

Smith addressed the meeting himself, his cool grey eyes, which seemed to bore right through a man, rubbering swiftly over each member of the audience.

“Fellow citizens!” he cried, while his cohorts, placed strategically about the hall, stomped and cheered. “We are here to form a real committee, not a half-baked, irresponsible committee such as we have been hearing about. We have the support of the business element of Skagway. We deplore present conditions, which are caused not by our own people but by riffraff from all parts of the world. We will protect ourselves, even at the cost of our lives.”

Having offered to sacrifice himself, if necessary, for the good of the town, Smith issued the following proclamation:

PUBLIC WARNING

The body of men styling themselves the Committee of 101 are hereby notified that any overt act committed by them will promptly be met by the law-abiding citizens of Skagway and each member and his property will be held responsible for any unlawful act on their part, and the Law and Order Society, consisting of 317 citizens, will see that justice is dealt out to its fullest extent as no blackmailers or vigilantes will be tolerated.

(Signed)
The Committee

The situation was now utterly confused. Half the people of Skagway saw Smith as the devil incarnate. Half saw him as a good fellow and public-spirited townsman trying to bring order out of chaos. Smith’s own men, under the guise of ordinary citizens, infiltrated the vigilantes’ meetings and produced further confusion and vacillation. The anti-Smith movement ground to a stop, the soldiers returned to their base at Dyea, and within a month Smith was being referred to as “the Uncrowned King of Skagway.”

4

Dictator of
Skagway

By April, Smith’s organization numbered somewhere between two and three hundred confidence men, harlots and pimps, thugs, gamblers and cardsharps, most of them operating under colourful nicknames such as the Moonfaced Kid, the Lamb, the Doctor, the Queen, the Blackjack, Fatty Green, Yank Fewclothes, and Kid Jimmy Fresh.

Each of these men acted out a role – like Bowers, the pseudo man of the cloth, and Old Man Tripp, the fake stampeder – but the greatest actor was Smith himself, who continued, for the rest of his days, to play the part of a respectable, public-spirited, and openhanded citizen. There is little doubt that towards the end of his reign the role took over from the real man, and that Smith sincerely believed himself to be the protector and benefactor of Skagway.

To all intents and purposes, he was the proprietor of an oyster parlour which served the best food in town. He had opened it in partnership with two of Skagway’s most prominent saloon-keepers, Frank and John Clancy, and it stood in the geographical centre of the business district, just off Broadway, with the number “317,” emblematic of the Law and Order Committee, emblazoned on its white false front. It looked innocent enough, with its polished mahogany bar, its fretwork screens, and its artificial palm trees, but into Jeff Smith’s Parlour the suckers were lured like so many flies by the spider web of his expanding organization. Behind the main restaurant and bar was a “pretty back parlour, as cozy as a lady’s boudoir,” in the words of the Skagway
Alaskan
, and it was here that the unwary were cheated or robbed of their money. Behind this was a small yard enclosed by a high board fence especially constructed with a secret exit through which Smith’s men could disappear with their loot. The enraged victim, rushing after his vanishing bankroll, would burst out the back door only to be baffled by an empty yard and a blank, unbroken wall.

Smith never involved himself with these affairs and at no time became entangled with the law. He sought, instead, to maintain the impression that his only interest in the law-breakers was to preserve such influence with them as would enable him to get them at times to make restitution to needy victims. But all the plunder snatched from well-heeled suckers was taken straight to his safe, where it lay until the furore was over. Smith took a fifty-per-cent commission, much of which he used to bribe law officers, conduct legal defences, or make a partial restoration to the victims to prevent them from complaining too loudly. The more direct methods of silencing a man were left to his bouncers – to the villainous Yeah Mow Hopkins, whose name meant wildcat in Chinese and who had once been a bodyguard for wealthy Orientals in the San Francisco tong wars, or to Big Ed Burns, who had been with him since Denver days and who made a habit of chewing cigars whole.

Smith was philosophical about the beatings that Burns or Hopkins administered to the swindled clerks and bookkeepers who came to his parlour and protested too loudly. “The greatest kindness one can do such people is to force them to get out of Skagway and to take the first boat home,” he once remarked.

This was Smith’s great propaganda argument on the street corners of Skagway and in the various places of business where his smooth tongue was seldom still: the sure-thing men were a public benefit to the town, he argued, for they not only kept business brisk by putting into circulation money that would otherwise leave the city, but also they performed an act of charity in keeping the innocent from going deeper into the Arctic wilderness.

“Infinitely better,” Smith would argue, “that any man who is such an infant as to try to beat a man at his own game should lose money here at the seaport, than he should get into the inhospitable Arctic, where such an idiot would lose it anyway or be a burden on the community.”

And then he would go on to discuss the universal corruptibility of character and to praise the public-spirited attitude of the saloon men and gamblers, while his flunkies applauded and the hangers-on nodded their heads sagely and said, yes, there was something to that, all right.

In some ways Smith was a generation ahead of his time, for, although he operated on a small stage, the tactics he used in Skagway were remarkably similar to those employed by various European dictators in the years that followed. All the basic elements were present: the hard and disciplined core of ruthless men who swiftly went to work under cover; the leader who presented himself as a champion of the people; the spy system and the secret police; the relentless propaganda machine; and, most important, the careful cultivation of the basic elements in the community – business, labour, church, and press.

The business community tolerated him and, in some cases, applauded him because he seemed to bring order out of chaos; as is so often the case, men preferred order to liberty, which they confused with anarchy. One of Smith’s first moves, on consolidating his power, was to make it a rule never to fleece or molest a permanent citizen of Skagway, but only transients. When some of his men sheared the youthful chief of the local fire department, he was aghast and returned the victim’s money, at the same time giving his followers a tongue-lashing. Moreover, he managed to exude an aura of law and order by halting minor misdemeanours and performing such incidental acts of justice as returning runaway daughters to frantic fathers.

When another group of outlaws tried to take possession of the toll road that George Brackett of Minneapolis was attempting to open up along the White Pass trail, Smith came to the rescue. He told the trespassers they ought to be ashamed of themselves: “The opening of that highway was being done at great expense and … without it none of them could have any money or get through the country.” When the gang refused to move, Smith told them that he would give them so many hours to get off the road “or I will come up with my Indians and throw your whole gang into the Skagway river.” He did not need to make good his threat; the outlaws had vanished by the following morning.

He made himself popular with the workingmen by taking the side of the stevedores in a strike that swept the waterfront. He distributed twenty-dollar goldpieces among them “just to see the fun,” as he put it, and the speech he made to the strikers was in the best tradition of labour agitation:

“Your cause is just – make ’em come through! These owners are clearing fortunes by the sweat of your brows. They’re making slaves of you. Stick for better wages, and if they won’t pay, let their ships lie at the wharves.… They’re raking in barrels of dough.”

With that he appointed himself strikers’ representative in negotiations with the dock-owners and continued to back the stevedores until they won the dispute.

He continued his policy, established in Denver, of outward support of the church, and there are two recorded instances of charity drives backed by Smith in the Skagway area, although there is some evidence that, at least in one case, all the money was stolen back within twelve hours.

He had very little difficulty in suborning the press. It was generally agreed that the editor of the
Alaskan
was in his pay. And when a prominent newspaperman, Billy Saportas of the New York
World
, lost his money at one of Smith’s gaming-tables and found himself stranded in Skagway, the dictator installed him on the staff of the paper at a salary of three hundred dollars a month. Saportas became his willing tool, describing him in print as “the most gracious, kind hearted man I’ve ever met” and adding that “to know him is to like him.” When Edward F. Cahill was sent to Skagway by the San Francisco
Examiner
to investigate reports of lawlessness, Smith handled him with delicacy and dispatch. He took Cahill under his personal wing and showed him the town. Cahill was charmed by Smith’s attention. “Soapy Smith is not a dangerous man,” he told the outside world. “He is not a desperado. He is not a scoundrel. He is not a criminal.…” Cahill exhausted his stock of superlatives in describing the dictator. He called him cool, fearless, generous, and honourable, and wrote that “he bitterly resents the imputation that he is a thief and a vagrant.” Before Smith was through with Cahill, the newspaperman had turned to poetry to eulogize him and had soon produced a flowery ode which extolled Smith’s patriotism and Americanism.

All this time Smith kept in touch with the world outside, and especially with the underworld, through a remarkable correspondence which ranged far and wide, from the Pacific northwest to Central America. He got letters from politicians, lawyers, professional men, journalists, and crooks. He got letters from El Paso, Texas, and from Guatemala, from confederates who had “bought” towns and civic governments. He got letters from Cy Warman of
McClure’s
magazine, which wanted to publish an article about him. He got a letter from a congressman in St. Louis enclosing two pairs of brass knuckles, and another from a political fixer named Mulgrew who wrote: “I can get police indulgence if anybody can.” He got letters from chance acquaintances asking for money, which often enough he sent as insurance against the future, and he got letters from old accomplices warning him of enemies in Skagway or advising him of suckers en route north.

“It seems you will be the next chief [of police],” one correspondent wrote from San Francisco on February 28, “and, if so, I am glad of it so that you can regulate some of the wolves that’s in our line of calling. They must have some man of judgement to regulate them or they will break up any place they try to go. There is one in particular who is strictly out for himself and I hear he is in your town.… I tell you, Jeff, he would put you and everyone else in jail to have the graft himself.”