Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (58 page)

“You’re a lot of cowardly rope-pulling sons of bitches!” he cried. “Now come on! I can lick the whole crowd of you.”

Silently the crowd melted away, as it had melted away so often before in the face of Smith’s guns.

Meanwhile, Judge Sehlbrede, a distinguished figure with his aquiline features and white mutton-chop whiskers, had arrived from Dyea. Together with some of the re-formed vigilantes, he called upon Smith and asked him to order his men to return the missing poke. Smith retorted that Stewart had lost his money in a fair game of chance and then went on to boast that he was backed by one hundred men “who would stand behind him and see that they were protected.” The judge told Smith that he could not afford to stand up for a bunch of thieves, whereupon the con man, pounding on the table, cried out: “Well, Judge, declare me in with the thieves. I’ll stay with them.”

Some of Smith’s own gang now started to lose their nerve. Even Old Man Tripp sounded a note of caution. “People are making such a stink about the job it would be wise to give the stuff up,” he told Smith.

This advice had a strange effect on the con man. With the entire town opposing him, with his own men wavering and calling for surrender, Soapy Smith turned stubborn. If he backed down now, he would lose his dignity, and this he could not countenance.

“I’ll cut the ears off the first man who makes a move to give it back,” he said.

The same morning he had a street-corner encounter with Reid and tried to provoke him to combat. Reid, who was unarmed, went directly to his cabin, got his gun, then strode into Smith’s oyster parlour and asked John Clancy to produce the dictator. But Smith did not appear.

By four o’clock – the deadline for the return of Stewart’s gold – an air of foreboding hung heavy over Skagway and a sullen crowd filled the street outside the parlour.

“There’ll be trouble unless the gold is returned,” a reporter for the Skagway
News
told Smith.

“By God, trouble is what I’m looking for!” Smith retorted.

As the bedlam increased, he strode to the door, rifle in hand, and announced in surly tones that he had five hundred men behind him, ready to do his bidding. The crowd fell silent at this warning, but for the first time in Smith’s experience it did not disperse. And so they faced each other for a few moments, the sallow-faced con man, burning now with an inner fury, and his fellow townsmen, who, just four days before, had cheered him to the skies. Then Smith turned on his heel, went back into his parlour, and swallowed some whiskey. It was the first sign of tension on his part, for he was a man who rarely drank.

By now the town was preparing for trouble, and a sinister hush fell over much of the business section as offices, shops, and saloons closed their doors. Some of the fainter-hearted members of Smith’s gang slipped quietly out of town, seeking refuge on the mountain trails and in the forests. From the dock area came an angry buzzing as from a nest of wasps. Citizens who had never uttered a peep against Smith since his arrival suddenly became brave and flocked to Sperry’s warehouse, where they made spirited speeches about
(a)
the evils of crime and
(b)
the money they were going to lose if travellers avoided their town.

The changed temper of the town impressed itself on Samuel H. Graves of the White Pass Railway, who was about to pay an Italian bootblack a quarter to shine his shoes that afternoon. A friend tapped him on the shoulder. “It’s hardly wise just now,” he warned and went on to explain that public feeling was running so high that a man with polished boots might easily be subjected to violence as one who earned his living by questionable methods.

Smith himself still insisted that he could bluff out the gathering storm, but the cocksureness and the calm that had been his stock in trade for so long were beginning to drain from him. He was drinking steadily now, and between drinks he was stalking up and down Broadway, rifle in hand, hurling challenges at the occasional passer-by. It was an ominous spectacle – the dictator of Skagway, defiant and alone, prowling the silent street like a caged and thwarted beast.

The gathering at Sperry’s warehouse, meanwhile, had lapsed into confusion, for it had been infiltrated by Smith’s own men, who had succeeded in bringing all business to a standstill. The meeting was adjourned and set again for early evening in Sylvester Hall.

By nine p.m. the hall was so crowded that the vigilantes were again forced to adjourn the meeting, this time to the end of the Juneau dock, where eavesdroppers could not overhear the proceedings. Four men, including Frank Reid, stood guard at the end of the ramp leading to the dock, while a chain across the entranceway effectively stopped each newcomer until he could be challenged and identified.

As the crowd gathered on the dock, Smith, in his parlour, edgy, irritable, and half drunk, decided at last to act. “I am about due to kill a man and I have lived long enough myself anyway,” he told a crony. A note arrived from Billy Saportas, the newspaperman who had been “covering” the meeting: “The crowd is angry. If you want to do anything do it quick.”

“I’ll drive the bastards into the bay,” said Smith.

He slipped a derringer into his sleeve, thrust a .45 Colt revolver into his pocket, and slung a Winchester .30/30 onto his shoulder. He moved west along Holly Street to State, which runs parallel to Broadway, and then turned south towards the waterfront, muttering that he would “teach these damned sons of bitches a lesson.”

Behind him, at a respectful distance, a knot of curious people followed. Smith swung his rifle off his shoulder and brandished it like a fly-swatter.

“Chase yourselves home to bed!” he shouted.

The crowd hung back, but did not disperse. About a dozen of Smith’s men swung in behind him, at a distance of twenty-five feet. The others had already fled to the hills.

John Clancy, Smith’s erstwhile partner, his wife, and his six-year-old son were out for a walk when Smith passed them by. Clancy tried to dissuade him from going to the wharf, but Smith was in no mood for chatter. He pulled the revolver from his pocket and pressed it against Clancy’s side.

“Johnny,” he said, “you’d better leave me alone.”

“All right,” said Clancy in disgust. “If you want to get killed, go ahead.” As the trio stepped aside to let Smith by, Mrs. Clancy began to cry.

The dock lay dead ahead. It was built like a causeway, set up on pilings over Skagway’s tidal flats and stretching like a long finger into the mountain-ringed bay. At the far end, in the bright evening sunlight, Smith could see the gesticulating throng of vigilantes. In the foreground, the four guards barred the way to the ramp.

Smith ignored them all but Reid, who was standing about one hundred feet from the dock.

“You can’t go down there, Smith,” Reid said.

Smith unslung the Winchester from his shoulder.

“Damn you, Reid,” he said, “you’re at the bottom of all my troubles. I should have got rid of you three months ago.”

The two men were now almost nose to nose, and as Smith levelled the Winchester at Reid’s head, Reid seized the muzzle with his left hand, pulling it downward, while he reached for his six-gun with his right.

“Don’t shoot!” Smith cried, in sudden panic. “For God’s sake, don’t shoot!”

It was over in an instant.

Reid squeezed the trigger of his six-gun, but the hammer fell on a faulty cartridge, and an instant later a bullet from Smith’s Winchester struck him in the groin, shattering his pelvic bone. Now both men fired again. Smith dropped to the dock, a bullet in his heart. Reid, wounded now in the leg, crumpled with him but fired again, striking the dying dictator above the left knee.

The two men lay on the ramp in a widening pool of blood, the one gasping out the last seconds of his life, the other in mortal agony. A scream cut the still air, from the lips of Mrs. Harriet Pullen, the hard-working widow who was out looking for one of her small sons and had passed the dock at the moment of the tragedy. One of the guards, a tough little Irish blacksmith named Jesse Murphy, ran up, seized Smith’s Winchester, and warded off his bodyguard of men, who had drawn their guns. They stood for a moment at bay and then, seeing the onrushing mob on the dock, fired a few aimless shots into the air and took to the hills. Sinclair, the Union Church pastor, who had been up the street when the shooting occurred, was one of the first to reach the fallen men. He looked at the corpse of the outlaw and muttered a simple “Thank God.”

Meanwhile, the vigilantes were running up the wharf at a full gallop, falling automatically into step as they did so, causing the entire structure to sway crazily.

Reid saw them and raised himself on one arm. “I’m badly hurt, boys,” he muttered, “but I got him first.”

The crowd threw their hats in the air and gave three cheers while four or five men raced off to a nearby cabin and commandeered a cot to serve as stretcher. They placed Reid on it and headed up the street for the Bishop Rowe hospital. In spite of his pain, Reid was in a state of high elation. He raised himself on an elbow and addressed the crowd that moved along with him.

“I got the sonofabitch,” Reid kept saying. “He may have got me, boys, but by God I got him first.”

A block past the wharf, the stretcher-bearers passed Reid’s cabin-office.

“Let me down, boys,” Reid said. “I want to take one last look at my cabin.”

Dr. F. B. Whiting, the surgeon on the staff of the White Pass Railway, whose construction had commenced only a few days before, was sent for. He arrived on a dead run, tore open Reid’s clothing, and exposed a hideous wound from which the blood gushed in great spurts.

“Rub my leg, Doc,” Reid was gasping. “It cramps! It’s killing me.”

The doctor rubbed as Reid urged him on.

“Rub harder! If you can’t rub it, get a big railroader to rub it – somebody that can rub!”

And thus Reid continued in his agony, crying out that if his gun hadn’t missed fire he would never be in such shape, while down at the wharfside the body of the fallen dictator still lay where it had crumpled. It lay there far into the night, unguarded and unclaimed, as the midsummer sun dipped briefly behind the mountains and the long shadows of the peaks crept across the tidal flats of Skagway Bay.

6

No
escape

Within a few minutes of the shooting, Skagway was in an uproar. Si Tanner, sworn in by Judge Sehlbrede as deputy marshal, ran up Broadway calling his townsmen to arms:

“I advise all good citizens to go home and get their Winchesters.”

Tanner himself borrowed a rifle from Captain William Moore and proceeded to deputize a posse of twenty-five vigilantes under Sperry to guard the docks and search the trails for Smith’s followers. He gave orders that every boat in port was to be tied up and prevented from sailing until the gang was corralled. The streets were soon alive with men armed with revolvers and rifles and some with coils of rope calling for a lynching.

Now Smith’s fleeing men came face to face with a frightening truth: there was no escape from Skagway. In previous encounters with the law, with posses and with vigilantes in the American West, they had been able to ride off across the bald prairie in almost any direction. But Skagway was a cul-de-sac, and they had not foreseen it. On the one side were the mountains, guarded by the Canadian Mounted Police; on the other was the cold sea. By midnight more than twenty of them had been captured and lodged in the log building that did duty as a town hall, and more were being brought in hourly. The following day, Saturday, with every saloon closed, Skagway was like a morgue. So great was the change in the temper of the town that lawyers who had worked steadily for various gang members now refused to visit them in jail.

Meanwhile, a squad of vigilantes went to the cabin of Deputy Marshal Taylor to arrest him for his obvious complicity with the Smith gang. The marshal, a barrel-chested, pot-bellied man, was hiding under the bed. His sobbing wife and two little girls, aged five and seven, pleaded with the men not to take Taylor away, but he went along without fuss and was lodged with the others in the town hall.

The “Reverend” Bowers, Old Man Tripp, and Slim Jim Foster had fled towards the White Pass immediately after the death of their leader and were holed up in the forest. They spent all of Saturday concealed in the thickets, living on berries and roots and sleeping on the damp ground while posses nosed through the woods seeking them.

On Sunday morning Tripp announced that he had had enough.

“They’re going to hang us,” Bowers warned him.

“We should have been hung twenty years ago,” the old man said contemptuously. “You’re young and maybe can do it, but I can’t. I’m going to get something to eat. I’d rather be hung on a full stomach than die of starvation in these goddam mountains.”

Tripp moved down the trail into town, walked into a restaurant, and ordered a meal. It was here that one of the vigilantes spotted him.

“I’ve ordered a good dinner and I need it,” Tripp told him calmly. “May I have it?”

The vigilante assented, but a threatening crowd soon gathered outside.

“They don’t look good to me,” Tripp said. “Will I be protected?”

The vigilante assured him that he would.

“Well,” Tripp said, “I’ll chance it,” and calmly proceeded with his meal.

That afternoon a woman spotted Bowers and Slim Jim dodging through the trees of the graveyard at the start of the White Pass trail. She called the trail guard who had been posted by Tanner, and the two were swiftly apprehended.

By Sunday night the news was spreading that Reid was under opiates and his condition growing worse. Sentiment was rapidly increasing, and a mob of about one thousand people gathered outside the makeshift jail crying for a lynching.

“Hang them! Hang the whole gang!” the crowd screamed. “Bring out Tripp. This is just right for his neck,” and men waved ropes already tied into hangman’s knots.

Tanner arrived and climbed upon a wagon to plead for order.

“Don’t hang the evidence,” he shouted. “Let law and order rule and we’ll get Stewart his money back. We have a lot of men inside who had nothing to do with the robbery. If you want to hang someone, hang me!”