Soapy Smith and the Alaska Gold Rush
To truly appreciate the impact the Alaskan Gold rush had on early prospectors, you don’t need to look much further than the legend of Soapy Smith. Jefferson Randolph Smith II was a legendary outlaw from the late 1800’s, and a very successful conman. His notorious gang of accomplices roamed the US from Georgia to Denver, swindling money from unsuspecting folk. His favorite trick was to set up a stall selling bars of soap, and to increase sales he wrapped money inside some of the bars, selling them off in a lottery style. The only lucky members of the crowd were his own henchmen, and this soap scam quickly earned him his nickname.
It was when the Klondike Gold Rush hit in 1897 that he left Denver behind and headed to Skagway, Alaska. He wasn’t particularly interested in mining himself, but with all those successful prospectors on the loose, he was sure to find plenty of pockets to lighten. He set up a successful crime empire in this small town, beginning one of the biggest money laundering operations the country had ever seen. He bought a telegraph business but didn’t have any telegraph wires but still charged townsfolk for sending messages, and had a haulage trucking company that stole the goods they were paid to transport and then drove off with empty trucks. He opened a saloon that ran stolen liquor and offered rigged card games, and his faithful gang spent hours roaming the streets preying on unsuspecting newcomers in their great hunt for gold.
Soapy Smith had only been in Skagway for one year before he met an untimely death, at the hands of a miner he had fleeced for nearly $3000. At the age of 37 he took a bullet to the heart and died instantly, although the miner, Frank Reid, also died in the shootout. He was buried outside the town cemetery, which was a customary method of dealing with criminals in those days.
Both graves are still there today, one inside the cemetery and the other several yards beyond, and they feature on most guided tours of Skagway as a reminder of the greed of the early pioneers.