While in Skagway, I learned about two characters from the gold rush days.  Jefferson “Soapy” Smith was known as the “King of the Frontier Con Men.”  We was born in Newnan, Georgia to a wealthy plantation owner and lawyer who, by the end of the Civil War had met financial ruins.  The Smith’s moved west.  By the time Soapy was 18 he was well on his way to becoming the best known confidence man in the west. 

In Denver and Creede, Colorado, Soapy had a major hand in setting up organized crime.  Eventually he moved to Skagway.  He got his nickname because he would set up a box on a tripod in the streets.  As people gathered, he would wrap paper money ($100-20-10-5-1) around several bars of soap.  He would then wrap the soap in plain paper.  Then he would sell the soap to anyone who wanted to take a chance.  With slight of hand, he would give them soap with no money, but to keep people interested he would have a couple of his gang members planted in the audience to open soap with $100 bills in it.  Worked into a frenzy, the audience would start a bidding war.

That was how Soapy got his name, but he did many other things to separate people from the money and gold the miners had brought back to Skagway from Dawson City.  Soapy had an office in Skagway called Jeff Smith’s Parlor.  People would go into the parlon where Soapy had a telegraph key which wasn’t connected to anyplace.  He would take money for his service of sending telegraphs which of course never went over the airways.

July 8, 1898, three of Soapy’s gang members cheated a man out of his $2,800 worth of gold in a rigged card game.  When the man balked at being cheated, the town formed a vigilante group and went in search of Soapy and his gang.  When they came face to face, one of the vigilantes, Frank Reid, and Soapy engaged in gun fire.  Soapy died instantly with a bullet to his heart.  Frank Reid lived for 12 days with a bullet in his groin.  The two men are buried close together.  Reid’s headstone reads, “He died for the honor of Skagway.”  The three gang members who bilked the miner of his gold received jail sentences and the rest of the gang dispersed.

There were a lot of women who came to the Klondike during the gold rush days.  One was Mollie Walsh.  She went to Skagway from Butte, Montana.  She worked as a waitress and was very involved in her church.  She had a run in with Soapy Smith, and because of the way his organized crime gang operated, Mollie moved north to Log Cabin (actual name of town) next to the Mounted Police station.  There she opened a grub tent, feeding the miners.  She met a man named “Trapper Jack” Newman who was quite taken with Mollie. 

She also met a man named Mike Bartlett.  She married Mike and they moved back to Seattle.  They had a son.  Mike’s business started to fail and he began gambling and drinking heavily.  Their marriage fell apart and she ran away with her son in tow.  Mike found her and he brought her back to Seattle.  In 1902, she tried to get the police to arrest him because he “abused her in all ways and threatened to do away with her.”   She withdrew her complaint.  A week later Mike chased her down a alley by their home and shot her in the back.  He claimed temporary insanity and was acquited.  Two years later, he hung himself.

Had it not been for Trapper Jack’s love for Mollie, she would have disappeared in history.  Jack commissioned a bust of Mollie and it has been placed at a children’s park in Skagway named for Mollie.

That is only two of the hundreds of characters who stepped upon the stage during the Klondike Gold Rush.  But I thought they were interesting. 

1.)  Street in Skagway, Alaska

2.) Mollie Walsh bust at children’s park

3.) On the road to Skagway.