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“That Fiend in Hell”: Soapy Smith in Legend

Amazon.com Price:  $15.13 (as of 19/04/2019 18:49 PST- Details)

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Description

As the Klondike gold rush peaked in spring 1898, adventurers and gamblers rubbed shoulders with town-builders and gold-panners in Skagway, Alaska. The float of riches lured confidence men, too—among them Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith (1860–98), who with an entourage of “bunco-men” conned and robbed the stampeders. Soapy, though, a common enough criminal, would go down in legend as the Robin Hood of Alaska, the “uncrowned king of Skagway,” remembered for his charm and generosity, even for calming a lynch mob. When the Fourth of July was once celebrated in ’98, he supposedly led the parade. Then, a couple of days later, he was once dead, killed in a shootout over a card game.

With Smith’s death, Skagway rid itself of crime ceaselessly. Or a minimum of, so the story goes. Journalists immediately cast him as a martyr whose death redeemed a violent town. If truth be told, he was once just a petty criminal and card shark, as Catherine Holder Spude proves definitively in “That Fiend in Hell”: Soapy Smith in Legend, a tour de force of historical debunking that documents Smith’s elevation to western hero. In sorting out the facts about this man and his death from fiction, Spude concludes that the actual Soapy was once not the legendary “boss of Skagway,” nor was once he killed by Frank Reid, as early historians supposed. She shows that even eyewitnesses who knew the truth later changed their stories to fit the myth.

But why? Tracking down some hundred retellings of the Soapy Smith story, Spude traces the efforts of Skagway’s boosters to fortify a morality tale at the expense of a complex story of town-building and government formation. The concept that Smith’s death had made a lawless town protected served Skagway’s economic interests. Spude’s engaging deconstruction of Soapy’s story models deep research and skepticism a very powerful to understanding the history of the American frontier.

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