Smith always preferred using his wits to his weapons, but he was not squeamish about resorting to mayhem if he felt he had to. One of those rare occasions arose when the Rocky Mountain News ran a hostile editorial that made reference to his family. Soon after coming to Denver, Jeff Smith had somehow found time in his busy schedule to court and marry a girl named Mary Noonan, but had scrupulously distanced her from his professional life. Few knew that he had a wife, but after the News’ article came out, he learned that she was being shunned by her strait-laced neighbors.

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Smith put his wife and their children on the next train to St. Louis. Then, armed with a heavy walking stick, he stormed over to the News printing company, intercepted its president, Colonel John Atkins, as he was entering the building and gave him a thorough caning. Atkins eventually recovered from a fractured skull, while Smith was tried for attempted murder. Soapy argued that if murder had been his intention, he would have rebuked Atkins with something more suitable than a walking stick. Smith was acquitted, but it was time to move on.

After some brief sojourns in Cheyenne, Wyo., Salt Lake City and Ogden, Utah, and Pocatello, Idaho, in 1892 Smith settled into the southwestern Colorado boom town of Creede, where he opened a gambling saloon called the Orleans Club (See related article in the April 2006 issue of Wild West Magazine). Soapy’s main competition in town was Ford’s Exchange, a magnificent combination saloon, gambling casino and house of ill-repute run by Robert Ford and his mistress, Nell Watson.

For a short time, it seemed as if Smith had met his match in Ford, the man who had shot Jesse James in the back. Then, on June 8, Bob Ford was killed by a shotgun-wielding drifter named Ed O’Kelley, for reasons that were never ascertained, but which strongly hint at it having been done at Soapy’s behest. Ford’s death did leave Smith in control of all but one of the 40 saloons in Creede, the last exception being the Denver Exchange, managed by none other than Bat Masterson.

In 1893, Smith returned to Denver and managed to reinstate himself among its ‘respectable’ citizenry. The next year, however, a high-handed new populist governor, David H. Waite, tried to clean up Colorado’s corrupt elements, starting with a thorough purge of Denver’s City Hall. The city officials resisted with the help of an armed militia made up of Denver’s lowest elements, allied with most of the police and firemen, under the overall command of Soapy Smith. The enraged governor sent the National Guard, complete with tow cannons and two Gatling guns, to Denver, resulting in a tense standoff in front of City Hall. Bloodshed was averted when the pleas of a delegation of Denver citizens persuaded the governor to relent and call off his troops.

The ‘City Hall War’ placed Soapy Smith at the peak of his popularity in Denver, but it fell almost as quickly as it rose. Eventually, Denver’s voters decided that it was time to reform their city, and a new set of officials who owed nothing to Smith served him notice that it was time to go.

Over the next few years, Smith drifted around. In 1895, he offered to raise a mercenary army of 500 American fighting men for Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz for $80,000, a deal that fell through when the canny presidente did some checking into the American ‘colonel’s’ past. In quick succession, Smith found himself equally known and unwelcome in Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Cripple Creek. He made a brief appearance in Butte, Mont., but things turned ugly when he was caught cheating at cards in the Clipper Shades Saloon, whose proprietor, Jack Jolly, was also the town marshal.

After finding San Francisco’s and Portland’s resident vice lords too well entrenched to compete with, Smith saw his fortunes at low ebb on July 16, 1897, when the steamship Portland entered Seattle Harbor. Aboard it were wide-eyed men with tales to tell of riches in the Alaskan Klondike.

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