Smith had, in fact, already been investigating the possibilities in Alaska the previous year — only to be convicted of conning a sourdough out of his money in Juneau and returning to Seattle empty-handed. During a second trip north in October 1897, Smith checked out two towns, Wrangell and Skagway, and opted to stake his claim in the latter.

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Until July 1897, Skagway had a resident population of one — a pioneering prospector named Captain Billy Moore. In that month, the first 100 people arrived with settlement on their minds. They ousted Moore from most of his claimed territory, leaving him just enough of a spread to be part of the community, and began laying out a town site. One of the most prominent of that early contingent was an erstwhile surveyor named Frank H. Reid. Born in Illinois, Reid had settled in Oregon’s Willamette Valley in the 1870s. Normally a quiet man, Reid had been a schoolteacher, but he was also a veteran of the Bannock-Paiute Indian War of 1878, and had been acquitted of shooting a man in Oregon.

In February 1898, not long after Soapy and six of his cronies took up residence in Skagway, Smith learned that a bartender named John Fay was being held by a town committee on a charge of double murder. While Fay was being considered for a lynching, Smith and his men intervened, grabbed the suspect and hid him until legal help arrived (turned over to the U.S. marshal at Sitka, then Alaska’s capital, Fay served only a short sentence). Smith grandly proclaimed his belief in law and order, and also got a collection underway to raise $1,500 for the widows of the two murder victims.

The people of Skagway were thus given a strong, if superficial, first impression of their new resident as a man dedicated to civilizing their primitive community. In actuality, however, Smith was counting on their rough-hewn metropolis to stay the way it was for as long as possible. Outside of Skagway’s local marshal — who could be bought — there was a total of two lawmen patrolling the entire Alaskan Yukon River district. For Soapy Smith, Skagway was a badman’s paradise.

To the resident citizens of Skagway, smith maintained a popular image with a respectable variation on the personal charm that had gained him such a wide following of criminal henchmen. The Skagway correspondent of the New York World called him ‘the most gracious, kind-hearted man I’ve ever met. To know him is to like him.’ Those journalists who Smith could not charm, he bribed.

Establishing temporary headquarters in Clancy’s Saloon, Smith soon had two joints of his own — The Mining Exchange and Jeff Smith’s Parlor. The Exchange specialized in overpriced whiskey and crooked gambling, while the latter establishment was little more than an oyster parlor that also served as Smith’s office and headquarters — Skagway’s unofficial city hall.

Among the local lowlifes who enlisted in Smith’s gang were Yeah Mow Hopkins, a violence-prone veteran of San Francisco’s Chinatown tong wars, and Van B. Triplett, better known as ‘Old Man Tripp,’ a lovable-looking patriarch with a white beard and a black heart. Generally, Soapy encouraged his minions to limit their crimes to transient prospectors, laying off Skagway’s more permanent residents. Drawing on his proven powers of warped logic, Soapy excused their depredations on the greenhorns as a charitable act, discouraging them from pursuing their misguided quest for gold: ‘Infinitely better that any man who is such an infant as to try to beat a man at his own game should lose his money here in the seaport, than he should bet into the inhospitable Arctic, where such an idiot would lose it anyway or be a burden on the community.’

Smith also urged his men to go easy on the violence and avoid any killing, lest it stir up public resentment. While his henchmen were not inherently well-disposed toward restraint, they did emulate their leader’s underhanded ways for awhile. One resourceful villain opened his own travel bureau and sold maps to newcomers for a dollar — just to get a look at the size and contents of their wallets. Others roamed the trail with feather-stuffed packs on their backs, waiting to link up with real prospectors and gain the occasion to fleece them in a ‘friendly little game’ along the way.

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