A sure thing man

Though his legend is most often associated with nefarious activities in Colorado and Alaska, the man history knows as Soapy Smith spent a couple of impressionable teenage years in Round Rock and began his career as a con artist and crime boss in Fort Worth.

Before he was Soapy Smith,  he was Jefferson Randolph Smith II, son of a wealthy Coweta County, Georgia family that was rich no more after the Civil War. The family moved to Round Rock in 1876 where he secured honest work as a store clerk. Not long before he left Round Rock, Smith and a cousin reportedly witnessed the shootout that killed outlaw Sam Bass in July of 1878. The “crime doesn’t pay” lesson inherent in the incident was apparently lost on Smith. 

The two years he spent in Round Rock were his last law-abiding years; he would spend the rest of his days as a “sure thing man,” defined as one who makes bets he can’t lose. Words such as “crook” and “swindler” (and some we can’t print ) were also used at various times to describe Smith and his chosen vocation.

Jefferson Smith morphed into Soapy Smith by virtue of his most famous swindle, the “Prize Package Soap Sell.” He’d pick a busy street corner to set up a display stand featuring bars of soap. He would establish a friendly patter with passersby and then wrap some of the soap bars with paper money of various denominations. Then he rewrapped the bars in plain paper, mixed them with the others and sold them for 50 cents— about $12 in today’s money.

Somebody in the crowd always bought a bar of soap, unwrapped it, found money inside and announced the discovery at high volume and with the proper theatrics. Unfortunately for everybody else, the loudmouth was always a member of Smith’s gang, a shill. So were any other winners. The shills’ excitement invariably spread to a dependable number of unwitting dupes who at least got to keep the pricey bar of soap. 

In Fort Worth, Soapy assembled a gang of loyalists, each with a special skill—the shell game, three-card Monte, bribery, beating people senseless, whatever. The gang members shared profits, pooled their money, paid off cops, hired expensive lawyers and bribed politicians.  It was such a reliable template that Fort Worth ran him and his gang out of town.  

Soapy opted for the big leagues of Denver but maintained contact with his family in Texas. His younger brother, Bascom, was arrested in 1883, when he was 14, for trying to set fire to a Belton hotel building after being turned down for work there. Bascom later joined his older brother in Colorado where headlines such as “Smith Brothers Run Amuck Though the City” soon appeared. 

Two of Soapy’s sisters lived in Bell County for many years, including Eva Katherine Smith, who married Bell County lawman William “Cap” Light. Light, quick to anger and handy with a gun, shot and killed two men in the discharge of his Bell County duties. He ventured to Colorado to enforce Soapy’s version of the law in Denver and the Creede mining camps. He only killed one man in Colorado.  On a train back to Texas he accidentally shot himself in the leg and bled to death. Okay, maybe he wasn’t that handy with a gun. 

Soapy Smith’s ballyhooed reputation as “King of the Frontier Con Men” made it difficult for him to find dishonest work beyond Colorado, which, like Fort Worth, sent him packing. By the 1890s the frontier that had fueled his illegal activities was mostly gone but he found a new and wide-open frontier town in Skagway, Alaska, gateway to the Klondike gold fields, where rubes and suckers were as numerous as the gold nuggets and a lot easier to spot.  

Skagway didn’t exactly send a welcome wagon for Soapy’s gang. More like a posse. A group of hostile citizens formed a vigilance committee to run Soapy and his confederates out of town. Smith responded by announcing his own committee to run the other vigilance committee out of town. 

The breaking point came when a member of Soapy’s gang stole more than $2,000 from a Dawson City miner and Soapy refused to give up the robber or return the money. A small army met at the Juneau Wharves on July 8, 1898, to discuss their next move. Soapy, drunk and armed, decided to drop in on the meeting—a terrible mistake. His last words were: “My God, don’t shoot!”

Twenty years to the month after he saw Sam Bass gunned down in Round Rock, Soapy Smith met the same fate in Alaska. That he would go out in such a manner was the one sure thing in the sure thing man’s life.