Read an Excerpt
"That Fiend in Hell"
Soapy Smith in Legend
By Catherine Holder Spude UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2012 University of Oklahoma Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-8820-1
CHAPTER 1
Conceived in Lawlessness
The town of Skagway was conceived in lawlessness and nurtured in anarchy.
Pierre Berton, Klondike Fever
Critical to Soapy Smith's legend is the premise that before July 8, 1898, Skagway was a town in which there was no law or order, and where chaos ruled. An examination of this, most basic principle requires going back to the beginning of Skagway's history.
Skagway was first used as a seasonal camp by local Tlingit peoples. They referred to both the river and the bay it emptied into by the word Shghaghwei, which means "wrinkled," or "rugged," and refers to the appearance of the water when the wind blows. Later stories applied the name Skugua to a beautiful woman whose husband insulted her. She disappeared into the side of a mountain in retaliation. When the cold wind blows, it is the icy breath of Skugua blowing down from the mountains. Either way, the word refers to the ubiquitous Skagway wind. English speakers would debate whether to spell the word Skaguay or Skagway until well into 1899, but the matter was first decided by the United States Postal Service on November 11, 1897, when it designated the Skagway post office.
* * *
Adventurer William Moore and his son, Bernard (Ben), came to the Skagway River Valley area in the fall of 1886 and settled in early 1887. The elder Moore anticipated a gold rush to the interior and envisioned building a trading post at the base of White Pass and improving a pack trail over the summit. As a Canadian citizen, William Moore could not make a legal homestead claim; however, Bernard, who was naturalized in 1896, could, and did. In 1888, Bernard posted a location notice for a 160-acre homestead, which he revised in 1896 by posting a notice for a trading and manufacturing site. Shortly thereafter, the Moores sold an interest in their homestead to the British investors, the Alaska & Northwest Territory Trading Company (A&NTT Co.), with the support of the Close Brothers Company, a London firm incorporated in West Virginia. At Skagway, the A&NTT Co. began constructing a lumber mill, wharf, and trail over the White Pass into Yukon Territory. In May 1897, the company sent its first workers—most of whom had British accents—to Skagway Bay.
As William Moore had foreseen, on July 11, 1897, the steamer Portland landed in Seattle with more than a ton of gold on board, all taken from tributaries of the Klondike River in Yukon Territory. Three days behind her, the Excelsior sailed into San Francisco boasting equal amounts of gold. On July 21, 1897, the S.S. Queen steamed into Skagway harbor bearing two hundred passengers wanting to cross the Chilkoot and White Passes and head to the Klondike regions. Within a week, several more ships from West Coast cities landed at Moore's Wharf, filled with passengers. Among them was a civil engineer from Oregon named Frank Reid.
Reid was born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1844. He and his brother, Dick, became orphans before reaching manhood and put themselves through college by laboring in the orchards and riverboats along the Mississippi River. They both got their degrees in engineering in 1873, at which time they headed off for the Dakotas, where they worked as surveyors. By the 1880s they had found their way to the Willamette Valley in Oregon, where Dick married and settled down. Frank came and went with various jobs, but always found his way back to his brother's home and family.
Reid came to Skagway on July 28, 1897, on one of the first steamers arriving in Skagway Bay, traveling with a Mr. Hilts, who wished to open a saloon. The first tasks he undertook for Hilts were to purchase flour and bacon and to tend bar while Hilts returned to Juneau to gather more supplies for his enterprise. By August 5, a committee of about a hundred townspeople came to Reid, knowing he was a surveyor, and asked him to begin laying out a townsite. He began his survey at the southeast corner of the town's largest store, Burkhard's Hotel and outfitters. This corner he called Lot 1 of Block 1. The hundred or so citizens who asked for the survey called this beginning point the corner of Broadway and McKinney Street, after Dave McKinney of their group. It later became known as Broadway and Fifth.
In his haste to plat Skagway, Reid brushed aside the Moore claim. A protesting Bernard Moore was allowed to fence off five acres around his cabin and pasture, which the citizens' "committee" asked Reid to survey and eliminate from the street grid. The A&NTT Co. was also allotted room for its lumber mill and access to the Moore wharf. To complicate matters, Bernard's father, Captain Moore (who had no rights to the claim), had initially given leases to the first businesses putting up tents on the Moore homestead. He was up on the White Pass working on the trail construction when the decision to stake a townsite was made. He returned to Bernard's claim aware of its questionable validity, but no contemporary sources mention him trying to stop the citizens' committee—just the opposite. He had a financial interest in the trail, the sawmill, and the wharf, and made good money collecting docking fees. In early July, he had placed an advertisement in a Juneau newspaper urging people to use his pack trail over the White Pass.
Captain Moore, who occupied a bunkhouse on one of the surveyed lots at the northwest corner of State and Fifth, was told he could stake that lot. No one seemed to pay any attention to Bernard Moore's claim to his 160-acre homestead, which included five buildings at what would become the northeast corner of Fifth and State. These prime lots would later become occupied by early arrivals such as attorney J. G. Price, steamboat captain J. M. Tanner, and by a structure that would become the city hall. Newly arriving townspeople ignored the larger homestead boundaries because of the mistaken impression that both Moores were Canadian and therefore could not homestead under United States law. Apparently no one believed Bernard when he said he was a naturalized American citizen.
On September 16, 1897, almost a month after the first stampeders arrived in Skagway Bay, Moore filed an application for the patent for 160 acres of land as a trading and manufacturing site under Alaska's homesteading laws, land that constituted about a quarter of the booming city of Skagway. It amounted to everything south of Eleventh Avenue, including all of the downtown businesses, which by that time numbered around five hundred. A total of 196 lots had been filed with U.S. Commissioner John U. Smith, for which he had collected fees of five dollars each, and each owner considered his claim legitimate. In addition, the U.S. Customs Office had exempted twenty-four lots from location, taking two entire blocks for its exclusive use. Moore's partners at the A&NNT Co., especially the British representative of the Close Brothers, E. E. Billinghurst, tried to consolidate their claim by building a bunkhouse in the center of Fifth Avenue at the corner of State, not on any of the city lots (see maps 2 and 3). This bunkhouse has long been confused with that used by William Moore, but it was a later building built for the employees of the mill. It occupied the middle of the street for over a year, and was not moved until fall of 1898.
Billinghurst pushed the Moores to fight for the questionable 160-acre homestead claim of Ben Moore. The fling of this claim—by lawyers paid for by the British company—stopped the location of town lots for over a month. Unsure how to proceed with allowing people to settle in Skagway, about a hundred merchants, in democratic fashion, held a meeting on October 9, 1897, to talk it out and come up with a solution.
They elected M. Klinkonstein, J. Allan Hornsby, and Frank Clayson, as a committee, which, in turn, hired attorney John G. Price to prepare a lawsuit to protect their interests in the townsite.
This citizens' committee was first referred to as the Committee of One Hundred and One in an article by The Skaguay News dated December 31, 1897. As early as the 1880s, citizens' committees in mining towns of the West had styled themselves "The Committee of [Blank] Hundred and One," depending on the size of their group, when forming to dispense justice in the absence of formal law and order (see Roger McGrath's 1984 discussion of vigilantes in Nevada as an example). Skagway's Committee of One Hundred and One was formed to protect the property rights of the merchants from the filing of a homestead claim by Bernard Moore—not to oust Soapy Smith, as the legend would later tell it.
Besides Klinkonstein, Hornsby, and Clayson, members of the citizens' committee included David J. McKinney, who chaired the meeting and for whom one of the main streets in town had been named; Thomas Ward, who would be important in negotiating the capture of bartender Ed Fay in February 1898, and in the capture of members of Smith's gang in July 1898; and David Samson. These last three men supervised the election of the committee of three men who eventually elected attorney J. G. Price to represent them in the lawsuit against Moore and the A&NTT Co. Membership would be fluid during the coming months, and would consist of whoever was currently active in city politics. Other members would include J. F. A. Strong, later to become editor of the Skaguay News (and eventually governor of Alaska); Captain J. M. Tanner, who lightered goods from ship to shore (and would one day be appointed a U.S. marshal); attorney Sam Lovell; and H. C. Bradley, C. B. Beeson, Henry Shea, and W. L. Berbee. Other players included William F. Saportas (a correspondent for an eastern newspaper), W. J. Rose, J. G. Goslett, Jacob Bloom, H. J. Foster, George E. Coes, Thomas M. Stephans, and Charles Sperry. These latter merchants, along with J. M. Tanner, would break ranks with Price in December 1897 and enlist the services of Emery Valentine of the Skaguay Wharf Improvement Company to bring another suit against Moore and the A&NTT Co. Importantly, too, the name of the group would change through time. Sometimes the members referred to themselves as the Citizens' Committee; sometimes as the Committee of One Hundred and One. At times, the newspapers would refer to a Merchants' Committee. It was all the same thing, a group of concerned businessmen who had originally become concerned about title to their lots.
On October 15, the day after the Committee of One Hundred and One formed for the purposes of hiring J. G. Price to bring a lawsuit against Bernard Moore and the A&NTT Co., the U.S. commissioner once again began recording lot claims in Skagway. He evidently found the decision to sue Moore to be a satisfactory legal way to allow people to continue developing the Skagway townsite, deciding that the courts would be the final arbitrators on whether the individual claimants or Moore could hold title.
In addition to processing the lawsuit, the Committee of One Hundred and One met again on December 4, 1897, to elect a city council. This council was charged with "originat[ing] measures for the material and moral welfare of the town; arrang[ing] for police and fire protection; look[ing] after the sanitary condition of the town and in short ... discharg[ing] every duty falling upon the shoulders of a city council of any incorporated city or town." Council members promptly appointed committees to take up each of those matters.
In 1897, Alaska was not a formal territory of the United States. It would not become one until 1912 with the passage of the Alaska Second Organic Act on August 24, that year. Before that time, it was a military district, governed by the U.S. Army and the federal courts. With no elected officials, the code of laws pertained only to the criminal code, trade, and land claims; there was no provision for the incorporation of new cities and towns. With the sudden onslaught of thousands of American citizens into the district beginning in 1897, Congress slowly responded with the creation of a Civil Code. By 1899, it created a code of laws for Alaska that allowed cities to incorporate and form and enforce their own ordinances. Skagway became Alaska's first city to incorporate in July 1900 because it already had a functioning city government, one that had been organized since December 1897.
The city council elected that December promptly selected a police force, which they called the Safety Committee. It should be noted that "Safety Committees," or "Committees of Public Safety," were common titles of militias during the American Revolution, being terms reserved for military or police organizations with no official authority. To the members of such groups, the title denoted public service, whereas "vigilante" had a negative connotation that the moral citizens of Skagway could not condone.
Just as the primary purpose of the Committee of One Hundred and One and the city council was to protect land owner rights, so the police force, or Safety Committee, was largely responsible for enforcing the rights of land claims. For the most part, the estimated seven thousand to eight thousand citizens of this northern port on the edge of the Alaskan wilderness relied on a handful of federal officials charged with enforcing customs law. These officials included the U.S. commissioner, John U. Smith (no relation to Jefferson Randolph Smith). He was stationed in Dyea, at the beginning of the Chilkoot Trail, four miles from Skagway by boat up the Lynn Canal, a perilous stretch of rough water when the seas were high, as they often could be in the winter. No trails or road connected Skagway and Dyea in the winter of 1897–98. A single U.S. marshal, John H. Shoup, served all of Alaska from his courthouse and jail in Sitka, then the capital of Alaska. He assigned one U.S. deputy marshal to Dyea and Skagway, whose name was D. H. McInness. With only one authorized federal law enforcement officer between tidewater and the Canadian border, it is quite likely that Deputy Marshal McInness would frequently call upon the services of the volunteer city police—the Skagway Safety Committee—when occasion needed.
* * *
Between the time it had published its first issue on October 15, 1897, and its final issue of 1897 on December 31, the Skaguay News placed advertisements for 136 businesses, including twenty outfitters, nineteen hotels, fifteen restaurants, and twelve saloons. This count occurs in only half of the twelve issues the newspaper produced during that time period (the only ones that survive), probably a very good sample of the more permanent merchants that had come to town. A round-up of the businessmen selling liquor without a license in December of that year indicated that there were actually eighteen saloons, not twelve. Obviously, a third of them did not advertise in the newspaper.
The 130 Businesses that advertised in the Skaguay News between October 15 and December 31, 1897
20 Outfitters and General Merchandise
19 Hotels
15 Restaurants
12 Saloons
8 Tobacco Stores
5 Shipping /Packing Companies
5 Real Estate Dealers
5 Meat Markets
4 Groceries
4 Clothiers, Tailors and Dressmakers
4 Blacksmiths
4 Bakeries
4 Attorneys
3 Doctors and 1 Dentist
3 Storage Companies
3 Coal or Wood Suppliers
3 Builders, Architects and Contractors and Painters
2 Stationeries
2 Games and Recreation
2 Barbershops and Baths
1 Photographer
1 Newspaper
1 Music Instrument Dealer
1 Laundry Cleaner
1 Hay / Feed / Grain
1 Hardware / Stoves
1 Furniture Store
On December 31, 1897, the Skaguay News boasted:
There is no more orderly town in the world than Skaguay.... There has been a nominal supervision exercised over the town by the Committee of One Hundred and One, a body of men elected by the people during the first great influx into this place. It was a sort of committee of safety or vigilance committee, but this has fallen into a state of innocuous desuetude, for the very good reason that there has been nothing for it to do. Law and order prevail.
In a district administered by military law and federal courts, the people of Skagway had gone about starting to resolve their biggest contention in the fall of 1897 through legal mechanisms and the American tradition of representative democracy. They had formed committees; they had, in the absence of constituted authority, elected a city council, provided committees to look into matters of civil concern, and gone about forming a relatively safe town in which people could live. For a community of almost five thousand more or less permanent citizens, little evidence outside of the Soapy Smith legend exists that Skagway was "conceived in lawlessness and nurtured in anarchy."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from "That Fiend in Hell" by Catherine Holder Spude. Copyright © 2012 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
