4A COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL JUNE 7, 2017
O PINION
Offbeat Oregon History: Soapy Smith
A
ugust
1,
1882.
On
a
For The Sentinel
sunny street-
corner in the middle
of the rough-hewn, stump-strewn frontier town
of Portland, a fresh-faced, wholesome-looking
22-year-old fellow named Jefferson Smith, nattily
attired, sets up a big valise atop a portable tripod.
He opens it up. It’s full of little packages,
wrapped with paper. He pulls out his billfold and
extracts several banknotes: some ones and fi ves,
a ten, a twenty.
Then he looks around the crowd, and starts his
spiel. He has the most wonderful soap, he exults;
it’s lightly scented and possessed of wonderful
cleansing properties. Moreover, this soap, he as-
sures the bystanders, can make them a tidy sum of
money — if they watch him carefully.
He picks up the $10 bill and a cake of soap,
wraps the bill around the cake, deftly re-wraps the
whole thing in paper and drops it into the valise.
“Watch me closely, gentlemen,” he prattles —
or words to that effect — as he scoops up another
cake. This one he wraps with a $5 bill, and drops
it back in the valise.
Finally, out comes a $20 bill — worth $440
in today’s dollars — and into the bin it goes,
wrapped around a cake of soap.
Dozens of eyes watch the $20 cake as the young
man gives the contents of the valise a desultory
stir with his left hand, while gesturing emphati-
cally with his right as he extolls the wonders of
his product.
Then he begins his closing pitch. His wonder-
ful soap costs just 50 cents per package, or three
for $1. (One dollar in 1882 is worth about $22 in
2015.)
And in the crowd, watching with interest, is a
reporter for the Portland Daily Standard.
The presence of that reporter is how we know
about this street scene today. In his news story, the
reporter didn’t actually quote Smith’s sales pat-
ter; he simply referred to him as “a ‘fakir’ whose
tongue appears to be hung in the middle and run
at both ends.”
“During about 10 minutes in which (the report-
er) was watching him, he took in about $20,” the
article noted. “The whole business is one of the
most transparent frauds imaginable and should be
By Finn JD John
stopped.”
Apparently this advice was taken to heart by
someone in Portland, because less than 10 days
later, Smith had moved on up the river to Albany.
This article is the fi rst documentation of the
streetcorner swindle that would make Jefferson
Smith rich and famous — and would give him
a nickname: “Soapy” Smith, the late, lamented,
too-soon-martyred patron saint of Old West con
artistry, the most famous “bunco man” of his time.
From the prize-package soap racket he would
move on to ever more audacious criminal enter-
prises, eventually making his name as a political
fi xer and an organized-crime boss with multiple
businesses specializing in fl eecing “greenhorns”
— and anyone else he could get away with fl eec-
ing.
All that was in the future, though, on this day in
Portland. Young Soapy was still young and rela-
tively inexperienced, traveling from town to town
as an itinerant swindler of a fairly common type.
His skills were still rough, too, by his later stan-
dards. Toward the end of his Oregon run — late
October — he got in a fi stfi ght with some disap-
pointed soap buyers in Eugene. An older, smooth-
er Soapy would never have let that happen.
Soapy’s Oregon run is hard to reconstruct in de-
tail. It was early in his career, and as an itinerant
swindler, he didn’t keep very good records; nor
did the newspapers of the day take much notice of
streetcorner hawkers. But the kind of operation he
was running at that time was a turf-burner, mean-
ing that he couldn’t stay too long in one spot;
eventually the marks would get wise, and the city
cops would start dreaming up charges on which
he could be jailed. For a successful con artist, half
the game was knowing when it was time to disap-
pear in the middle of the night. Guess wrong, stay
just one day too long, and you could end up with
a new coat of tar and feathers, or worse.
Despite these challenges, Jeff Smith, Soapy’s
biographer and great-grandson, was able to place
him in Astoria in early July; Portland in late July
to early August; Albany in mid-August; Salem in
mid-September; and Eugene in mid-October. And
by Feburary of 1883, he was in Utah, having ap-
parently left the Beaver State for good.
But the Beaver State wasn’t done with Soapy
yet. Oregon still had one more role to play in
Soapy’s story — and it was a role that would not
have pleased him much, had he known.
In later years, Soapy would develop the
prize-package soap swindle to a science. Working
with a team of “cappers,” or secret confederates,
he would set up his valise — a specially built case
with a secret compartment inside, which would
enable him to sort the soaps on the fl y — and
start his routine, wrapping a dozen or so cakes of
soap with bills ranging from $1 to $100. The $1
cakes would occasionally go to a mark; the larg-
er denominations, though, would be pulled out of
the valise only when one of the cappers made a
purchase. The capper would joyfully “discover”
a $10 bill in his soap and go frolicking off with
it. Soapy would glibly point out that the $20 and
$100 package were still in play, and resume his
sales.
As the number of bars in the valise dwindled,
Soapy would switch to an auction format, and
people would bid up the price of the remaining
soaps. From there, it was simple enough. Near the
end of the soap supply, Soapy would simply sell
the $100 package to a capper, and the crowd, dis-
appointed, would melt away.
It was a few years after leaving Oregon that
Soapy Smith settled down in Denver to build the
fi rst of his three major organized-crime empires.
He seems to have realized that rather than living
on the lam, one step ahead of the law or the vig-
ilance committee, he could establish himself in a
morally fl exible town which a lot of suckers pass
through, and fl eece them while leaving the locals
alone and building their trust and goodwill with
copious local philanthropy.
Soapy built elaborate criminal empires fi rst in
Denver, then in Creede, Colo., and fi nally, after
the Klondike Gold Rush broke out, in Skagway,
Alaska. At their peak, these operations ran mul-
tiple crooked saloons and gambling dens, lottery
shops, auctions for imitation jewelry and watches,
and even fake stock exchanges.
But as he got older, Soapy’s bad habits started
to catch up with him. Throughout his mid-30s, his
drinking problem worsened, and when drunk his
temper was terrible. The morale and discipline of
his confederates — the “Soap Gang,” the cappers
and assistants whose loyalty was always Soapy’s
number-one asset — started to go to seed.
It all came to a head on July 8, 1898, on the
Juneau Wharf in Skagway. Three members of the
Soap Gang had swindled a miner out of $87 in a
game of three-card monte. Wanting more money
to play, he offered some gold dust from his bag,
which contained $2,700 worth; one of the robbers
snatched the bag and and ran.
A vigilante group demanded that Soapy re-
turn the money; Soapy refused, loyally standing
behind his men’s claim that the miner had lost it
all fair and square playing three-card monte. The
vigilantes were meeting on the pier to decide what
to do about it when Soapy loaded his Winchester
rifl e and went down to the meeting in an apparent
attempt at intimidation.
When he got there, he found the vigilantes had
posted four guards to bar any Soap Gang mem-
bers from the meeting. One of them, the only one
of the four who was armed, was an Oregonian:
Frank Reid, a teacher from Linn County who had
joined the gold rush a year or two before. (It’s
tempting to wonder if Reid might have bought
some soap from Soapy when he was working the
marks in Albany 15 years earlier; he was, at the
time, 48 years old.)
The three unarmed guards stepped aside for
Soapy, who was almost certainly liquored up and
in a bad humor. The fourth, Reid, did not. Soapy
went for Reid with the rifl e, either to clobber him
with it or shoot him; Reid pulled his revolver; and
second or two later, Reid was mortally wounded
and Soapy was stone dead.
Soapy Smith was just 38 years old when he
died. His passing was largely unlamented at the
time, but in subsequent years his career would
be refurbished in nostalgic memory in the typi-
cal manner of American bad guys from Jesse
James to D.B. Cooper. Today, remembering the
copious philanthropy that was always necessary
to ensure the support of the local population, he
is sometimes depicted as a sort of fast-talking
Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to
the poor. And the true story of Soapy Smith can
sometimes be hard to pick out from among all the
legends that have developed.
The world was probably a better place after
Soapy was removed from it. But it was, without
question, a less interesting and colorful one.
munity in which we have a home and employ-
ment and our friends and within a small nucleus
of mutual support and love. We each live as the
children of Earth. And the same sky shines over
all of us. We are all homebodies and we are all
global citizens. These are not opposing points of
view. These two perspectives are like two strong
legs you need to stand and move on, two hands by
which you grab the tasks of your life. But nation-
al governments, when they shift from serving the
needs of communities by serving as bridges to the
world to serving the needs of powerful interests
who stand to make a great deal of money in view-
ing the world as an economic battlefi eld, actually
isolate us from opportunities in green growth and
the economic possibilities available when we are
in communication with the world.
The religious tests of every nation are nothing
less than attempts to give the individual the big-
gest picture of a world in which the fate of the
individuals are not only linked to the weal of the
whole, but to the very stars above our constantly
rolling sphere of the seasons. Our families and the
world itself are the two eyes we look upon our
world with. If either of them are put out, it is said
that we have become blinded.
Leo Rivers
Cottage Grove
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Upset with snack choices at CG
Raceway
Last weekend my wife and I decided to go to
the Cottage Grove Speedway to see the big Me-
morial Day race. We are both in our mid-60’s and
are on low fat diets due to high cholesterol. We
are on a fi xed and limited income. The cost of
the race was $12 each. We brought with us two
bottles of water, a bag of nuts, an apple and a
few pieces of candy. As we were admitted, they
wanted to go inside my wife’s purse because they
said they did not allow anyone to bring in their
own food or beverages. We can’t eat most of their
food because it’s either high fat or high sugar.
We don’t mind paying for the price of admission
but we should not be forced to buy their food or
water. And I believe the 4th amendment protects
us from being searched and having our property
seized. This seems like plain old greed and it is
anti-American as well.
Thank you,
Edward Garcia
Global citizens
We have two eyes, which allow us to have
what’s called parallax view. With two eyes we
can see the same thing in the distance from two
different sides. This allows us to locate accurately
an object in the distance. We each live in the com-
C ottage G rove
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