Soapy Smith
Books
- A Ton of Goods Ledgers, Law, and the Klondike Gold Rush · Liszt Think
In July 1897, the steamers Excelsior and Portland docked with a ton of gold, igniting a stampede that would test the limits of human endurance and bureaucratic order.
- The Ton of Goods…ater describe the settlement as little better than a hell on earth. Fights, prostitutes, and liquor were ever-present. The con man known as Soapy Smith had not yet arrived, but the ground he would claim was already being cleared. Every tent sold something. Every merchant had heard the same…
- The Siege of the Scales…t Dyea and Skagway, the trails were unregulated. Men were robbed on the White Pass trail by bandits who operated in the fog and the forest. Soapy Smith would build his empire of fraud in Skagway within months, preying on the stampeders who arrived with money and without sense. The American…
- The King of Skagway…ground of Skagway’s streets and wharves was the space where the Mounted Police’s jurisdiction ended and a different law began. That law was Soapy Smith’s. It had its own jurisdiction, its own enforcement, its own economy. It was not a failure of government. It was the absence of government,…