This is the story of Soapy Smith, the alias of Jefferson Randolph Smith. He is the man in the pauper's grave on my previous post. Here is his photo from Wikipedia.
The large gravestone memorial belongs to a city engineer named Frank Reid. After an altercation on the wharf, Reid shot Smith dead. Smith shot Reid in the scrotum and he lingered for 12 days before he died.
Townspeople were so angry with Smith that they left his body on the wharf for several days before burying him. At least, that's the story we were told.
Smith started his life of fraud while he was traveling around the American southwest. He had a fake statue of a "prehistoric man" that he charged money to see in Creed, Colorado.
"Smith earned his nickname “Soapy” with a more conventional confidence game. Traveling around the Southwest, Smith would briefly set up shop in the street selling bars of soap wrapped in blue tissue paper. He promised the credulous crowds that a few lucky purchasers would find a $100 bill wrapped inside a few of the $5 bars of soap. Inevitably, one of the first to buy a bar would shout with pleasure and happily display a genuine $100 bill. Sales were generally brisk afterwards. The lucky purchaser, of course, was a plant." From History.com
Smith pulled off a really cruel con using what he called a telegraph machine. He had a machine with batteries in it and had a man clicking on it in his "telegraph office". He told the miners he would send a telegram to Seattle for five dollars and after that it would go Western Union to their loved ones.
If they wanted to wait an hour or two, he would give them a reply from "home" for five dollars saying all was well and wishing them luck. He often made as much as $15 on this scheme.
If anyone bothered to follow the telegraph wire out of the building, it ended about 50 feet from the office.
Here is the news story about his death. In those days Skagway was called by its Indian name, Skaguay. This is from a site called Simanaitis Says.
According to the story we heard, the undertaker paid for the huge memorial to Frank Reid.
