My billet on the hospital ship Araguaya was very comfortable and my duties agreeable, but every time we reached port on the Canadian side of the Atlantic I had an impulse to desert the ship and become a stowaway on the hospital-train bound for British Columbia. It was there my wife and boy lived and I hadn't seen them for three years. However I got the chance at last to go without breaking regulations, for when I requested it, leave was readily granted me to stay ashore over one round-trip of the boat. This was supplemented by my taking the place of an absent conducting officer on the western train. So my transportation cost me nothing, except the congenial task of making myself generally useful to the returning soldiers.  
We had crossed the prairies, dropping many of our crowd at way points, and were climbing slowly along after supper up through a lonely stretch of mountains, when someone in the car where I was "visiting" gave it as his opinion that this would be a good piece of road on which to stage a train-robbery. This, of course, led to the mention of gun-men that they had known or heard of, men of the same ilk as Jesse James and Bill Miner. I contributed the story of Soapy Smith, the man who pulled off the most remarkably prolonged hold-up of which I have ever read. In the most approved dime-novel style he terrorized a town, not for a few days or weeks, but for six months.
 
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"You'll have to see the spot where Soapy died." The Skagway man who said this was rather proud of the celebrity which the bandit had brought to the place. I had come by the steamboat the nine hundred miles north from Vancouver, and was forced to spend a day in Skagway before going over the White Pass on my way to Dawson. A resident of the town was taking me around showing me the sights of this mushroom camp. It was humming with life and packed with people. The rush to the goldfields was then at its height. I judged by my friend's tone that he expected me to be deeply impressed with this particular sight. So down to the sea we went and out on the wharf. As we walked down he outlined the story of Smith's career in the camp. On the pier he showed me a dark stain, covering about a square foot, made by the life-blood of the man who for half-a-year forced Skagway to pay him tribute in hard cash. He was the leader of a group of men who robbed and cheated in wholesale style, and when it was necessary, in getting their victim's money, did not stop at murder. No one had attempted successfully to interfere with him. Reputable merchants were all intimidated into handing him their "life-insurance premiums" whenever he asked for them. His reputation as a "killer" was such that on the fourth of July, when good Americans celebrate their freedom, he rode at the head of the procession on a white horse! Very few complained loudly enough for Soapy to hear. Without question his nerve is to be admired. I have never heard or read in the annals of the west anything to equal his record in that Alaskan port. Desperadoes have ridden into towns, "shot them up," took what they wanted and got away with it. But this man and his gang lived openly in a town of several thousands and in the most brazen fashion ran the place for months, although he was known as a crook, gunman, and leader of a gang of thugs. Skagway, it is true, was simply an eddy in a stream running into the gold-fields. In their mad haste to get on and over the Pass people wouldn't take time to straighten out the morals of the camp. The Soapy Smith business was especially uninviting as something to mix into. "It isn't my funeral," they would say, "and I don't want it to be."
 
Jefferson B. Smith hailed from the city of St. Louis in the U.S.A. He got the nickname he bore because at the beginning of his career of crookedness he used to sell soap to some of the citizens of Denver, Colorado. There is nothing remarkable about selling soap unless you do it Smith's way. In the evenings he and a confederate would set up their "stand" on a suitable downtown street. All he needed was a high box for a "pulpit" and a smaller box behind it to stand on. This with a flaring torch giving an uneven light, some cakes of cheap soap, a couple of five-dollar bills and some change, completed the outfit. A little clever "spieling," kept up more or less all evening, and the usual crowd would gather out of curiosity. He would show them an unwrapped piece of soap all the while extolling its great merits as a cleanser. To show how disinterested he was in introducing this superior article that only needed to be known to become popular, he would say he was going to wrap a five-dollar-bill in with some of these cakes of soap. He would sell the soap at fifty cents each piece, and everyone that bought stood to get the soap and make four dollars and fifty cents in cash out of the deal. Further if they watched him carefully they would see him actually put the five-dollar bill in when he wrapped up the soap, although he wouldn't guarantee that it would always be found there when the purchaser unwrapped his package. Of course he deceived them simply by clever sleight-of-hand. Rarely would any money be found, but people liked to be fooled if it is done the right way. To get them "biting" he might let one of the bills go to a confederate who was seemingly just one of the crowd. It was a money-making business as a rule for there were ordinarily quite a number of "easy-marks" around. They got the soap anyway. So came the name "Soapy."
 
Well, it was the same old clever, crooked game in other bigger and bolder forms that he now worked in Skagway, with the gun-play in addition. When the steamboat City of Seattle came into port there on January 17th, 1898, Soapy and his "merrie-men" were among the passengers. He was a slight built man, only five feet seven inches tall, very dark complexioned with a full beard and moustache. He wore a round Stetson hat with a hard brim. He soon established headquarters in the "Kentucky saloon" and "Jeff Smith's Parlors." These were liquor saloons, not providing board or lodging, and running crooked gambling games in their rear, a fruitful source of revenue to Smith's card-sharpers. Then he and his confederates got busy on all sorts of other schemes to steal people's money. He had at least thirty followers, and there wasn't a dishonest trick known to the underworld of those days that some of them couldn't work. They wore Masonic, Oddfellow, Elk and other fraternity emblems that might help in working "confidence-games." They opened up Information Bureaus where newcomers could be conveniently sized-up and robbed then or later on. One member who was very successful in luring victims was Old Man Tripp. He had grey hair, a long white beard and a benevolent countenance. It seemed impossible to suspect him of criminal intent. Smith had most of the gambling-joints paying him a big percentage. He even had men clever at the old, old "shell-game" running it in the fine weather at relay points on the trail.
 
One of his favorite stunts for a while at first was to recruit for the Spanish-American war which was just ............