by Howard Blum
Mamie, although usually shy, went next. When she sat down, Charlie had already made up his mind to intervene if the phrenologist started to cast aspersions on his wife. But there was no need. The blind man ran his hand over Mamie’s head just once and then said, “Here is a good-natured little somebody who cannot tell a lie or do a wrong.”
Then it was Charlie’s turn. He volunteered because he had grown intrigued. It wasn’t all guff, as he’d expected. In fact, Charlie had to admit, the phrenologist had said some things that were pretty accurate. Now Charlie was curious to hear what the blind man would say about him.
The phrenologist laid his hands on the top of Charlie’s head, found a spot, and began rubbing it as energetically as a bartender polishing a glass. “Ladies and gentleman,” he finally said after a good deal of determined rubbing, “here is a mule’s head.” When he went on to explain that his subject had a large stubborn bump and therefore undoubtedly was as stubborn as a mule, Charlie hooted merrily along with the rest of the audience.
But the phrenologist was not done. He added that the subject had “a fine head.” A head that indicated he would one day make a very successful detective.
A detective? Like some desperate character in a dime novel? What a darn ridiculous idea, Charlie silently raged; he might as well have predicted that I’m going to be president. Having some fun was one thing, but Charlie was touchy about anyone thinking they could play him for a fool. He got up so abruptly that the chair he’d been sitting in nearly toppled over. Whatever spark of interest he’d previously had in the performance had been extinguished. The blind man, he informed Mamie with a renewed conviction as he led her out of the hotel, was just another of the West’s army of con men, and not a very good one, at that.
YET CHARLIE soon would find himself recalling the blind man’s words. And wondering.
Five months after the performance in the Leland Hotel, Marshal Henry Brown, along with his deputy, Ben Wheeler, and two cowboys rode into Medicine Lodge, Kansas, and held up the First National Bank. They charged into the bank with their six-guns drawn, and when both the bank president and the cashier refused to open the vault, they shot the two men in cold blood. Then they grabbed whatever cash they could find and rode off. It didn’t take long for a hard-charging posse to catch up with them. Before sundown the gang was locked up in the Medicine Lodge jail. And later that night an angry mob stormed the jail and dragged the four men out. The cowboys and the deputy made a break for it, but they didn’t get far before they were cut down by blasts of buckshot. Henry Brown didn’t try to escape. So a noose was slipped over his head, and he was strung up from a nearby tree until his neck broke. They left him there, the rope squeaking against the bark of the heavy limb as his body swung in the night.
Just as the blind phrenologist had predicted.
FIVE
ear ye! Hear ye! Come gather round me, fellow citizens, and rejoice, for I am going to invite you to a feast where money is served with every course,” Soapy would typically bellow, as loud as a trumpet, when shortly before noon as he’d drive the light buggy pulled by his big bay horse up to the Union Depot clock tower. As a bemused crowd, mostly travelers coming off an arriving train or waiting for the next one to take them out of Denver, would begin to mill about, he’d hitch the bay to a post. With elaborate ceremony, a performer taking his place on center stage, Soapy would remove his tripe and keister—as he called the stand and suitcase that were the essential tools of his grifter’s trade—and set them up on the cobblestones. Finally, when he felt the moment was right, when the audience’s curiosity was running hot, he’d stand tall and speak to the crowd with an authority inspired by his memories of his old trail boss setting the day’s agenda for the outfit. “This morning,” he’d announce, “it will be my pleasure to distribute several hundred dollars among those who gather here.”
It was 1883, a time when Charlie Siringo was growing dispirited and George Carmack had in desperation joined the marines. But for Soapy Smith, life had taken a more promising turn. After near on two years in Denver, he’d transformed himself from the dazzled young pup who had stumbled into town. Now he cut quite an imposing figure. He habitually wore a well-cut black frock coat and had a somber black four-in-hand knotted tightly around the high collar of his immaculate white shirt. A wide-brimmed black hat sat flat on his head. His face was no less severe: a carefully trimmed coal-black beard, initially grown to disguise his youth, a thick ridge of black eyebrows, and deep-set, shining dark eyes—a grave and somber countenance. He was a man in black, the image calculated to suggest sober, ecclesiastical propriety as well as both position and expensively tailored success; and yet there was still a hint of menace. Soapy was dressed to do business.
Selling soap was his game, and playing to the crowd, he’d throw himself day after day into the task. “My soap is a universal blessing,” he’d proclaim with a booming and fulsome sincerity, “and my untarnished name its heritage. It will cleanse your conscience. It will relieve your life’s burdens. It’s more than meat and drink in my scheme of the brotherhood of man.”
Soapy, though, was too shrewd to bank on either his grandiose rhetoric or a circus barker’s promises to persuade customers to spend $10 or even more to buy a nickel cake of soap. Instead, he’d hit on a surefire inducement: money. In many of his bars of soap, he went on, a piece of currency, perhaps a hundred-dollar bill, or a fifty, or, worst come to worst, a ten or twenty, had been placed in the wrapper. As explanation for this startling generosity, he pleaded simple Christian kindness: “The profits from my soap sold in all lands will enable me to beat Old Nick and have 365 Christmas days every year.” Loaded down with his self-made bundle, Soapy now wanted to share his wealth. And “plain homely countrymen like yourselves,” he’d earnestly assure the rapidly expanding circle of onlookers, should by natural right be the recipients of his good fortune.
Of course, it was all a scam. But shameless, and a born showman, Soapy played his grifter’s game with unhesitating sincerity. “Now, my friends,” he’d say to the marks as he slipped into his tale, “watch me while I fold the bills in the wrappers.” He’d extract a hundred from his wallet; he’d hold it high over his head like a sacred totem; then, each small gesture a performance, he’d fold the bill once, twice, and for good measure a third time; and finally he’d insert the currency deep into the soap wrapper so that it was a well-hidden prize. He’d repeat the process with a fifty and, often, a twenty and a ten, until the moment when, his instincts told him, he had his audience at a boil. They’d be near to bursting with curiosity, eager to get a notion about how those bills might end up in their own pockets.
But Soapy still did not jump into his con. Instead, he paused; and the crowd turned quiet, too, in response. The silence was sudden, and as enveloping as a shared embrace.
When he finally spoke, Soapy found a tone that was pure delicacy. He knew that it was crucial to soften the concerns of anyone who was still feeling a bit ticklish. He needed to win the doubters over. “Gentlemen,” he’d say, “if there is any man here in absolute need, let him come up. And if I find him worthy, I will give him a stake.”
Some days a prospector down on his luck would shuffle forward, and Soapy, without hesitation, would hand him a bill. This was, he knew, the price of doing business. But it wasn’t just that. Soapy, especially when he was flush, had a generous nature. After all, he had done his fair share of hard traveling and could sympathize with someone else’s misfortune.
Regardless of whether a supplicant stepped forward, though, the crowd would never fail to appreciate this act of kindness. A thunder of respectful applause would break out. And that would be Soapy’s signal. The hook had been baited, and now it was high time to reel the suckers in.
“Well, I see that there are no other beggars here, and that you are all worthy men,” he’d say. But that left him with a dilemma, Soapy would continue on, but with a newfound hesitancy meant to suggest that he’d spent many a sleepless night grappling with
this problem. How was he to settle on a fair “method for distribution”? How should he choose the recipients of his cakes of money-laden soap?
The only sensible solution, he’d explain, answering his own question with a measured, Solomonic wisdom, was to allow people to bid for the bars of soap. “If your eye is keen and your brain alert, you will buy the cake wrapped in the money. While if you are slow and stupid, you will at least secure a valuable soap that will let you ride on its lather over the Rockies and through the deepest mines.”
“How much am I offered for this cake of soap?” he’d at last demand in a booming voice, all the time cradling the item in his two hands with an immense solemnity. He wanted the prospectors in the crowd to feel as if a shiny bar of gold had been put before them for their acquisition.
And so the auction would begin. Competing bids would be shouted out in loud, insistent voices, a rapidly building frenzy of greed. It would sound as rough and tumble as a bar fight. But it was all a sham. It was only Soapy’s confederates in the crowd vying with one another, just his men going back and forth, raising the price another notch.
When the bidding reached a lofty $40, that was the signal for the shills to sigh with regret and for Soapy to declare a winner. Jumpy with excitement, the lucky man would rush forward to claim his prize cake of soap. In a flurry, he’d unwrap the bar as the crowd watched with a shared anticipation. Lo and behold—a hundred-dollar bill! The winner’s whoop of delight would be loud enough to make many in the throng wonder if it was the whistle of an arriving train that had startled them. His joy was sheer ecstasy. And he could not give his benefactor—who, of course, was also his boss—enough thanks; encomiums that Soapy, gentleman that he was, politely dismissed with visible embarrassment.
This hundred, as the grifters put it, was the “convincer.” The bidding for the next bar was “solid”—the real thing. Only this time the winner would find nothing in the wrapper but a flat cake of soap. Soapy would reassure the crowd that this unlucky man’s loss was their gain; the bars with the hidden greenbacks were still waiting to be claimed.
And so it would go. More sales of soap at wildly inflated prices, more disappointed winners, more money going into Soapy’s pocket; and, before long, more disgruntled voices beginning to shout from the crowd that this was “a put-up job.” When the mood had sufficiently shifted, when the catcalls had turned truly threatening—and another of Soapy’s gifts was his ability to gauge the temperature of a crowd—he would promptly put an end to the festivities. “Since so few of you care for money,” Soapy, bristling with indignation, would reprimand the assembly, “then I will simply bid you good day.”
Now all pretense of ceremony would be gone. His tripe and keister would be packed up with a well-practiced speed. Then Soapy would jump up into his buggy, give the bay the whip, and practically gallop away across the cobblestones. He’d pay no mind to the rude and angry shouts chasing after him. He was already comforted by his confidence that he’d soon enough find a fresh crowd of marks to fleece.
WITH HIS soap game, Soapy struck it rich. New arrivals flocked to Denver each day, and the prospect of virtually free money never failed to attract a gullible crowd. He worked nearly all the downtown street corners. It was in the course of putting together this con, recruiting the shills who’d pose as feverish bidders and the intimidating hulks who’d provide the muscle to, as the grifters say, “blow off the mark” if the losers starting showing too much temper, that Soapy built his gang.
Since his days with Clubfoot Hall, it had been one of Soapy’s ambitions to be the fixer, the ringleader of his own crew. Now, as crooks and bunco men from across the West drifted into the shiny city of Denver, it wouldn’t be long before they’d hear about Soapy Smith. He was a man, rumor had it, who always had a con or two in play. And so they’d track him down in a saloon or at a faro table with the hope of finding work. Soapy, taking to his kingpin role, would make a show of buying the applicant a glass of “the best Irish” and in the short course of the drink would take measure of the man. If he liked what he saw and heard, Soapy would explain that he demanded only one quality from his associates: total loyalty. They must be willing to lie, cheat, steal, or, if the occasion warranted it, kill on his command. If that didn’t strike the prospective gang member as too onerous an obligation, he’d welcome the fellow on board. There was no contract, or even a discussion about how large a share of the weekly take they could expect. A firm handshake would be sufficient to seal the vague but tightly binding deal. If you entered Soapy’s world, the expectation was that there’d be honor among thieves—and bloodshed if there wasn’t.
The recruits became known as the Soap Gang, and what a collection of cunning, broken, and just plain criminal sorts they were. Reverend—the title, naturally, was one more con—John Bowers was their “grip man.” By nature a bookish individual, the self-ordained good reverend had put in some long but ultimately valuable time memorizing the fraternal greetings and handshakes of a large variety of secret societies. Now he would patrol the hotels and train stations looking for the telltale lapel pin or ring that identified the bearer as a Mason, or an Odd Fellow, or a Knight of Pythias, or any of a half dozen other orders. Offering the prescribed salutation and the appropriate handshake, the pious-looking man of the cloth would greet his fellow brother. In the course of the ensuing conversation, he would volunteer that he would be only too eager, one brother to another, to show his new friend around Denver. Inevitably, their destination would be a con or a rigged card game that Soapy had in play.
Syd Dixon’s role was to give the mark the breakdown. He’d pose as a man of means and he’d encourage the mark to invest, as he already had, in an opportunity that was too good to miss. It was a part for which Dixon was well cast since, like all the best cover stories, it was grounded in a small bit of truth. There had been a time when handsome, bright, smiling Syd, the pampered son of a wealthy father, had lived a cushy life back east as a well-heeled lawyer. His reputation as a ladies’ man had been famous. But in the twisting course of the long downward spiral that eventually brought him to Denver, he’d squandered his inheritance, gotten disbarred, and had acquired a taste for opium. These days his remaining Jim Crow eastern suits were shiny from wear, and he looked to Soapy to help him earn the money that would buy him his next opium pipe.
“Judge” Norman Van Horn was another disbarred lawyer, and, like Soapy, he had the smooth gift of telling the tale with eloquence. He also had a impressive knowledge of the law and, no less handy, was an expert on how to wiggle his way around it. His specialty was fixing juries and bribing the police.
“Old Man Tripp”—Van B. Tripplet was his proper name, but it had been long forgotten—was a white-bearded prospector with a weary face as creased as the seat of a hard-ridden leather saddle. He had spent a lifetime looking for gold and silver, but had never managed to strike the mother lode until he had hooked up with Soapy. Now he had great success as a roper, steering his fellow prospectors into Soapy’s conniving clutches.
Then there was “Professor” Turner Jackson. While the academic title was an unwarranted boast, there was no denying that the professor knew a great deal about mineral deposits and mines and, more important, how to talk authoritatively about these subjects. Prospectors new to the West would put great stock in his advice—and only realize too late that they were being gamed.
With so many cons in play, it was to be expected that a few of the resentful, gun-toting marks might come looking for Soapy with the hope of evening the score. But Soapy had enlisted a small army to protect him. The chief enforcer was a dull, brutish thug known throughout Denver as “Ice Box” Murphy. He’d earned the nickname (and a lifetime of ridicule) after his attempt to rob the payroll of a local meat market. His plan had been to sneak into the building in the dead of night and then blow the safe. In the darkness, however, Murphy had inadvertently fixed his sticks of dynamite to the door of the meat locker. The force of the explosion left sides of beef scattered about
, while the payroll remained locked tightly away across the room in the solid steel safe.
Working under “Ice Box” was a hard crew of veteran gunslingers. “Big Ed” Burns and “Texas Jack” Vermillion wore their holsters low on their hips, and were as coiled and dangerous as a pair of rattlers. They had fought beside Wyatt Earp in bloody Tombstone, Arizona, and the fact that they had survived was proof of their talent. “Shotgun” Tom Collins had earned his nickname from the cannon of a shotgun he toted; one blast could blow a man in half. While “Sure Shot” Tom Cady was a beautiful pistol shot; his draw was quick, and his aim perfect.
It was a very efficient organization. Soapy would set the cons in motion, and his gang would help make sure they came off without a hitch. The opportunities were enormous. “Denver,” as Soapy would boast with a larcenous pride, “never had a chance.”
BUT IT wasn’t all scheming and scamming. Denver was a bright, good-time city, and Soapy, accompanied by his deferential retinue, liked to strut through the downtown saloons and dance halls and have himself a hurrah or two. One of his passions was faro. Many evenings he’d join the other punters “bucking the tiger,” as the faro players called their sport, sitting at the long baize-covered table at Big Ed Chase’s Arcade. He didn’t play with chips, like the rest of the bettors. Instead, he’d dig deep into his pockets and pull out the day’s earnings. Then he’d wager twenty-dollar gold pieces on each draw from the box as if they were nothing more than bars of soap; which, of course, they might as well have been, considering how Soapy was making his money. But as fast as he was raking it in on the streets, Soapy was squandering it at the faro table. His huge losses had people talking. Soapy, however, never seemed to complain. A few hours before dawn he’d walk out of the Arcade with his pockets empty, nod a polite good night to Chase, and by noon that day he’d be out again with his tripe and keister.