King Con: The Story of Soapy Smith

Klondike Gold Rush began in 1897, he knew that the tenderfeet headed for northern gold fields would be ripe for the picking, and chose raw, lawless Skagway as his headquarters. In this bleak settlement at the head of Alaska's Lynn Canal, he constructed an empire that any Mafia don might envy. However, less than a year later, the town had had enough of Soapy. SOAPY SMITH. KING CON is the first new biography of this notorious character in many years, and Alaska historian Jane Haigh (WOMEN OF THE GOLD RUSH) has uncovered new evidence of Soapy's early misdeeds deep in the stacks of the Denver Library. This is a rip-snorting portrait of the rise to power of a man without a conscience. It reveals the strong-arm robberies, bloody trail murders, illegitimate businesses, rigged card games, and garish, candle-lit honky-tonks of the Gold Rush, illustrated with period photographs that show Soapy and his gang from their glory days to his autopsy in 1898.