15. Many of the western cities were already too corrupt for a new player
In Butte, Montana, Soapy cheated at cards in a saloon which was owned by the town marshal. Departing hastily, in San Francisco he found well-established operations of the type with which he was familiar. He also found his reputation had preceded him. A similar situation greeted him in Portland. Soapy was beginning to believe there was no way for a dishonest man to get a break when he arrived in Seattle in the summer of 1897. While there he turned his attention, as did so many others at the time, to the gold fields of Alaska and the Yukon. Smith had already visited Alaska once.
A trip to Juneau had been terminated abruptly when Soapy cheated a miner there, using the soap con rather than cards, and after being chastised by the authorities he was run out of town. He had also visited the town of Skagway, eight hundred miles east-southeast of Anchorage. It was a small, rough village of less than two hundred hunters, trappers, and prospectors. But it was on the cusp of a boom. Soapy decided that Skagway offered opportunities similar to those he encountered early in his career. With a half-dozen of his loyal men, he traveled to the mining camp via steamer, ready to once again con his way into a fortune and the control of a new town.
