Jefferson Randolph Smith arrived in Denver in the early 1880s from the Texas and Kansas circuit, where he had already worked the shell game, the monte table, and a version of the prize soap racket that gave him the name he would carry for the rest of his life. The game was simple in its mechanics and intricate in its logistics: bars of soap wrapped in plain paper, some reportedly containing bills of large denomination, sold from a street cart to men who had watched a confederate in the crowd peel back the wrapper and find a fifty-dollar note inside. The confederates were Smith’s people. The bills were Smith’s bills. The transaction was a performance staged for the benefit of strangers who believed they were watching a demonstration of random luck. Denver had enough strangers — miners newly arrived from the camps, travelers between rail connections, men with cash in their pockets and a brief window of unsupervised time — to support the operation indefinitely. Smith understood this before he arrived.
What distinguished the Denver years from the ordinary biography of a frontier con man was scale. Smith did not operate as an individual. He built a network. At its peak in the late 1880s and early 1890s, his organization included steerers who worked hotel lobbies and rail platforms to identify likely marks; shills who populated the games and demonstrations; a fake assay office that defrauded miners newly arrived from the hills; and a telegraph office called the Tivoli Club where men could send messages that never left the building and receive replies fabricated on the spot. The commercial notices in Denver papers of the period are studded with Smith’s operations in their legitimate-appearing forms: investment opportunities, employment offers, auctions of goods that did not exist, services that would not be performed. He operated in the open because the open was safer than the shadows, and because the open required that a certain number of civic figures be made comfortable with his presence through periodic arrangements of mutual benefit.
He maintained those arrangements with considerable skill. Police officers were paid. City officials received hospitality. Journalists who wrote critically about his operations found the copy spiked or the editor suddenly moved to a different beat. The system was not original to Smith — political machines in larger American cities had been running variants of it since before his birth — but Denver in the 1880s was a new enough city that the positions in the machine had not yet been claimed by established interests, and Smith was quick and intelligent enough to occupy them before anyone else thought to. By the early 1890s he was, in the practical sense, part of the city’s governance of itself. The difference between him and an alderman was primarily one of official acknowledgment.
In 1892 he extended his operations to Creede, the silver camp in Mineral County that had erupted the way Colorado silver camps erupted — overnight, chaotically, full of men with money and nowhere reliable to spend it. Smith arrived early and set up quickly, and for a period of months Creede was his town in roughly the same way Denver had become his city: the gambling halls paid tribute, the con games ran openly, and the men who might have objected found reasons not to. Bob Ford — the man who had killed Jesse James a decade earlier and was running a saloon in Creede — died there in June 1892, shot by Ed O’Kelley in an event that had nothing directly to do with Smith but that removed from the local scene the one figure with enough notoriety and temperament to have complicated his operations.
Reform came to Denver in waves, and the wave of 1895 was strong enough to push Smith out. A citizens’ committee organized, the police arrangements became too expensive to maintain, and Smith relocated to the Pacific Northwest and eventually to Skagway, Alaska, where the Klondike gold rush was producing exactly the conditions — transient men with money, no established civic structure, a population that arrived every week not knowing the territory — that he had spent fifteen years learning to exploit. He ran Skagway the same way he had run Denver, with the same network and the same methods, until July 8, 1898, when he was killed in a gunfight with a surveyor named Frank Reid who had helped organize the citizen opposition that Smith had, this time, underestimated. He was thirty-seven years old. His obituary ran in papers across the country, most of them using the word “notorious” in the first sentence, which is the newspaper language for a man who was famous for things the newspaper would rather not describe precisely.