Soapy Smith on Jeopardy

Would Soapy have made a good game show host?

(Click image to enlarge)

will take CON MEN for $400 please, Alex...

      March 25, 2014 will be remembered and treasured within the family of Soapy Smith. The date, and its importance, is permanently included in the ON THIS DAY calendar of events I publish at the bottom of each blog entry (scroll down). On the very popular TV game show, Jeopardy, Soapy's name came up in a question under the category Con Men. No one got the correct answer about where Soapy hid a little ball. The answer? Under a shell. As my good friend, Whit "Pop" Haydn write, "It pays to keep up with this page folks! It might one day help you on Jeopardy."  About five of my friends, all fans of Soapy, contacted me on Facebook and in emails, about the mention. You just know you made the big time when your name is mentioned on a TV game show...

 

Not the least amusing trait of “Soapy” Smith’s character is the eager interest which he takes in the preservation of law and order. The interest is, of course, not purely unselfish, for he realizes that crimes of violence create a sort of public opinion likely to be unhealthy for his own peaceful, if peculiar, industry. He feels that there are times when fine distinctions get confused, and therefore he is always foremost for law and order coupled with life, liberty and the pursuit of a sure thing. [San Francisco Examiner]

—Alias Soapy Smith, p. 493.

MARCH 26

1804: Congress divides the Louisiana Purchase into the District of Louisiana and the Territory of Orleans, and then orders the removal of all Indians east of the Mississippi to Louisiana.

1862: The Civil War, Battle of La Glorieta Pass, in New Mexico Territory, ends. It was called the "Gettysburg of the West." 1862: Union troops capture 50 Confederate soldiers in a fight near Denver, Colorado Territory.

1874: Rancher, John Iliff, brings in the body of C. M. Manchester, a cowboy who was killed by Indians near Cheyenne, Wyoming.

1879: A mob pulls Bill Howard, a convicted rapist, from his jail cell in Fort Scott, Kansas, hanging him from a lamp post, and then setting his corpse on fire.

1881: Outlaw Bill Ryan, of the James gang takes shelter from a storm in the White's Creek Store and Saloon near Nashville, Tennessee. He drinks heavily and is arrested. Jesse and Frank James learn of Ryan's arrest, and fearing he might talk to authorities, Jesse leaves Nashville with his family for Kansas City, Missouri, while Frank takes his family to Virginia.

1882: Frederic Remington's first nationally published illustration, “Cowboys of Arizona,” appears in Harper's Weekly.

1884: Charles Kusz is shot and killed through the upstairs window of his home Manzano, New Mexico. Kusz published The Gringo and the Greaser, a controversial newspaper that attacked numerous groups, including Catholics, rustlers, the education system, etc.

1885: Eastman Kodak (Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company) produces the first commercial motion picture film in Rochester, New York.

1910: Congress passes an amendment to the 1907 Immigration Act that bars criminals, paupers, anarchists, and carriers of disease from entering the U.S.