Soapy Smith's wedding photograph, 1886

 

(Click image to enlarge)

can remember my father telling me that the portrait photograph (see above) was Soapy and Mary's wedding photo. The family stories have mostly turned out to be correct so I had no reason to reject the idea. However, I grew up with the concept of a typical long white wedding gown, so I always wondered about this photograph every time I came across it.
    I recently came across the Pat Garrett and Apolinaria Gutierrez wedding photograph and was floored in how similar it is to Soapy and Mary's, right down to the dresses. I would say that my question has been answered. There is no reason to believe that the photograph of Soapy and Mary is not of their wedding day. 

Soapy meets and marries Mary: page 104-106.

"Smith’s personal bravery was never questioned. He feared neither police departments nor things of the mining frontier. For twenty years he was the prize bunco steerer of the West and his bunco games were masterpieces of their kind…."

—Henry “Yank Fewclothes” Edwards
Alias Soapy Smith, p. 592.

JUNE 9

1790: John Barry copyrights Philadelphia Spelling Book, the first American book to have done so.

1860: Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter by Ann Stevens, is the first published "dime novel."

1872: Marshal William Brooks is wounded three times while arresting Texas cowboys in Newton, Kansas.

1876: Left Hand, a Hunkpapa Lakota Indian leaves the U.S. Army as a scout. He joined the Sioux and sixteen-days later (June 25) he fights against Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

1878: A posse comes upon the Sam Bass gang near Denton, Texas. A shootout erupts and one of the posse is wounded and two horses killed, but the gang escapes. Soapy Smith would witness the shooting death of Sam Bass in Round Rock, Texas.

1898: Gold being transported by Canadian officials to a ship in Skagway, Alaska. Canadian officials are fearful that bad man Soapy Smith is planning to rob it.

1898: Train and bank robbers, Pierce Keaton, Bud Newman and Bill and Jeff Taylor, stop a train outside of Coleman, Texas. Lawmen and armed crew-members, engage in a gun battle; Newman is wounded in the arm and Keaton in the leg. Keaton fires killing fireman Lee Johnson. The outlaws flee on horseback, but are tracked down and captured four hours later, minus Jeff Taylor.

1902: Outlaws Harry Tracy and David Merrill escape from the Salem, Oregon prison after a rifle is smuggled in to them. Tracy had been sentenced to twenty years and Merrill for fifteen. Tracy and Merrill soon have a falling out and Tracy shoots and kills Merrill. Tracy remains at large until August 6, 1902, when a posse surprises him on a ranch near Creston, Washington. Tracy is hiding in a wheat field with two bullet wounds in his left leg. He cannot stop the bleeding and cannot escape, so he shoots himself in the head.

1904: Outlaw and Wild Bunch gang member Harvey “Kid Curry” Logan commits suicide with a bullet to the head after being trapped and wounded by a posse near New Castle, Colorado. Two days previous he and others had robbed a train at Parachute, Colorado.