"New" photograph of Juneau Company Wharf, Skagway, Alaska, where Soapy Smith died.

JUNEAU COMPANY WHARF
"Skagway from Outside Wharf - (Third Wharf)"
Circa 1899
Courtesy of DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University

(Click image to enlarge)

erhaps one of the closest photographs showing the location of the gunfight on Juneau Wharf.

     According to the accounts the shootout between Soapy Smith, Frank Reid and Jesse Murphy took place about 60 feet inside the entrance of the wharf. There are stories of early residents of Skagway showing visiting friends and tourists the blood stains on the wooden planks where Soapy and Reid fell.

Are those blood stains?
Close-up of approximate location of the gunfight.
Circa 1899
Courtesy of DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University

(Click image to enlarge)

     

     Historian and publisher, Art Petersen came across this photograph while researching the photographic files at the DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University. We thank him very much for sharing this with us.

      In comparing photographs there is no doubt that the photo is of Juneau Wharf.

Comparison of matching structures.

(Click image to enlarge)

Juneau Company Wharf
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"A clever rascal in one of Shakespeare’s plays claims that “Some men are born great…, Some achieve greatness…, And some have greatness thrust upon them.” And some, like the imposing, contradictory, aggressive, charming, and unforgettable Soapy Smith–his watermarks all through the pages of the last chapters of the American West–have all three."

— Art Petersen, Alias Soapy Smith

AUGUST 16

1777: The Battle of Bennington takes place. New England's minutemen route the British regulars.

1812: Detroit falls to Indian and British troops during the War of 1812.

1829: 18-year-old "Siamese twins," Chang and Eng Bunker, arrive in Boston, Massachusetts for exhibition. They have been joined at the waist since birth.

1858: A telegraph message from Britain's Queen Victoria to U.S. President Buchanan is transmitted over the recently laid trans-Atlantic cable.

1861: U.S. President Lincoln prohibits Union states from trading with the states of the Confederacy.

1878: Lawman John Beckwith is involved in a shooting in the home of his father, Henry, who had killed his son-in-law, William Johnson, during an argument in the ranch house located in New Mexico Territory. John had tried to intervene and was almost shot by his own father. Earlier in the year John was among those who killed rancher John Tunstall, setting off the infamous Lincoln County war.

1896: Gold is discovered in the Klondike, Canada starting the Klondike gold rush. It is what draws bad man Soapy Smith to Alaska, and to his death. George Washington Carmack, Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie, discover the gold in Rabbit Creek, a tributary of the Klondike River, Yukon Territory. Carmack staked his claim, marking the beginning of the world's largest gold rush as thousands of miners poured into the territory. Word of the discovery does not reach the outside world until July of the following year, when the steamer Portland docked in Seattle with two tons of gold in her cargo hold. At the time North America was experiencing a severe economic depression known as the Panic of 1893. The rush literally ended the depression overnight. Of the tens of thousands who ventured north, Soapy Smith joined the stampeders, not to mine for gold, but to mine the stampeders of their gold.

1899: Outlaw “Black Jack” Ketchum stopped a Colorado and Southern train near Folsom, Arizona Territory. After robbing the train, conductor Frank Harrington fired at him with a shotgun but apparently missed. The two men continued exchanging shots and both men were wounded, Ketchum receiving buckshot in the chest, but he managed to escape. Ketchum was found the next day alive and propped against a tree. He was taken to Santa Fe where he was tried and hung on April 25, 1901.

1923: 20 members of the Denver Blonger gang are arrested in a raid that ends Blonger rule in the city. The Blonger’s were Soapy Smith’s successors to the underworld throne in Denver.

1924: Former Doolin-Dalton outlaw gang member Roy Daugherty, alias “Arkansas Tom,” is killed in a shootout with lawmen in Missouri.