Jefferson Randolph "Soapy" Smith II

Horsey sauce is the

the the sauce that comes with your sandwich at Arby's.

Earlier this year or last year, they tried to make a very fancy one that came in a wine bottle and they sent one to my wife who is a food writer.

And we had

a good

stuff mailed to you because of her jersey.

I've got a Cheetos soccer jersey that I love.

well this is the this is a beautifully like treat pilled household i salute you for it yeah what does it say on the jersey does it say libchansky it says cheetos rightly oh i see i want to put the name on the phone this is this is downstream listeners of a food bit in which i decided that i could nail my colors to the mast by going into a churrasco place uh and like physically like gluing or hammering uh the card into my table green side up so that they will be forced to continue bringing me meat no matter what I said.

They're honoring what I did.

Yeah,

look, everyone who works at the Churrasco signs a sort of Brazilian Bushido code.

The Brazilian Bushido code is just like a hoist crazy thing.

I hate it when my

Churrasco closes and I have to cut my top knot.

Anyways.

Hey, just quickly, before you welcome everybody who knows God's New Meyers, can I just highlight that it was, if you wanted to guess who brought up a Churrasco as a metaphor for plans that Nova has in the future, you can guess that it was me.

I took it to the Lucifone place.

You got more Lucifone with it.

Hello, Hondia.

Welcome to No Gods, No Mayors, the podcast about getting a little bit Portuguese and or Brazilian and or Angolan with it, and also about how weird mayors are.

I am your mayor for this episode, November Kelly.

I am joined by my beautiful co-mayors Matty Lepchansky and Riley Quinn.

Hello.

Hello.

Also, we do have to say, by way of caveat, that our beautiful Matty has been injured, has been stricken, has been rent asunder

by the cruel forces of New York University's

butchers.

That's right.

She was walking under...

over a big X and then a piano fell on her in a way that...

I didn't say which faculty.

I didn't even say a hospital.

You could have gotten like beaten up by the NYU film.

Yeah, no, no, no, no.

I'm just going to, I'm just going to come clear with everybody.

I had a lobotomy last week.

So

I'm just, I'm relearning how to talk.

So I might sound a little funny due to the lobotomy that I had.

So just,

that's all.

Which, of course, was thank you to the like Tisch School of the Arts or whatever it's called for performing that.

That's right.

It was a lobotomy that was performed in front of a live studio audience.

It was the surgeon was just someone learning the method.

Maddie's doing the method for a lobotomized person.

Getting a lobotomized person.

Dr.

Daniel Day-Lewis.

So

I've brought you, at long last, I've finally sort of been compass mentis enough to like, you know, do the notes for an episode.

And I've brought you what I like to think of as a fun one.

We are doing some real 19th century Wild West Deadwood Dodge City Hokum type bullshit on this episode.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

We are talking about Jefferson Randolph Soapy Smith II.

Oh,

what you have done is you have,

in the theater of the mind, you have walked onto the stage and you have presented me with a delightful plate of pecania.

This is what you've done.

This makes me very happy.

Yes.

I love this shit.

If we look in the notes, I've included a photo, which is a very, very old sort of 19th century photo of our guy who has like a full kind of podcaster beard, an alarmingly modern haircut.

He's wearing a sombrero in the most fucked up way I've ever seen.

He's got one foot up on the bar and he's drinking what I can only assume is a pint glass full of milk.

Yeah,

that's the whitest sarparilla I've ever seen.

And that's crazy to look at.

Yeah, give me a white monster.

And by monster, I mean sarsaparilla.

So he's got his hat is at like a

45 degree angle.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's like all the way to the back of his head, all the way up.

And it's like a completely flat-brimmed fedora, I'd say.

It looks like

a sort of orthodox icon painting of a halo.

It's beautiful.

And on here, in the most crabbed, fucked handwriting is the legend, Jeff Soapy Soapy Smith, killed July 8th, 1890 dollar sign.

Oh, he was killed by the rapper 1890 dollar sign?

God damn.

So we're going to get into this.

I really like this guy as the thing.

My other problem is, much like, you know, I do this podcast, I do, well, there's your problem.

And both of those are...

to some extent the kind of like international Cayman Islands Swiss banking money laundering network of turning Wikipedia articles into podcast.

That's right.

I don't like that to just be the one transfer, but I really have to say there are charmingly narrative Wikipedia articles on every single guy that I'm going to talk about here today.

And my other big sources are like kind of dubiously factual and terribly laid out local history sites.

So take this as a good story rather than a true one.

You know, this is not going to be the most eminently researched episode.

It's like those

old West local news sources always seem to me to be a bit like ancient Roman history, where they're mostly trying to make a point about a guy they hate rather than relate what actually went on.

Well, so Soapy Smith is a peripheral figure in the wider Batmasterson fandom, for instance.

So it's all things like that.

You know, he was like sort of briefly interacted with someone in the broader kind of doodaverse.

And so

every source that I've got for this was written clearly by like an older man wearing a bolo tie typing at a beige computer.

So can I just clarify that have you, because I like Maddie, I took your advice.

I did not read the notes because I wanted to have fun with the names.

Thank you.

And it sounds to me like this guy sort of wandered into or was peripheral in like in like the background of a photo of every famous Old West story.

Kind of, yes.

So it's cowboy forest gump.

Desert gump.

High plains gump.

Perfect.

I love it.

Pretty much.

But we'll get into it.

But before we do all that, this being a Wild West show, we have to introduce a segment I like to call Colonel Kelly's Patented Cural Tonic Purgative and Panacea Item Rodeo.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Roll and rode.

This is, it's never been more appropriate.

All right, so I brought the first item, and this is, I guess I'm going to invoke the Nucky Thompson rule.

Okay.

Where this is a person called Matt Carmichael, and Matt Carmichael is running.

for financial controller of the city of Mechanicville, New York.

Now,

Mechanicville, New York.

I invite you to look it up.

It's one of these upstate New York towns.

It's just north of Albany, I believe.

Yeah, it has a population of like 5,000.

It's a place that's in need of reviving.

And everyone sort of agrees that it's in need of reviving.

And the whole sort of upcoming set of like county comptroller style elections are about, okay, who's got the plan to revive Mechanicville?

And a lot of people are just like, oh, we're going to create jobs.

Oh, we're going going to, you know, convert the, yeah, we're going to do city beautiful stuff, like blah, blah, blah.

Boring, boring, boring, city authentic stuff.

Boo.

Yeah.

Matt Carmichael, even if you don't agree with him,

has a unique plan.

Okay.

Okay.

Which is why I'm invoking the Nucky Thompson rule, which is to say that he envisions himself having a mayor amount of power over the city of Mechanicville.

And I also want to say this was shared with me by a listener.

Thank you very much for sharing this with me.

So Matt, this is Matt Carmichael.com.

Not Matt, and he has just a link called Revive Mechanicville.

This is Matt-Carmichael.com.

Let's not get it twisted.

Yeah.

Matt wants to create a public brand for the city of Mechanicville.

He is, can I invite you all please to navigate to matt-carmichael.com?

Absolutely.

I'm already there.

Just quickly, could you navigate?

He envisions, number one, a new seal for the city,

which will celebrate his view of combining steampunk's Victorian charm and cyberpunk's cutting-edge innovation.

Okay,

I cannot get past this sentence.

It is driving me insane.

Cyberpunk's cutting-edge innovation.

Yeah.

What the fuck do you think, what cyberpunk media has he been absorbing?

Like reading Trans Metropolitan and being like, ah, the cutting edge innovation.

What the fuck are you talking about?

I love the crest, the seal that he's got here, which is so clearly like Dali 2 in the sense that it says all gemini mechanic villain y and both both sides have a weird curl on them the vtorque in hub um and then it's surrounded by a bunch of gears and cogs no no two of which are the same and none of which are kind of mechanically comprehensible um and then it's got like a steam locomotive with a cyber truck on there yeah which yeah the cyber truck is not properly angled alongside it so it looks like they're about to crash into into each other.

Yeah, we're gonna find out who's stronger: Steam Engine or Cybertrap.

Yeah, I will say if you if you right-click on any of these images and open them in a new tab, they are called Gemini-generated image.

So he gives it away.

He's got some like steampunk phone booths, AI generated.

He's got some steampunk parking meters.

My favorite is the sign that advertises

Two HALG customer parking.

And then it's got a steampunk brass pipe going from nothing to nothing, bolted on the top of the sign with a gear in the middle.

Yeah, I have to go wind the signs.

It's going to create a job as the sign winder because otherwise the sign stops working.

Yeah, you got to wind the sign every two HAUGs.

Ironically, doesn't the Russian G also mean three?

Let's say sure.

I'm pretty sure.

Two out of three parking.

I like what appear to be what I can only describe as um a line of steampunk port-a-potties just lining the street they look like suicide booths they look like suicide booths they all have air vents on the top

are they i think they're no those are those are supposed to be car chargers i think oh right they have

uh they have well they all say Mechanic-yo-e-ville on top of that.

You know what?

I love this guy, right?

Because he didn't have an art budget and he wasn't going to get an artist to do this.

And he wouldn't, although he should have and it would have been much more fun.

He wasn't going to learn to like draw to do any of this.

But more people should be saying, our city should have a theme, right?

Like more people should be like that kind of doomed Sim City game that really kind of ended out the franchise before the always online one, right?

Where it's like, we got to give your city a bit more character so you can apply like a theme to it.

Maybe you want to live in a steampunk city.

I don't want to live in a steampunk city.

I would run a mile, like I would move.

But you know what?

People do.

And if we could kind of corral, if we could quarantine the steampunks in upstate New York where they're no longer our problem, maybe on some kind of like prison island.

Okay, here's what I'll say.

I know you don't like steampunk, but what if we combined the charm of steampunk with cyberpunk's cutting-edge innovation?

That's what I'm thinking.

There's a kind of three-way like high school sports rivalry between the steampunk town, the dieselpunk town, and the cyberpunk town.

Yeah.

We're going to go

to the steampunk town after dark in my cyberpunk visor.

And I notice there's like a shadowy presence under the like fucking gaslights.

Oh, no, the guy that ran that

solar punk teen center was shot.

That's so sad.

The solar punks perished first in the punk war.

Me and my chooms are going to go prank the steampunk fraternity.

yeah it turns out they rolled over the solar punks like really really easily they were just sitting around like eating vegan yogurt the windmill caught fire it was it was deadly i mean uh so yes at the

now it seems as though um crime is down 100 but heavy brass pipe beatings

so what they've said um They've said textures and materials combine soft textures such as smooth bike paths and lush greenery with gritty stone and polished metal to reflect mechanicville's industrial history.

For example, cobblestone inspired by Gemini, isn't it?

Cobblestone-inspired pavers with embedded LED strips can line pathways, evoking a gas lamp glow while ensuring its sustainability.

So what if you put a gas lamp in the street?

Yeah, sure.

Why not?

Listen, he's doing stuff.

And

I support almost everything on his own.

What's crazy about this is that it's almost exactly like a

D and D setting I was in the middle of generating as a joke.

Is it legal for me to donate to this guy's campaign?

I'm going to check.

Yeah, I love also driveway first initiative.

Encourage residency.

Private driveways or a driveway first program.

This is an American Belt and Road initiative.

It's like we want to encourage driveways.

It looks like I can't donate to Mr.

Steampunk or like directly.

It has to go to the Saratoga County Republican Party, which I'm not going to do.

I just do wish him every happiness in putting his matte black iron racks with gold pinstripes styled with Victorian gear motifs around parking areas.

Imagine just being a person who lives.

Is he going to get to implement this vision?

Of course not.

But let's just

enter, let's engage in a little bit of imagination.

And let's just say maybe he does, right?

Imagine you are just like a normal person who lives in Mechanicville and slowly more like gear motifs just start appearing around.

More, it's just like, was there, was there always a steam pipe here?

I hate going back to my parents for Christmas because they live in the steampunk town and like it's always very fucking annoying.

I love this.

So go ahead, Matt.

I was going to say there's one image at the bottom that's what he wants the street signs to look like.

And there's an incredible sort of combination of things here.

This one is not a Gemini image.

I think it started as one and he tried to Photoshop it himself to add some signs.

Yes.

Which you can tell because they are not properly Photoshop transformed for the

perspective.

And one says historial society.

I love, yeah, you could go to historial society.

You could go to dot dot dot dot dot 483f.

You could go to mechanicville, which has a bike trail in like sort of a bike trail icon, but the icon is a guy riding a bike the wrongest I've ever seen.

He's becoming a bike.

Desperate.

There's also like a plumbing faucet on top of it.

Well, yeah,

you've got to keep the...

These aren't hand-wound signs.

These are steam-powered signs.

You don't need to wind these signs.

I love this.

Please make this man dictator of Mechanicsville.

I hope that he wins and gets everything.

If he wins, I'm going.

I'm going to go.

Yeah.

Live show.

i so agree with nova's point at the very beginning before we move on to the new york a minute and then go to the actual mayor um which is there should be more towns that are just one thing or in this case i guess two things like i'd love if there was like gangster town you know where every like in that one episode of uh star trek right like you should take

up to the federation see yeah i are the gangster town or like or or what about a town where like everyone's on a sports team and they decide everything you know, instead of like trials.

Yeah, 80s town.

Every town should have a thing like a gang from the warriors.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Things just generally, there's a disturbing lack of theming in everyday life.

Yeah.

And like, I'm woke.

I love diversity.

And by, what, I, what I mean by diversity is every town I go to should have a unique gambit.

There could be Nerdville.

there could be there could be nerdville you know there could be jockville and like separated separated by jockville from by a like a demilitarized zone enforced by un peacekeepers no unville

i would like you know what yeah move me to unville that'd be lovely yeah okay all right so okay i think maybe i think we may have uncovered another um uh maybe i don't know if this is an immortal axiom but it might be one of the one of the three one of the three recommendations

which is there need.

Well, maybe this is an axiom.

We only have one aesthetic principle at the moment.

Yeah, it's an aesthetic principle.

That's number two.

More theming.

Which is more theming is necessary in daily life.

Yeah, it's like it's unit's the opposite of fashion.

You need to match more than you think you do.

Yeah, this will be our second aesthetic principle, along with street trading is ugly and columns are beautiful.

I don't remember when we approved that one, but sure.

We will never go to street Trader City.

Column town, hungry.

But we love ancient Greece town.

Our research assistant for, well, there's your problem, has a market store.

We can't do.

Okay, sure, whatever.

But I've signed on to it now, so it's too late.

Yeah, it's a sorry, it's an immortal aesthetic principle.

It's based on science.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

I'm walking here.

Okay.

I'm walking here.

We have not covered this yet on the show.

Everyone in the world already knows it.

Every single person on earth called me when it happened.

Yeah.

You did start a podcast largely about the guy.

Okay.

Well,

to be fair to every single person on earth, and I know you're all listening.

Yeah, that's true.

Anyways, good night, sweet prince.

Eric Adams has, in fact, dropped out of the race.

Oh, I thought you were going to say about the Albania thing.

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

Well, we'll get into that too, I guess.

Eric Adams appeared, dressed up in Albanian clothing to, I assume, drive the three of us insane.

He's communicating with us.

He's talking to us.

He's going to fly to London and he's going to start like gesturing at the SS Richard Montgomery and like shrugging his shoulders theatrically like,

I don't know, maybe.

Doing a bunch of shots and insisting he's sober, playing basketball with Sarah Palin.

Yeah, he's going to say at the podium, like in reference to something else, be like, well, even Sarah Palin knows hoops.

And he's going to look right at the camera.

I, yeah, I am going insane.

All of us are going insane.

Sorry, it's, it's, I, I, I hate to reference a film, but it's like that short scene in Lord of the Rings where Galadriel is looking at Frodo and she's talking to the others, but speaking directly into his mind.

That is what Karen is doing to us all right now.

Yeah, we have a deep psychic bond.

I mean, people, we talk about the metaculous, right?

But like, we, you know, the kind of like mathematical, psychological thing that allows us to kind of like plot the course of the show.

But the metaculous comes with a kind of like downside, which is a deep psychic connection and even kind of precognition of the affairs of Eric Adams.

So really, what I'd like us to do is to really kind of like commune with the Metaculous to think about where we see him next.

And I'm really thinking ambassador to Turkey.

It seems likely.

Look, I actually think he might play a game of pickup basketball with sarah palin to raise money for something

personally eric adams united states ambassador to vatican city oh my god yes and and he'll say of course shrimps is bugs popes is mares

and and he's such a weird guy people wouldn't really notice they'd be like yeah it seems like something he would say

we know the three of us now yeah we know fixing eric adams on the first american pope yeah you thought you could get away at some point we will have to do like when it's all said and done and wrapped up a sort of like 2025 new york city mayoral election post-mortem yeah but as it stands now our our sweet prince has gone to bed it's very sad and uh we so we he's kind of the father of the podcast and we salute him Yeah, leaving us with no choice but to vote for Zora and Mamdanik, which, as you know, we were like very reluctant to do.

Yeah, what's weird is that a lot of people don't know this, but the three of us get a vote in every mayoral election on earth.

Oh, yeah.

It takes up a lot of my time.

Yeah.

I mean, it's there are special votes that are counted as really only as tiebreakers.

Like,

we're not re like, we're, we're, we're tipping the scale, but like, we're not, you know, don't worry, we're not undermining your democracy.

This is more ceremonial.

Yeah.

Yeah, we're only undermining it a little bit.

Beautiful.

Beep, beep, New York News.

Geeha, etc.

Thank you.

Thank you for those items.

What a beautiful way to start the podcast.

Can you hear, by the way, there's a little now the items are done that there is a sort of steam whistle going on outside the room I record with because it's a we've wound down the mechanical item bull that we've been riding in the rodeo

three-hour

item rodeo.

Three hour limit on the mechanical bull.

So we set our scene, first of all, in Georgia with the bad guys losing the civil war.

That's not the World West.

It's not.

Let's check it out.

It's important to note that.

So this guy, our guy, Sophie Smith, his grandfather was an actual plantation owner in Georgia, right?

And when

the war of northern aggression was won by Northern Aggression, he lost the plantation on account of how free labor makes it way easier to run a business.

And so he was like instantly impoverished.

I assume there may have been some other stuff going on there.

I don't know, but instantly impoverished.

And so his family are like kind of, you know, forced to move to Texas.

Here's a kid, his kid has a kid, and that's Jefferson Randolph Smith II, old secondary Jeff.

And this is, this is our guy, our subject.

And so he's, he's raised in Texas.

He is, he's born in 1860, right?

So he's like alive for the last of the Civil War and then grows up in like sort of reconstruction, such as they reconstructed it, Texas,

where he falls in with a bad crowd.

And the bad crowd is really just the first of a long series of, this is kind of like a Gatling gun of names.

I'm just going to fire at you.

Okay.

Okay.

I'm ready.

I have my name hit points.

I think I have maybe three.

I'm wearing a, I'm on the name shooting range, and I've got my blindfold on, so I can't see who's doing it.

My first guy, John Oberland Vermillion, also known as Texas Jack or Shoot Your Eye Out Vermillion.

Oh.

This is just a pyramid character.

Yeah, they're like three different names.

The reason why he's called Texas Jack is because he's from Virginia.

Now, here's something else, right?

Which is, as Nova may know, I love the movie Tombstone.

And of course, I note as soon as you said Texas Jack, I was like, I remember there's a big character in Texas.

I mean,

Texas and Tombstone, correct?

Texas Jack.

Yes.

This is why he's Desert Gump.

It's because Texas Jack in Tombstone was also one of Sophie Smith's boys.

Yes!

Yes!

That is the kind of thing I'm excited to hear about High Plains Gump.

Yes.

We got fatty Shoot Your Eyes Out Gray, who you may notice, shares a nickname with shoot your eye out vermilion.

Close.

One's plural.

It's just, oh, I hope I don't run into shoot your eyes out because if it's just the one, you know, I can wear an eye patch or something.

Yeah.

So,

okay, I've got it.

I've got it.

You see, shoot your eyes out first,

and then you see shoot your eye out second.

And then, or sorry, other way around.

My nickname is shoot out remaining eye.

Yeah.

If I go, if I go to shoot your eyes out and i got one eye only already i'm safe right yeah it's like look i'm shoot your remaining eye out johnson and you are gonna be safe shoot your shoot your eyes out is gonna go insane if you don't have a second eye for him to shoot right it's gonna it's just sort of like we're gonna fuck with this programming oh wait so i think i understand this riddle there's shoot your eye out vermilion shoot your eyes out Oberlin or whatever.

What has two eyes in the morning, one eye in the afternoon, and no eyes in the evening?

There's also troublesome Tom Cady, who carried a sword cane.

Troublesome Tom.

I mean, that's, I mean, I suppose that's quite a, um, there's quite a distance between shoot your eyes out and merely troublesome.

It's true.

And then we've got Icebox Murphy, who

got his name from doing a bunch of like bagpipe folk punk that was really popular in sort of like the 2000s.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

How did he actually get the name?

He got his name because he blew up what he thought was a safe, but it was an ice box.

And so he got showered and cold cuts.

He fucked up when the root chat.

He grew.

He blew up the wrong box.

This is Bun Town all over again.

How difficult are you making your ice box to open that a guy dying?

We got the Reverend Bowers.

And we got like a Professor Wilson as well.

That's the gang, right?

Sounds like a pretty bad crowd.

Yeah.

Texas Jack, Shoot Your Eyes Out Gray, Troublesome Tom Cady, Icebox Murphy, Reverend Bowers, Professor Wilson.

And these guys together are out on the Texas frontier.

And what we're dealing with here is a more specific and more fun kind of outlawry

that we can call confidence artistry, or as they called it at the time, bunko after a dice game that's very easy to rig.

Well, this is what

this is what Barnum was saying he was dead set against was Bunkum.

Was Bunkum.

Yeah.

This is a bunko man.

And so he works with his gang in Leadville and in Fort Worth doing short cons.

And his first and most effective short con is

just one of those things where you look back and think, oh, you really had to be stupid to fall for this.

He would set up a stall with a bunch of like five cent bars of soap, and he would make a big show of like wrapping a hundred dollar bill around one of the bars of soap and then putting it back in its wrapping.

Um, and he would be like, This is a bit character in Deadwood.

This is a bit character in Deadwood.

And he's like a bit character in Deadwood.

I have, he also palms the hundred back.

Uh, and he's like, I have, I have like, you know, put like five, 10, 50, $100 bills selectively throughout these soaps.

For $5, you can buy a soap.

There's a chance you get your money back.

There's a chance you win some more money.

Worst case, you've paid $5 for a 5 cent bar of soap.

You're not that much worse off.

Right.

And of course, the way this works is that he has a shill.

He has like a plant in the crowd.

who picks out like a marked bar of soap and wins a bunch of money and goes, huh, it really works, Dad.

And people, people go for it.

All the dumbest people in town go, yeah,

I will give you $5 for a bar of soap with nothing around it.

Just to be clear, when I said this is a bit character in Deadwood, I don't mean, oh, this is like a bit character in Deadwood.

No, there is a guy who runs around saying, soap with a prize inside, get your soap with a prize inside.

who gets like beat routinely like beaten up by Al Swearing.

This guy, he didn't get routinely beaten up.

What he did get was routinely arrested.

And what he did when he got arrested was go, okay, let me demonstrate how it works to the judge, does the $100 bill thing, very ostentatiously does not palm it, leaves the bar of soap marked.

The judge pockets the $100 and lets him go.

I mean,

I think that's, I mean, look, we know that that's how you talk to a judicial official.

Of course, yeah.

You're just like, oh, let me just bribe you very quickly.

And

very, very openly, yeah.

So he gets arrested doing this by a cop at one point who forgets his name and sort of pressed for time.

Why were people so stupid?

There was a lot of alcohol consumption.

No one was drinking water.

Everyone was like eating poison.

Everyone, okay, like if you, if you look at like food safety stuff in like America around this time, everyone's drinking milk with paint in it.

Like, I just, it's.

Everyone's wearing a hat three sizes too small.

They all look like Curtis Sler when they take them off.

They're all standing in the sun staring directly at it for seven hours a day.

So this cop can't remember his name.

And so he writes it down as Soapy Smith and renames this fucker for life.

Okay, that's relatable to me.

I'm always forgetting people's names and then people go on my phone as like, you know, that's a very characteristic part of the Soapy gang.

Yeah.

So he gets run out of Fort Worth and he comes to Denver in 1879.

Now, Denver is a great place to run a gang doing short cons because it's a cow town with a gigantic like union station in it.

And therefore, it always has this like constant movement through of rubes, right?

You got like a relatively small kind of permanent population, an extremely corrupt political structure, and just this washing through of like cowboys and tourists and morons who you can hustle.

You know, there's that problem where like AI is like 40% of the economy and we're going to crash out.

This was the problem, the panic of 1890 happened because the economy was like 75% rubes.

And

there's not an artificial general rube any day now.

Yeah, it's just the, there's basically just like thousands of turnip trucks every day that these guys are falling off of.

There's like the test for artificial general rube is can it go go into a saloon it hasn't been to before and get robbed?

So

he gets in, immediately starts bribing local officials, cops, immediately starts putting his people in positions of power.

And so he fills the lower half of 17th Street, which is next to Union Station, with these saloons and bars and brothels, all of which you are getting robbed in.

to the point that by the time he's built his empire, which only takes him a few years, there's there's this kind of expression in Denver that like you're not, your money isn't safe until you've walked the like, you know, like three miles from Union Station to like Lorimer Street

without having been sort of like dragged or persuaded into one of these places.

It's just a gauntlet.

These girls are.

Literally, yes.

Yeah, absolutely.

I hate having to walk from the Union Station to my hotel and it's just like McCabe's, Mrs.

Miller's, McCabe's, Mrs.

Miller's, over and over.

Well, you know what it is?

We put the station in the scams district.

Yeah, that's what it's like.

It's scam town.

It's themed.

Yeah, the historic scams district.

Okay, I respect it now.

It's themed.

You can recognize that you're in the scams district because of the gaslighting.

So it's gone.

So he ran everything,

like rigged poker games, which at the time were apparently called Big Mitt.

Not sure what that's about.

My favorite detail is one that is not explained in the source that just says, oh yeah, he ran a fake stock exchange.

I don't understand what that means.

Like just a bunch of made-up companies.

Just my job is to run around in a weird jacket and shout, buy, sell,

and hope that

a local rube wanders in so that a con man can like take it for all his money.

It's like, okay, so I sold all my shares of red herring at a loss, but I got in in the ground floor of MacGuffin Inc.

And so very, very rapidly in Denver, what we're entering into is a kind of a boss type situation, right?

Where like, you know, there's, there's a mayor, but he's the man, he's the mayor behind the mayor.

I will note that the real, like the ostensible mayor of Denver is named at this point Wolf Londoner.

That's not true.

That's the CEO for the fake stock exchange.

What are you talking about, Wolf Londoner?

What was

so he he ran all of this out of a massive saloon sort of come brothel which he named the tivotly club and supposedly it had i don't know if this is true or not but this is features in all of the kind of like local sort of walking tour things had a big sign above the door that said caveat emtor or caveat emtor uh buyer beware right which is uh which is if you're a rube you don't speak latin and therefore you're not going to notice the big you are about to be robbed sign over the door.

Oh boy.

Well, it screens out the non-rube.

You want only rubes in there, you know?

Yeah.

I have a quote here from the San Francisco call.

He started gambling rooms with every robbing device known to the craft.

The games appeared as fair as other games, but they were all crooked.

Nobody had a chance of winning, for cards were stacked and the most ingenious devices were used for skinning patrons.

If any visitor showed a disinclination to play, he was sold a gold mine which never existed or induced to invest in fictitious stock.

As

a last resort, he was quietly touched and thrown without unnecessary violence into the street.

I love the idea of like going into the gambling parlor and you're like looking around like, this is all a scam, right?

And someone comes up to you and they're just like, Yeah, unfortunately, yeah, but would you like to buy a gold mine?

Yeah, we only offer this to the people who are smart enough to realize it's a scam.

You seem like you're really not suggestible.

Congratulations.

You've passed the test.

Just doing a little bit of flattery.

It's like, oh, yeah, that's for the dum-dums.

Now, this gold mine, on the other hand,

it's also,

it is hilarious to be like,

oh, yes.

And again, because he employs,

he is more is more, right?

He is not leaving any stone unturned in terms of chances to rob someone.

Even if you say, no, that gold mine is a scam, you're walking out and then

someone's like, stock exchange, get your stock exchange.

It was like, all right, that's legitimate.

Let's go.

Yeah.

The fake solution.

Oh my God.

Ultimately, he's able to like run the city like this for a few years.

And he has kind of like total control over everything.

You know, he controls the police.

The police won't arrest him.

If one of his gang gets arrested, he comes and like bails them out.

And everybody knows that him, the mayor and the chief of police are like tight.

And so ultimately, the thing that really does him in is the goddamn news.

This is, this is a beautiful, heroic moment for the American press as a real fucking newsman named Colonel John Arkins, who runs this newspaper called the Rocky Mountain News, runs this kind of like series of exposés about him, which is a really kind of stirring monument to the power of journalism.

Soapy Smith's response is a really stirring monument to the power of violence because what he does is he waits until Arkansas comes out of his office, sneaks up behind him with a weighted cane, and hits him really hard over the back of the head.

Look, everyone has their own methods.

Yeah, what's mightier now, dude?

Hey, nice sword, fucking idiot.

I neglected to mention he also did this with his brother Bascom, which is just, yeah, I just like the name.

He has a dumber, more violent brother.

But yeah, he's like constantly getting in fights.

He's constantly getting drunk.

He's in all these saloons, you know, he's like still personally scamming people.

And he's still, you know, doing the heavy work of like, you know, beating a guy unconscious in the street with a cane.

And so the combination of those articles coming out and author of those articles or like publisher of those articles in injured in savage cane beating forces the city to do something.

He also has a friend who famously has a sword cane.

Yeah, he could have just had troublesome, fucking, troublesome Tom Katie do that.

Yeah, he could have shot one or both of his eyes out, you know?

Like, he had a kind of wealth of options at his disposal.

I can't believe I said, shoot your remaining eye out, Johnson, to shoot a man who had both his eyes still.

Yeah.

He was powerless.

Obviously,

obviously, he's devastated by this.

Like, he's sitting there crying like a little girl.

But so this forces the city of Denver to like, if Wolf Londoner is removed as mayor, terrifyingly.

And it forces the city to, they get him this guy, Platt Rogers,

who has a really like alarmed-looking Wikipedia page.

They called him the Iron-Handed Mayor.

Ooh,

is a cool name.

And so the Iron-Handed Mayor pushes through these anti-gambling, anti-saloon ordinances and so it's colorado there's it's like 1890 whatever um there's like um 1880 whatever excuse me there's like still a silver rush on so soapy is sort of run out of town but more accurately what he does is like a kind of capital strike but for crime he just moves all of his stuff out of town to the like the next mining camp down the railroad called creed colorado and he just buys up the entire camp declares himself mayor of it which makes him count as a suspect as a subject of the episode we did just run yeah he did it

play the chimp play the chime

ding ding ding

and so he's he's able to kind of like get his revenge on denver because Denver, Denver's economy is in large part based on getting, you know, like fucking cowboys and whatever in and getting them drunk.

But now all the saloons are out of town.

It's like Vernon again.

You just have to go to this one guy's kind of fiefdom if you want to get drunk.

He's the Pied Piper.

He's the Pied Piper of,

as Al Swarench says, hoopleheads.

Yes, yeah.

And it's like a pirate republic.

I have an anecdote that like...

Passengers on trains stopping there are told by the conductors to change clothes for creed, meaning to like hide your jewelry and like take off your Taipei and your pocket watch and stuff because the platform is just like crowded with thieves and con artists.

You got to go from the, from like the gangster town to like the thief town.

Everyone's wearing like a striped shirt and a like a domino mask.

They're all holding big bags.

I'm so glad that the

man who appears to be the train conductor has come into the car and said that they will keep my valuables safe in this sack from the many thieves on the train platform.

Oh my god.

He builds a new club called the Orleans Club.

Just a guy who cannot stop generating crime.

Like picking up.

No, he loves it.

He's criminogenic.

He is.

He builds this new club.

He buys a bunch of

curiosities, including a mummified dead guy who he exhibits under the name McGinty.

Was he he like, yes, seems Irish?

I don't know.

Just as a marketing gambit, I guess.

I think this is the point at which Bat Masterson is like one of the dealers in his

rigged casino games.

There is also, there's an assassination attempt against him, which he survives.

However, there are two consequences of this.

One is that Sopy Smith writes to, I think, his brother, complaining that they have shot off half of his moustache,

which I don't spatially quite know how you do that there sure are a lot of people who specialize in using a gun to perform very specialized facial alterations shoot you from i could shoot you from denver and still achieves the proper effect but that's that's one consequence i could shoot you from denver and still feminize one quarter of your face

getting getting the perfect like bullet hair removal yeah when people say mustachios they mean that you have two yeah he just had the one.

Yeah, shoot your remaining mustachio off.

Yeah, you're fucked if they bring in that guy.

But that's not the only consequence of that assassination attempt.

You're going to have a bare lip, Buster.

The other one, like, Soapy's fine, less the moustache thing.

His friend Joe Palmer had his thumbs shot clean off.

How?

What, like, by Buster Scroggs?

I don't know.

How are none of these guys aiming at center mass?

Well,

that's you on shoot your center mass clean off.

You know, that's a different guy.

Yeah, that's shoot your body off, McGinty.

Like, who do I want for this?

You mean the mustache guy and the thumbs guy?

How about the blinding triplets?

People don't know this, but the entire old west had access to vats.

I just...

And for the rest of your life, you're like kind of fucked because you got both your thumbs shot off in like a dive bar in a mining camp in Colorado.

Like in one shot?

Or did he...

I don't know.

Did he hit two?

Was he like, no, okay, at least I have my, I can shoot you with my off head.

Oh, no, my second thumb.

I want to come at you with both my thumbs as weapons.

You're going to be wind up exactly behind each other.

Not in front of me so much that I get shot.

They'll go through them into me.

They're off to the side.

Do not challenge this motherfucker to a thumb war.

He takes it very seriously.

My thumbs had to be registered as lethal weapons with the government.

Just trying to pull back the hammer on your revolver and finding your thumb shot off, going for your other revolver and having the same thing happen again.

Sorry, I hate to always be, we're always bringing it back to the Cohen brothers, but this is just the ballad of Buster Scruggs.

That's what I said.

It's like this is exactly a sequence of Muster Scruggs where he keeps shooting the guy's fingers off when he's trying to get his gun.

i it gets more cohen brothers right so like his main guy in creed is his brother-in-law a guy called cat light who used to be a cop good night um and he like tempts him to the dark side of like evil cop by making him deputy marshal this guy's got a great wikipedia page the headings on it alone are hysterical i'm just going to read this verbatim William Reddy McCann, a Creed pharaoh dealer with a killing history of his own, was drinking heavily one night.

At about 4.15 a.m.

on March 31st, 1892, McCann was on Main Street shooting out street lights.

Like recreationally?

Yeah.

McCann retired into the branch saloon when Light walked in and confronted him.

Light attempted to arrest McCann, who resisted.

Light tried to talk sense into McCann, but then suddenly slapped him in the face, knocking a cigar out of his mouth.

Both men drew their weapons and fired, five or six shots in all.

McCann fell to the floor, and his last words were i'm killed which is great i love that

factual you can't dispute it they got me uh the coroner's jury showed that light had used self-defense but light was so distraught over the killing that he quit his job and the gang oh my god he's like how do you but also how are you gonna be in the soapy smith gang if you can't like perform surgery on someone with a gun that's that's like that's like justified use of force now dude but like the rest of his life is like this too.

I really want like a little sidebar here on cap light.

Can we get some like cap light music?

Yeah, some, okay, so that's to Sam.

Cap music, normal cap music, but just lighten it up.

To lighten it up a little bit.

So

not heavy.

Not heavy cap music.

He's like, he is a Cohen Brothers character, right?

Because he goes back to Texas and he tries to get back into law enforcement by getting a job as a railroad detective.

And the railroad chief detective, this guy named Coggins, tell me that.

Is that like the name for a guy who worked with the railroad to have?

That's so good.

That's because she moved to Mechanicville.

So he, he finds Coggins drunk and, like, as his Wikipedia page says, because I like this phrasing, struck him repeatedly with his fists and pistol barrel.

Perfect.

Well, you don't expose your thumbs.

No.

Gets arrested for assault.

And then while he's being arraigned in court on the salt charges, coggins comes in and shoots him in the fucking head with a 44 revolver oh my god

light's wounds were pronounced fatal but he eventually fully recovered okay

like fallout new vegas how come guns are so weird in this story they're used to perform like barber operations, delicate surgery, and then being shot in the head with them is sort of fine.

Also, that's literally the structure of The Simpsons joke about being transferred to a better hospital where his condition was upgraded to a life.

Coggins was arrested for attempted murder, but never faced trial.

Yeah, everyone was too busy just gawping at like how he

everyone was too busy doing gun tricks.

They were too busy.

So, like, he survives.

The next year, he's going home for Christmas by train with a gun in his pocket, fumbles it shoots himself in the leg by accident and bleeds to death i love that cut of planes trains and automobiles

as a as a thread of life's rich tapestry just following that through makes me feel insane just

Just any kind of life review, if you believe in any kind of afterlife reincarnation, whatever, like

on the fucking wheel of Samsara, that is, that's like your karma being like, now let's do a silly one.

We're going to give you a gun-themed life.

Like, everything that happens to or around you is going to be gun-related.

But not the way you think.

Not always.

So, Sopy Smith, he's running this mining camp of Creed as a kind of pirate republic and as a kind of capital strike against the city of Denver.

It works because two things happen.

One, the silver dries up in 1894, and they premised the whole Colorado economy on this silver, so this is bad news.

The other is that Platt Rogers, the iron-handed mayor, is ruined because

he's trying to redevelop the city cemetery into a park, which it now is, but he contracted with an unscrupulous undertaker who was discovered to be stuffing adult corpses into child-sized coffins to rebury them faster.

sorry can you explain the mechanics of this con to me i i don't know i i really don't other than the fact that he was just just like trying to stuff a fully like adult corpse into a smaller coffin to save money this is the most slapstick story we've ever done this really wacky period of history i gotta say this is i i i the research process for this for me is find funny detail find funny detail find funny detail and then just try and connect those together um he yeah, so, so Platt Rogers, like,

my scam.

I, my scam is I'm gonna take these guys out of the big coffins and put them in the little coffins and then rebury them.

This is somehow making me a hundred dollars, which is a lot back now.

This breaks the iron-handed mayor, right?

Like, it genuinely

he made that campaign promise, which was that no one will ever have an ill family.

Bury an adult in a child-sized coffin.

Look, if there's one thing, read my lips.

No adults in child-sized coffins.

Okay, so are they trying to like save space in the cemetery by putting smaller coffins closer together?

I don't know.

How does that benefit the Undertaker?

I really cannot tell you, only that it was a scandal that ended the iron-handed mayor's mayoralty and ushered in a guy named Marion DeKalb Van Horn, the third mayor of Denver to appear in this episode.

So you're getting four mayors for the price of one.

Marion DeKalb Van Horn does sound like a very wealthy Knickerbocker who is here to just get his shit robbed.

Yeah.

Or maybe Dutch Vanderland.

You don't know.

Well, just put a bookmark in that.

But so Van Horn is the guy who like surrenders back to Soapy Smith because Denver's broke.

So they legalize gambling again.

And Smith comes back, he brings his gang back.

And right after he leaves, the entire town of Creed burns down.

Oh, the same night?

Oh, wow.

That's so weird.

Just a weird coincidence.

Yeah, there must have been it's student housing now.

There actually must have been something about him keeping the fire away, like physiologically.

I think

he was the fire chief.

And, you know, that's like, it turns out it's an important job.

Yeah.

So he comes back to Denver.

He sets up all of his old businesses again.

He is fairly openly a con man.

Like, he will give interviews about it.

He describes himself as an educator in the sense that like what you are getting out of this, out of being robbed by him, is an education, right?

And he says, you know, that he makes his living more honestly than any politician.

And

this is all working pretty well.

But about that silver, so the silver dries up, all the mine owners are trying to like lay off all of their miners.

There's this like huge labor struggle, which leads to the election of, to date, Colorado's only third party governor, an actual honest to god universal suffrage votes for women eight hour day armed struggle against the bosses socialist from the populist party named h davis wait whoa pretty cool

they called him they called him bloody bridles wait because of a speech he gave to striking miners in which he invoked the book of revelation to say i don't know maybe you got to kill him can we like clone this guy?

Can we get him?

Yeah, I really hope so.

Like, our quality of radical politicians has decreased so far from bloody bridles.

The idea with bloody bridles is that it's a metaphor from the book of Revelation that the blood is so high that your horse is wading through it.

See, I was going to say, like, this sounds like

you've run over a robber baron with your horse, is what this sounds like.

Yeah,

yeah, basically.

The only thing is, the successor to the populist party had H.

Davis Waite and an associate of his both sending competing telegrams as to

your populist party yeah so so he's he's into like the cause of organized labor he's into votes for women uh he's into like universal suffrage um like it one of the first things he does as governor is there's there's like a huge kind of like um like labor struggle uh and the the mine bosses tell him to like send in the like uh the state police and the militia and he does on the side of the miners right this guy rules

That's great.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's like,

I am joining the war on, I'm joining the war on wealth on the side of everybody else.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like genuinely, you, you can do a lot by electing like

a socialist as governor.

But so he also decides that he's going to, he's got to clean up Denver, right?

Like Colorado, not one of these states where the largest city is not the capital.

He has to live there as well.

And so to clean up Denver, that requires you to get rid of Soapy Smith, and it requires you to get rid of like all of his cronies.

Denver proves pretty resistant to this, right?

Like, so he tries the first thing he can control, he tries bringing in like new state prosecutors, but there's nothing for them to prosecute because none of the cops will arrest anyone.

And by the way, to be clear, this guy is like getting drunk and like beating people with a cane all the time.

And the cops are just being like, Yep, cool, how's it going?

Anytime he sees someone with a pen, he's like, Oh, I'm about to fuck you up with this cane to make a point.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Prepare for an education, motherfucker.

So Davis Waite's next move is to get Smith's cronies off the police and fire board and replace them with his cronies, but the cronies don't want to go.

So Davis Waite fires them and tries to install the new ones, which at this point, based on the like Colorado kind of state constitution, nobody actually knows if he has the power to do that or not.

But the cronies don't want to go.

He is trying to enforce this,

to put in his people.

And so Soapy, his gang, the denver police department the denver fire department the arapahoe county sheriff's office and the cronies arm themselves the sheriff drafts in 500 criminals out of the jails as special deputies they fill city hall with dynamite and then they sit there and tell him to come and get them This is like the end of the Blues Brothers, or it's just every cop on earth

descending on them.

And it's like, what a what an alliance what a coalition in favor of graft is like you've got the cops you've got the firefighters you've got the sheriffs you've got a bunch of miners with sticks of dynamite threatening to throw them out of the windows in favor of their right to rob tourists

look this is just the traditional life way of the short con criminal.

What it is, I'm envisioning a flag over Denver City Hall with like a sack with a dollar sign on it and come and take it.

Well, there's two flags, right?

There's the peacetime flag, which is just a hand reaching for a wallet, and then there's the wartime flag, which is the one you describe.

There's a quote from the Pegosa Springs News, March 16th, 1894.

It seems from newspaper reports that every Denver tough who is not behind bars is either a deputy sheriff or a special police officer.

So, Davis Waite, though he doesn't blink he calls in the national guard and so all of these guys are sitting in denver city hall for 10 days waiting for something to happen and the uh the colorado militia as it was then show up with a company of infantry two gatling guns and two cannon and aim them at city hall which again is full of dynamite why would you why would you put the dynamite on your position

That's what I don't get.

Irish just, it's the real kind of like, let's die.

Let's meet up and die right now

kind of decision.

I just want you to know if you shoot me,

I will explode.

You'll be fine, by the way, because you're a cannon.

You can't rely on guns to kill people at this point.

You can only rely on them to like do something kind of funny.

If you want to actually kill someone, you need the dynamite.

Yeah.

This is my throwing dynamite.

If you shoot us, we will die.

Unusual for now.

He's just barricaded himself in City Hall with what the news describes as a desperate crew of dry land pirates.

He's barricaded himself inside.

He's hiding behind a red barrel.

Yes.

Yeah.

The entire population of Denver is like out in the streets to watch this standoff.

There's a long quote here from the Aspen Weekly Times with a beautiful headline of just, it looks threatening.

It does.

Yeah.

Like the police around with shotguns.

The like the governor is talking about blood again.

And

genuinely, right, like the Aspen Weekly Times takes a like, just fucking do it approach.

They write, it would be a good thing for the purity of politics of Denver if Governor Waite should turn his batteries loose upon the city hall and wipe them out of existence.

Well,

we used to have a real press.

So

he's like going back and forth with the like general commanding the militia.

And ultimately, the general is looking at like all of these cops with shotguns and all these miners with dynamite.

And he writes to the governor, if a single shot is fired, they will kill me instantly and kill you in 15 minutes.

But if you say fire, we'll fire.

I mean, this a little bit goes back to the relationship between organized crime and the state, where it's like the state, if you do, if the state just doesn't blink, it will just keep coming.

Right?

Like, Colorado, if I think if Colorado's governor is killed by a con man,

probably the United States government would be like,

well, I guess we're a state and we should do something about this.

Yeah,

there is at this point a battalion of the U.S.

Army on the way to Denver.

But so, because like the governor's mention is in Denver.

He is down the street from them.

So they could just kill him too.

And so he hesitates.

And as more and more Denverites come to try and like lobby him to back down, for basically like the first time in his life, he like he vacillates and he does.

And there's a lesson here, right?

Because this breaks him politically, right?

Like he withdraws the militia and just goes to the Colorado Supreme Court.

And the Supreme Court rules in his favor in the sense that like he's allowed to enforce his candidates on the police and fire board, but not to have deployed the militia in the first place.

It crazes his popularity and he loses the next election.

Colorado has never had a third-party governor since.

I guess that's what happens.

You vote third party, you get a city hall full of dynamite.

This is the like short experiment with like Coloradan socialism, and it ended with one con man winning a stare down.

He is Western gump because this is just like an important historical moment for Colorado politics, right?

And he just brings this guy down out of nowhere.

Yeah, that quote, like, if you say fire, we'll fire is like still a, it's like a known thing in like Colorado history.

Um, ultimately, this, this does force Soapy out of Denver because his brother gets arrested.

Um, Botolf or whatever, I don't remember what his name was.

Bascom, Bascom, Bascom Jefferson Smith, or whatever.

They do, however, have a good few weeks of still making a living out of scams because they're all still special police officers.

So they just run cop scams for a while.

It's like they get senioritis for being cops, where they're like, well,

they can't take the uniform for another three weeks.

Why don't let's have some fun with it, you know?

Yeah, they just start like arresting people for ransom or like uh sort of like taking like new bribes.

But so eventually Soapy flees Denver.

This delivers Denver into, and this is Sleeper Hit, my best name yet.

It delivers Denver into the hands of Soapy's greatest con artist rival, Lou Blonger of the Blonger Brothers.

Oh, I saw them,

I saw them play at Ronnie Scott's.

Oh.

I love the Blonger brothers.

Lou Blonger could plausibly be another episode.

We just

pick up in Denver.

He invented the Blong,

which is when you write on your computer.

You want to know who Lou Blonger's second-in-command was?

There's a guy called Adolph W.

Kid Duff.

Good.

Good.

Good, good, good, good, good.

Oh, my God.

You were really right about the names in this one.

Oh, yeah.

A lot of names.

Kid Duff and Lou Blonger.

So Sopi flees the Blongers to Mexico.

It sounds like an Australian slang curse.

Get out of here, you blonga.

Well, Sopy flees the blongers, mate.

He goes to Mexico and he tries to sell Porfidio Diaz on creating a kind of Mexican foreign legion for American crooks.

He does also, he starts calling himself colonel at this point because he is, I guess, colonel of this kind of the crook legion that he's imagined.

He's colonel of the 41st Criminals Division.

Isn't that just sort of the plot of a sorcerer as the criminals,

little foreign legion?

Yeah, it's the plot of the dirty dozen.

But like,

Diaz doesn't go for this.

And so ultimately at this point,

this guy's, he's big into his metals, right?

Because at this point, the Klondike gold rush is starting in Alaska.

so soapy goes to alaska and he ends up he washes up in this uh kind of like mining town stop over in the middle of nowhere called skagway

skagway alaska

if you are british uh feel free to laugh at the fact that that skag is slaying for heroin oh okay so skagway is really the middle of nowhere and this is perfect he's just trying to run the same thing as creed again where he tries to run this his own little fiefdom which he kind of does he sets up a bunch of he sets up a saloon which becomes the kind of unofficial city hall.

My favorite scam that he runs in Skagway is the telegraph office.

Skagway is hundreds of miles from anything and has no telegraph wires connecting to it.

Like you would notice walking into town, but it does have a telegraph office.

And for $5, you can send a telegraph anywhere in the world.

And the wires just stop at the wall.

Uh-huh.

Well, they're buried, presumably.

Presumably.

Yeah, you got to assume that.

It's just a tax on situational awareness.

Yeah, if you walk into a building with no wires coming out of it, it was never your $5.

No.

By this point, it hits 1898.

He tries the military thing again for the Spanish-American War.

So he writes to the War Department offering to, again, raise a regiment of crooks.

And they go, yeah, sure, whatever.

So he starts, he like...

gives his men like rifles and uniforms, starts calling himself marshal and then parades like on the fourth of july down the main drag on horseback with a caged bald eagle how do you just get that can you just get that you can you capture a bald eagle in alaska they are

everywhere right it's not that hard it's not that hard

just snatch one out of the air so the the other skagwayans get really sick of his shit and they try and do like a vigilance committee.

They put a notice in the newspaper saying there's like a committee of 101 and like warning him to leave town.

So he puts a notice in the newspaper the next day saying that he has an anti-vigilance committee of 303 and that he's staying.

So an anti-vigilance committee, what he has like a sort of no-situational awareness committee.

Yeah, the pro-scamming front or whatever.

You know, it's really good to donate to them.

So

then,

at one point in the midst of this, a guy, July 7th, 1898, John D.

Stewart walks into town, having just been in the goldfields, and he's got like $3,000 worth of gold, which today is infinity money.

He runs into John Bowers, Professor Bowers, and Slim Jim Foster,

as well as Professor Jackson and Van B.

Oldman Triplett.

You know,

if someone gives you that as your name, I would say just don't.

You know what?

Don't trust any game of chance they ask you to, if someone has that many nicknames, don't trust any game of chance.

Yeah.

So he gets enticed into a game of three-card Monty, where he is, of course, swindled of his $3,000 in gold.

And he complains about this to local law enforcement.

Yeah, well, he shouldn't have played shoot your gold out, Johnson.

He likes steal your life savings, Johnson.

Yeah.

There is also some politics here in that the railroad is trying to go go through Skagway and they want Soapy out, but he goes to the U.S.

Marshal and then the U.S.

Marshal goes to like the judge and there are like suddenly there are warrants out.

Smith goes to court and he says that he sticks to his defense, that the boys who had won the money wanted in a fair game and they should keep it.

That he had a hundred men who would stand behind him and see that they were protected.

To which the judge tells him that he couldn't afford to stand up for a gang of thieves.

And Smith screams, well judge declare me in with the thieves and with that he passionately beat his table with his fist and left the room wow

your honor you know what i'm a proud thief and yeah tell tell me where in the law it's illegal to be a thief no for what you tell me for what um so the vigilance committee are holding a meeting about what to do about this on one of the wharfs going into the bay and soapy gets word that they're out there and he's he's got to act like now or never.

He's drunk, he's angry, so he grabs his Winchester rifle, he goes down there, and they've posted sentries-like armed sentries, because they know that there's you know, a gang of con artists.

He bumps into one of them, and in a really confused shootout, he shoots the guy.

And then another guy sort of points a gun at him.

Soapy delivers my favorite set of last words ever: My God, don't shoot, having just shot a guy,

is then shot.

Soapy dies instantly.

The guy he shot dies like a week later.

They bury him outside of the town cemetery in, if you look on his Wikipedia page, the jankiest looking grave I've ever seen in my life.

And that's it.

That's the, that, that is the life of Sopy Smith.

The rest of the gang are sort of like told, hey, we shot this guy and we'll shoot you too.

And they flee town.

Scrubbed out too soon.

His last words are basically, come on, you wouldn't shoot a guy with a gun, would you?

Just a gun?

Sorry.

The thing that I just am realizing after all this, looking at his janky grave, he was 38.

He did all this before he was 40.

Live fast, die young.

Imagine the old folks Konzi could have been running.

Imagine if he'd lived to see the invention of the telephone.

Oh,

my God.

Imagine if he'd lived to see like, what if Soapy Smith watched like the wolf of Wall Street?

He would have been so inspired.

Oh, God.

Short, weird, beautiful life of Soapy Smith.

You know what?

Okay, number one, in the manner that all of the mayors or many of the mayors you talk about are very bad, except for Frank Ney.

Yeah, I remember.

As far as we know.

I loved hearing about him, but my question remains as to why he always was like, no, no, we are sticking to little, many little cons.

We're never going to like

go for the big one.

We just love this.

Oh, I forgot a detail.

You remember Marion deKalb Van Horn, the last mayor of Denver who was like on his side?

Yeah.

Well, so after Sopy left town, Marion deKalb Van Horn died falling out of the window of his own hotel mysteriously.

Yeah, he's too sad.

He was sad his friend left.

He was sad his friend left.

Yeah.

Mental health can strike at any time.

Yeah.

Hey, hey, listeners,

check on your mayors.

Yeah.

Check on your mayors.

If you have a mayor in your pocket, make sure that you're looking out for you.

There are formal mayors and one informal mayor in this episode, and one of them fucking died.

And the other one, well, two of them died.

They all eventually died.

Yeah, and then, yeah, one of them was engaged in a kind of child coffin jamming shenanigan.

Like

he kind of got off best of everybody.

Yeah.

He got nicknamed the Iron Handed Mayor, which I guess you need to force the adult body into the child coffin.

Yeah, it's got to be fun.

I'm making money on this somehow.

And yeah,

Denver was left in the hands of the Blonker brothers.

I think maybe that needs to be your next episode.

God, maybe.

Follow up.

The Blongers.

The fabulous blongers.

The blongers.

The bouncing baby blonger brothers.

Congratulations.

It's a blonger.

Oh, blongers.

Well, oh, blongers again.

This is the wondrous life of Sopy Smith.

I hope you've enjoyed.

I hope you've enjoyed it.

Oh my God.

My face is tired from smiling too much at the life of Sophie Smith.

Due to one of the effects of my lobotomy recovery is that it actually hurts to laugh and smile.

And I'm actually in a great period of physical pain from this.

So thank you for that.

Hey, you're very welcome.

Not your fault.

Yeah.

Unfortunately, what you got was like, um, uh, like, shoot your prefrontal cortex out, surgeon.

You know, yeah, that's right.

Maddie, why did you go to Old West town for your surgery?

Because they use the wacky kind of gun that you can do surgery with, Riley.

It's not that complicated.

I went to Old West NYU.

They shot on both of my thumbs.

I don't know.

Look, all we're saying is that would be a good theme for a hospital.

Old West.

Old West Hospital.

Old West NYU, you're doing some downhome film criticism.

I'm sorry.

I was saying some weird.

Imagine a version of the series Girls in which everyone involved is wearing chaps.

Yeah.

Now, I was sent by my father, George Hurst, here to

Old West New York University.

Yeah, it's called Cowgirls, by the way, is what you're describing.

Now, I may be studying that they're political signs, but I'm actually going to be

enjoying some of this horse tranquilizer, learning to

tell two bands to play kind of over one another such that the music don't never stop.

I'm going to experiment with bisexuality.

I'm sorry.

Imagining an old West DJ, but it's just two big wagon wheels.

Oh, no, Godstomaz.

Thank you for subscribing to the Patreon.

No, no, no, this is a free episode.

Subscribe.

Then do subscribe to the Patreon.

No Godstomer.

Do you want me to do my best blood-curdling scream?

I can just

really get people to subscribe.

This is our short con, which is you subscribe to the Patreon, and what you get is capable of dropping dropping a blood-curdling scream at any time.

It's actually a really good part of vocal therapy.

So, yeah, just subscribe to the Patreon, or I will do that at a sort of unannounced time, at a time and place of my choose.

November,

you'll be walking around going about your daily life, and you'll think you'll see Nova out of the corner of your eye.

And then you'll sit down in the train, and then you'll turn around, and the last thing you hear is just a yelp.

Yeah, I'm like black canary.

You're never going to to hear shit.

And

if you're, if you're being like, oh, I'm parasocial with November, that would be really cool, actually.

No, all you'll get is the scream.

Yeah.

So come back next week for the bonus episode, no gods, no mares.com, where you can subscribe for just $5 a month.

Yeah, I'm the mayor.

I'm handling another guy from the sort of minor Mayor Cana that I'm excited to talk about.

Delighted.

Well, we will hope to see you there.

Bye, everyone.

Bye, Bye, bye.

Bye.