An event from this day in 1898 caught my eye because it happened in Skagway, Alaska, where we were at about a year ago. It involved a conman known as Soapy Smith.
Born in 1860 as Jefferson Randolph Smith, he quickly discovered that he had a severe allergy. He was allergic to work! It was easier and more intellectually challenging to con people out of their money. The first scheme involved his “prehistoric man” discovery in Creede, Colorado. Smith found a 10-foot human-ish looking statue, buried it only to unearth it in a mock archaeological dig. With great fanfare, he announced his discovery and charged people to see it. He left town before the townspeople caught on.
Another scam involved selling a bar of soap wrapped in blue tissue paper. Allegedly, $100 bills were in certain packages. Each bar cost $5. A shill in the audience of buyers would announce they had found a $100, producing it and waving it in the air. You can imagine how frantically people bought more bars of soap. They sold out faster than Willy Wonka’s Wonka bars and the search for the golden ticket. Hence, the nickname Soapy.
Smith always managed to get out of town before the law caught up with him. He ended up in Alaska, chasing the gold rush and hoping to make himself rich. Finding a home in Skagway, Smith began to run his cons on the locals and formed a criminal syndicate. The townsfolk decided it was time to put an end to this and bring law to the town, so they formed a vigilante group called The Committee of 101. Smith heard about it and formed a retaliatory committee called The Committee of 303.
“On this day in 1898, Smith tried to crash a vigilante meeting on the Skagway wharf, apparently hoping to use his con-man skills to persuade them that he posed no threat to the community. Smith, however, had failed to realize just how angry the vigilantes were. When he tried to break through the crowd, a Skagway city engineer named Frank Reid confronted him. The men exchanged harsh words and then bullets. Reid shot Smith dead on the spot, but not before Smith had badly wounded him. The engineer died 12 days later.
“The funeral services for Soapy Smith were held in a Skagway church he had donated funds to help build. The minister chose as the text for his sermon a line from Proverbs 13:15, “The way of transgressors is hard.”1
The full verse says, “Good understanding giveth favour: but the way of transgressors is hard.” The Matthew Henry commentary says, “The way of sinners is rough and uneasy, and, for this reason, unpleasant to themselves, because unacceptable to others. It is hard, hard upon others, who complain of it, hard to the sinner himself, who can have little enjoyment of himself while he is doing that which is disobliging to all mankind. The service of sin is perfect slavery, and the road to hell is strewed with the thorns and thistles that are the products of the curse. Sinners labour in the very fire.”
Commentator John Gill writes, “the way of transgressors is hard; ungrateful and unpleasant to themselves and others; it is a rough and rugged way, in which they stumble and fall; and cannot walk with pleasure themselves, when their consciences are awakened, and they are loaded with guilt, and filled with terror; and must be very disagreeable to those who have seen the evil of them.”
Finally, in the Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament gives this insight. “The way of the transgressor, the treacherous, i.e., the manner in which 
they transact with men, is stiff, as hard as stone, and repulsive; they follow selfish views, never placing themselves in sympathy with the condition of their neighbour; they are without the tenderness which is connected with fine culture; they remain destitute of feeling in things which, as we say, would soften a stone.”
These explanations of this verse sure sound like Soapy Smith! While he thought he was having a great time pulling off his scams, getting rich off the gullible, and finding the easy way to money, deep inside he was a miserable individual.
The really hard truth of this isn’t usually realized until it is too late. Proverbs 14:12 leaves us with this reminder that we need to pass on to others. “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.”
1https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/july-8/soapy-smith-killed-in-skagway-alaska
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