Hornswogglers, Fourflushers & Snake-Oil Salesmen (4 page)

Beginning with the December 23, 1869, issue of
New York Weekly
, Buntline serialized the novel
Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men
. Shortly after this hugely popular novel appeared, it was turned into a play. Seeing the success of his own work as a play, Buntline became convinced he could do an even better job than the playwright. He claimed that he wrote the play,
Scouts of the Prairie
, in four hours.

The work went on to star not only Buffalo Bill Cody himself, but also Texas Jack Omohundro, another frontiersman acquaintance of Cody's. Buntline even wrote himself into the play as a hard-bitten frontier character. His acting was singled out as being particularly bad. The
New York Herald
wrote: “Ned Buntline . . . represents the part as badly as it is possible for any human being to represent it. . . . ‘Buffalo Bill' is a good-looking fellow, tall and straight as an arrow, but ridiculous as an actor. . . . Ludicrous beyond the power of description is Ned Buntline's temperance address in the forest. . . . Everything was so wonderfully bad it was almost good.”

The 1872 play itself was a critical failure, but audiences enjoyed it, and it toured, after its Chicago debut, to St. Louis, Cincinnati, Albany, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Harrisburg. Starring in the play also convinced Cody that though he was not good at remembering his lines, he very much enjoyed being in front of an audience, something he would perfect in the coming years when he devised his famed touring Wild West show.

Buntline's well-documented popularity with women was another in a long line of ironies in his life, given that he was not particularly attractive. He was of less-than-average height, chunky physique, and had a pocked face topped with bushy red hair and bushier red mustaches. He walked oddly, more so when he'd been drinking alcohol, and yet even when he was sober, his gait was one of a man in discomfort. He suffered from arthritis and an improperly healed leg fracture from his three-story jump to escape from that mob intent on lynching him, itself the result of a dalliance with a lady.

Yet for all that, Buntline was also impressively erudite for a poorly educated man. He was charming, charismatic, and very well liked, even by people to whom he had become indebted. But it seems that his charms, especially concerning women, were as transitory as his fortunes. He was married six times, had six children, and was accused of bigamy by at least one of his wives. In addition to these numerous marriages, Buntline also had a lifelong series of liaisons with other women, often women who were married.

At various times through the years, he revamped and embellished his military exploits until even he no longer was sure what he had and had not accomplished during his service years. He claimed to have sustained at least twenty wounds on the battlefield, been savaged by Apaches, been a chief of scouts in the Indian Wars, and so much more.

He retired to his home, the Eagle's Nest, which he had custom built for himself in Stamford, New York. He died on July 16, 1886, at the age of sixty-three, sixty-four, or perhaps sixty-five. He'd lied so often about his age that no one is certain how old he was. Owing to a lifelong lack of financial restraint, overspending, and mismanaging his finances, his wife was forced to sell the Eagle's Nest to pay debt.

In addition to being a hugely successful writer—at one time the highest-paid author in the United States—Buntline was at various times in his life a posse member, probably a murderer, a bail-jumper, a blackmailer, a bigamist, an inciter of riots, a horse and boat thief, and so much more. As a critic of certain types of sport he deemed uncivilized, he shot a man's dog so the owner would no longer hunt in such a manner.

Buntline drank heavily, yet preached temperance vehemently, sometimes inviting his audiences to join him afterward at local taverns. In print he could be particularly savage in exposing gamblers and houses of prostitution. In private, he frequented bordellos, gambled, and blackmailed others he met there lest their names appear in his publications.

Conversely, he was also reputed to be a crack shot with a rifle and pistol, a swordsman, a fine rider of horses, generous to various charitable organizations, widely read, a keen hunter and fisherman, and politically active. In other words, Edward Zane Carroll Judson, aka Colonel Ned Buntline, was a complex individual not easily categorized, but he led a fascinating life jam-packed with adventure, that much is certain.

Despite—or perhaps because of—all that, does a lifetime of tall-tale-telling and tongue wagging, of lying and cheating so habitually that even the teller came to believe his own fabrications, make Ned Buntline a swindler of the highest order? You bet. And we wouldn't want him any other way.

I
n these modern times when it's become fashionable to revise history to adhere to current modes of thought and opinion, it's amusing to read the efforts of people devoted to sanding the well-earned burrs and sharp corners off the jagged, smoking hunks of legacy the various nefarious sorts have left behind. One well-sanded case in point: Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith.

If the name rings a bell, it's because he's been immortalized a number of times in books, on film, in song, and more. And all because he was a societal mooch. To give the man his due credit, he was quite good at his particular brand of theft. He scammed gullible galoots out of their holdings, be it cash, gold, land, or Granny's savings. And he did it all with a smile and a friendly arm around the shoulder.

Smith was born on November 2, 1860, in Georgia. And before his untimely end at the barrel of a smoking gun thirty-seven years later, Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith II would range far in his pursuit of marks. It was an effort to quell the avaricious urge that was his lifelong companion. Or perhaps the need to fleece others was a monkey on his back. If so, it was a beloved pet, for Smith roved far and wide, from Texas to Colorado to Alaska, where he became the Scourge of Skagway.

But all that was yet to come on that second day of November 1860 when he emerged, one imagines red-faced and bawling, for close inspection. And that's when I picture the man as a bearded baby, tweezering a wallet from the leaning doctor's coat pocket, the bejeweled necklace from around the neck of the busty nurse, a collection of rattles and pacifiers mounding up in his own bassinet, filched from other babies in the nursery.

The less-fanciful truth is that he grew up on his family's sprawling, well-appointed plantation in Newnan, Georgia. His family was a well-heeled, well-educated lot for which cash-flow woes didn't exist. Alas, with the end of the Civil War, as with so many similarly situated Southern families, the Smith clan's cash dried up. They trekked westward to the town of Round Rock, Texas, in 1876, and two years later young Jefferson was on hand to see notorious outlaw Sam Bass succumb to death from a gunshot by a posse member.

If this influenced young Smith, it was to impress upon him the need to not get caught. Whether he was able to follow that notion in his own shady dealings remained at the time to be seen.

Not long after, the quick-witted and quicker-fingered Smith relocated, sans family, to Fort Worth, Texas, where, in the company of rogues and scala-wags, he finally found a place where he felt at home. Following his cleverly devised scams, soon enough they were doing young Smith's bidding. These were heady days for Jeff Smith, still not yet known as “Soapy,” building a budding reputation as “King of the Frontier Con Men.”

Always careful to keep a few light steps ahead of the law—and any citizens with vigilante leanings he might have irked—Smith and his cohorts concocted a rogues' gallery of short cons. These were swindles that took little time to set up, exercise, then dismantle, all before moving on. Such quickies included all manner of variations on the shell game, card cons, and, by the late 1870s and early 1880s, the swindle he perfected in Denver for which he earned his infamous moniker. . . .

“What you got there, bub?” The man who spoke narrowed his eyes and bent forward at the waist, his hands tucked behind his suitcoat. With an intent gaze he eyeballed the display the tall young man had been for a few short minutes setting up on the busy Denver street corner. A number of people had slowed, gazing at his wares. Thus far none had stopped, save for the old man.

“I am glad you asked, sir.” The young man nodded smartly toward his inquisitor, who continued to stare at the display. “I am Jefferson Smith, purveyor of fine soaps, plain and simple. If you will but stick around for a few more minutes, I will endeavor to sell my soap to these kindly folks looking to go about their business.”

“And they're all in need of soap, is that what you're saying, young fella?” The older man finally looked at him. A cake of soap in each hand, Smith paused in stacking them atop his salesman's display case balanced on a tripod.

“We all, sir, could use a good soaping now and again.” He kept his gaze on the man's face. His comment had the desired effect—the older man's eyebrows arched and Smith thought he detected a faint smile there. Might be he'd have to watch this old fellow. He was shrewd. Too much so? Time would tell.

But then he had little time for further speculation on the point, as the curious began to gather. He knew from experience that if there were no folks sniffing out the possibility of getting something for nothing, he may as well call it quits, pack up, and find another street corner. But this spot had all the earmarks of a prime location. He'd been eyeing it for a week and knew this was the corner for him.

As people stopped on their way by, more followed suit. The young man reached into an inside coat pocket and slipped out his long leather wallet. From it he produced a stack of paper currency of varying denominations.

As he worked, he nodded toward the soap. “That soap, my friends, may look like ordinary soap, and in many ways it behaves like ordinary soap. But having been a purveyor of fine soaps for a good many years, I can tell you without reservation that this Magical Bar Soap and Cleanse-All is a one-of-a-kind product that will leave the user cleaner and feeling better than he or she has any earthly right to feel. It is truly that good. How does it attain such lofty heights, you may well ask? Especially for something that looks so . . . let's face it, ordinary.”

As he spoke he carefully wrapped the paper cash around a half-dozen bars of the soap, one at a time, using a dollar bill here, a ten there, on up to a single $100 bill that drew the crowd to a hush as he held it up. The higher the denomination, the more intent the gazes of the amassing crowd grew. This was something they wanted to see. Cash! Yes, something wild and exciting was about to take place, and they might have the chance to be part of it.

Smith first wrapped the cash around a selection of bars, then carefully wrapped each bar of soap in brown paper. What the rapt attendees saw was precisely what Smith wanted them to see—which is the same thing they wanted to see—valuable currency wrapped around bars of soap. What they didn't notice, however, was Smith's adroit hand-play. He carefully swapped the larger-denomination bills for $1 bills. Others he hid. Then, he mixed the bars supposedly containing cash in with paper-wrapped bars containing nothing but soap, and proceeded to sell the bars of soap for $1 per bar—far more than the poor-quality soap was worth.

The sight of the cash-wrapped soap bars elicited the reactions Smith had grown to expect. He fought the urge to exchange the knitted-brow look of serious concern and gravity on his long face with a big grin. Would people never learn that nothing in life was free? Oh, he hoped not.

He was, after all, about to take their money. Lots and lots of it. And not lose any of his own in the process. Again, the urge to grin had to be pushed down—until later.

As he worked the bars, he wrapped them in plain brown paper to both conceal the money and to give all the bars a uniform look once again. “You'll notice, ladies and gentlemen, that I have wrapped various of these bars of soap in paper currency with denominations ranging from $1 to $100. To prevent anyone from acting fraudulently, that is to say to keep us all honest—” He let that hang in the air, and within a second it elicited a crowd-wide laugh, as he'd hoped it would. “I have wrapped the remainder of this stack in plain brown paper, then mixed all the bars together. Now, this fine product should not really require such incentive to be appreciated, but I am willing to forego convention for the sake of excitement.” As he spoke he arranged the pile to his satisfaction.

By the time he'd finished speaking, he had before him a pyramid-shaped stack of neatly wrapped bars of soap, among which he'd interspersed the bars wrapped in money. All this he did in plain sight of the onlookers, who had become curiously silent.

“I will now sell this soap to whoever is wise enough, whoever cares enough about their own skin, for $1 per cake. That's it, that's all, no other motivation on my end other than to introduce you all to the wonders of this fine product.”