White/Caucasian. Frank H. Reid, a 54-year-old male, stood watch on the night of July 8, 1898, at the mouth of Skagway's Juneau Wharf as townspeople convened a mass meeting to wrest control of their boomtown from Jefferson “Soapy” Smith's criminal syndicate. Reid—a former soldier turned city surveyor and engineer—was one of four guards posted to keep gang members away from the gathering.
When Soapy strode down the planks with a Winchester across his shoulder, words flared into a close-quarters struggle and gunfire at roughly 9:15 p.m. Smith took a fatal shot to the heart, collapsing on the wharf; Reid, struck grievously in the groin and leg, was carried away alive. He clung to life for nearly two weeks before dying of his wounds on July 20, 1898, his sacrifice later etched on a granite monument in Skagway's Gold Rush Cemetery.
The violence had been primed by a brazen daytime theft: earlier on July 8, Klondike miner John Douglas Stewart was lured into a rigged street game beside Jeff Smith's Parlor. Three of Soapy's men—John L. “Reverend” Bowers, W. E. “Slim-Jim” Foster, and Van B. “Old Man” Triplett—made off with his gold poke, a theft that galvanized Skagway's “Committee of 101” to call the wharf meeting that Reid was guarding. After the shootout, vigilantes seized control of the town and the U.S. Army at nearby Dyea threatened martial law if order could not be kept. In the days that followed, Stewart's gold was located in a trunk behind Soapy's saloon—most of it recovered—and the three robbers received jail sentences, signaling the collapse of the Soap Gang's hold on Skagway.
Reid's death had a suspect and motive as stark as the tide flats under the wharf. The suspect was Jefferson “Soapy” Smith himself, the crime boss who had ruled by graft and intimidation and who exchanged the point-blank shots that left both men mortally wounded. Whether Smith or, as some testimony hints, an assisting guard fired the bullet that killed Smith does not cloud the responsibility for Reid's fate: he was shot during the confrontation Soapy provoked while attempting to break into the citizens' meeting. Twelve days later, the 54-year-old male succumbed in Skagway's hospital, and the town turned out for the largest funeral in its brief history, honoring the man remembered for “giving his life for the honor of Skagway.”
