Free The Floor of Heaven by Howard Blum

tangled enterprises: He played a complicated con. He settled with his bride and baby in a house on Curtis Street in one of Denver’s new residential neighborhoods, but he still spent his days and nights working the downtown streets with his crew. There was, as a consequence, an aspect to his life that was seeped in larceny, corruption, and, when necessary, a casual but effective violence. And there was another filled with family happiness, a place that was comforting and where he was comforted. In the end, though, this was one con that was too difficult for even Soapy to play for very long.
    YEARS LATER, Soapy, ranting with bitter thunder, would still put all the blame for his comeuppance on Colonel John Arkins. And it is true that Arkins possessed several qualities that made him a relentless and effective adversary.
    First, he was motivated by a “vision,” to use the colonel’s own ardent, deliberately ecclesiastical word, of what Denver could grow to become. He’d realized that the Wild West was rapidly becoming a memory, a reckless and violent era that would live on only in the pages of dime novels. If Denver were to grab its place as the premier city in the new West, it needed to become a destination where newcomers could go about without being harassed, where working men did not need to fear that they would be preyed on by unscrupulous gangs, where families would not have their peace disturbed by louts and villains.
    Second, the colonel was a dedicated newspaperman, an editor who, he’d boast with pride, might just as well as have been born with printer’s ink running through his veins. After serving in the Civil War as a corporal—“Colonel” was only an honorific title—Arkins had traveled around the Midwest working as a printer. Following the prospectors to Leadville, he’d established the Evening Chronicle. By 1880, however, he had realized that the boomtown’s time had come and gone. He sold the Chronicle and used the proceeds to buy a piece of the Rocky Mountain News, Denver’s oldest newspaper. The News had started out in a rickety log cabin, but it was now housed in a substantial brick building downtown on Patterson Street and had distinguished itself as a crusading civic voice. Yet the colonel had still larger ambitions for his paper, and he saw in Soapy a way to help realize this success. Bandits, he appreciated, were never boring, and front-page stories reporting the exploits of the Soap Gang and its kingpin were a surefire way to sell copies. The nearly daily articles boosted the News’ circulation, and in the process they made Soapy a larger-than-life villain.
    Finally, and not least, the colonel was fearless. When, for example, an argument at Joey’s barroom on Curtis Street turned heated and his adversary drew a nickel-plated revolver, Arkins did not hesitate. He stepped forward and, quick and decisive, knocked the man’s silk top hat off with a dismissive wave of his hand. Intimidated, the man backed off. The colonel explained with a smirk, “Any man who carries a nickel-plated revolver will not fire it at anybody.”
    And so the pages of the News beat a loud and insistent editorial drum: “Soapy, in the language of the fly-by-night fraternity ‘has’ Denver”; “The city is absolutely under the control of this prince of knaves”; “His skin games in town are flourishing, he gets his percentage from those to whom he furnishes protection”; “There is not a confidence man, a sneak thief, or any other parasite upon the public who does not pursue his avocation under license from the man”; and on and relentlessly on.
    But while there’s no getting around that the colonel had it in for him, in the end it was all largely Soapy’s own doing. Soapy had no one to blame but himself for the raw anger that overwhelmed his customary calculating and coolheaded demeanor. What happened was that Arkins, trying to keep his long-running story alive, came up with a new angle. He reported that