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gang. Soapy envisioned a world where he’d be running the show. His mind was brimming with potentially lucrative scams. And so with heartfelt thanks, he said good-bye to his mentor and moved on. At twenty-one, he was now a seasoned bunco man.
    SOAPY DRIFTED through a few cow towns before deciding to join the crowds heading up into Leadville, Colorado. Ten thousand feet high in the Rockies, without even a railroad spur to tie it to the big western towns, Leadville, nevertheless, was roaring. In the summer of 1879 the promise of fortune glittered in the thin mountain air. The town’s Matchless Mine was yielding an extraordinary $100,000 a month in silver, and prospectors flocked to the surrounding gulches to try to find their own rich veins. Hotels, saloons, whorehouses, and even an opera house sprang up as if overnight along a muddy stretch of the unruly main street. Each day new arrivals jammed the makeshift town, all chasing after the opportunity to strike it rich. Soapy felt confident that prospectors, men whose trade was the most optimistic of professions, would have a predilection for his kind of speculations, too. They’d be partial to taking a gamble, particularly if it held the promise of an exorbitant return. They’d make the perfect marks.
    His instinct was pure cunning. He hit one rich vein after another. But as the silver petered out, so did new prospects for fleecing. Soapy began to realize that continuing to play the same crowd could become a reckless, even fatal enterprise. For the time being people had simply taken to giving him contemptuous looks as he walked the streets. Still, that was enough to make him jumpy. After all, a lot of the miners had a Colt stuck in their belts or a Winchester in their packs. Feeling the moment had turned, he quietly moved on.
    Everything Soapy had heard about Denver was promising. In his mind it loomed as a bit more substantial and established version of Leadville, a boomtown that had kept booming. But when he arrived in 1881, the reality proved even more exciting. Denver was on its way to becoming a full-grown city. Its scale, hustle, and already imposing stony grandeur went way beyond anything in his imagination.
    Like Leadville, there were streets filled with a seemingly constant buzz of raucous activity. The Larimer Street and Market Street saloons, dance halls, and gambling parlors kept their doors open around the clock. And on Blake Street the sporting girls provocatively worked their trade. Never had he encountered such throngs—an always flowing sea of people looking for good times. Yet, Soapy discovered to his fascination, a sturdy prosperity had wrapped itself around other parts of the far-spread city. Denver was filled with handsome red brick and yellow stone residences, grand public buildings, and wide, elm-shaded streets under piercing blue skies. It was a city where families were digging roots.
    Each new day the Union Pacific brought in farmers and merchants from around the country, all hoping to start their lives again out West. Many would continue on to the mountain mines or head off to California, but others looked around and decided to stay. By 1886, there would be nearly 70,000 people living in Denver. And the town was growing rich. Flush with its share of the treasures of gold, silver, coal, iron, and lead that had been ripped from the surrounding mountains—in the mid-1880s, ores worth about $26 million annually were being carted off from the Colorado mines—Denver promised to be the future capital city of the West. Soapy reckoned Denver would be fertile ground for his own ripe future, too. Touring the bustling city left Soapy brimming with an excited, nearly giddy joy. At last, he decided, he had found his home.
    THREE
    ot every boy growing up in the West in the years after the Civil War, though, wanted to be a cowboy like Charlie Siringo and the young Soapy Smith. That notion never took hold of George Washington Carmack. True, he wound up spending