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Blonger Day, April 22, 2005
Blonger Day, again. Two years ago today, Scott was querying Google, trying out variations on the name Belonger in hopes of finding some sign of our great-great-grandfather Michael's missing brothers. He found one right out of the box, and it was big as a billboard:
Since then, you can see we have discovered a great deal, and shared it with you here, along with our our questions and ruminations. For the second time now, I'd like to take a moment to look over the past year and take stock of the effort as a whole.
A year ago we were still giddy about all the great material we had found in the Albuquerque newspapers. Confirming Sam's tale of being marshal would have been plenty, but the place started to come alive for us, just a little, like a town in a sitcom. There's the saloon, the brothel, the newspaper office, the town jail, and the street where the colorful characters play out their boilerplate dramas. And then there's Wyatt Earp and His Tombstone Posse.
The whole Earp connection is overdone, of course. It's of no importance, really. But it brings a certain cachet to the Blonger story, and if anyone ever decides to make a movie about Tombstone that DOESN'T LEAVE OUT THE PART ABOUT THE POSSE CROSSING OVER INTO NEW MEXICO, Sam and Lou could liven up the script a bit. They're a cinematic pair — tall, hard, steely-eyed Sam, and the chubby little schmoozer Lou. Not to mention Soapy Smith, Doc Baggs, Con Caddigan, Bill Nuttall, Professor Park Van Tassell...
So we learned a great deal about Sam and Lou in 1882. Other documents, including a military pension request from Lou, filled in some of the spaces between 1868, when Sam and Lou left Illinois, and 1887, when Lou submitted his request from southern New Mexico. Boomtown after boomtown, running saloons and theaters and god knows what, all across the West. What a ride.
And we had Van Cise's book to give us some detail about Lou's latter days in Denver. We found out a few things about old Joe too. But how does one become The Fixer?
Shortly after Blonger day, Scott and I agreed that we needed to know more about the glory days and the Blonger's rise to power. Now we do, a little.
First of all, there's Soapy. We met Jefferson "Soapy" Smith's great-grandson, Jeff "Soapy" Smith, and started to develop a picture of the Denver bunco scene in the 1890s.
I found that, contrary to my initial impression of Soapy as the quaint flim-flam man with his suitcase full of soap, he was in fact a prominent gangster in Colorado at the time, well-known for his extensive operations in Denver, where his connections kept his boys out of jail, for his benevolent dictatorship in Creede and his army of minions, swarming the trains as they pulled into town, and for his high hand later in Skagway, where he was gunned down in 1898.
As "General" Smith, he and his cronies helped defend Denver City Hall from the state militia during the City Hall War, 1892. By 1895, Soapy and his brother Bascomb were apparently feeling threatened by the Blongers, and nearly had a deadly confrontation with them. Within a year, Soapy would leave Denver forever.
In a process that is still not very clear, the Blongers continued to extend their influence over the city's rival gangs, until no one was working the streets of Denver without Lou's approval, and not without surrendering a cut to maintain the good fishing — which was precisely the fixer's role: to maintain balance and maximize everyone's profit. It takes money to make money.
As it turns out, Soapy's story can tell us a great deal about the world of the Blonger Bros. circa 1895.
We also learned a few things about g-g-grandad Michael's war injury, some kind of heart disease, brought on by exposure and exhaustion during the Union Army's retreat from the Shenendoah Valley under pressure from Stonewall Jackson. He would serve until the battle of Antietam, after which (we think, though it might have been before), his heart problems forced his hospitalization.
We learned that Sam's gold badge still exists, along with a pistol of his(!) — though we still haven't discovered the owner.
We heard from the grandson of one of Lou's victims. Writing under the pseudonym "George Costanza."
Perhaps most interesting, we began to understand that both Sam and Lou had deep, long-standing personal connections to law enforcement and the private detective business. The Armstrong account had told us Sam was a lawman for many years, and Van Cise obliquely mentions Detective DeLue and William Pinkerton, but it was startling to realize that Lou himself had been a marshal and deputy sheriff, at least, a member of the Rocky Mountain Detective Agency, and a private detective on at least a few occasions over many years.
Their relationship to law enforcement was unquestionably a critical source of power in Denver, but as it turns out, their time in the biz makes a good story in itself. And yet this aspect of their personal history is usually completely overlooked — partly a legacy of Van Cise's near-monopoly on the Blonger story, till now. Fighting the Underworld has always been the go-to source on Lou Blonger, and Van Cise made no indication that Lou had been a lawman or detective.
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