The Floor of Heaven (12 page)

And getting to Fort Laramie had proved to be no problem. The first time he rode off, he told Hall the truth: He was heading in to pick up his mail. Of course, he didn’t say that the letter he expected would be from the superintendent of the Denver Pinkerton office. Nor, upon reading the letter, did he he explain that he’d received authorization for an extended operation: He’d been instructed to stay undercover for as long as was required to ascertain McCoy’s whereabouts. And after Charlie had the good fortune to make the acquaintance in the hotel parlor of the pretty widow with the young daughter, none of the gang was the least suspicious about his weekly trips to town. They were simply jealous.

The hard part for Charlie was all the nocturnal sneaking about. He felt it was a funny business for a man to have to tiptoe through a dark hotel hallway to his wife’s bedroom. But he knew it would cause a scandal if he got caught going into the young widow’s room. As it was, the landlady of the hotel was advising Mamie that Charlie was part of a gang of outlaws and dance hall loafers and she would do well not to associate with him. Mamie and Charlie had a good laugh over that.

They enjoyed a lot of other laughs, too, in their days and nights together. It was as if in Fort Laramie they’d become two different people, the tough outlaw and the young widow, and all the playacting gave their time together a new spark. It was a very happy interlude. Yet Charlie couldn’t help growing a bit anxious about Mamie’s cough. She said it was just a spring cold, but it didn’t seem to be getting any better. He made her promise to consult a doctor as soon as she was back in Denver.

When he wasn’t in Fort Laramie, Charlie was leading another life back at the ranch. The gang had come to accept him as one more Texan on the run from the law. They bragged to him about the crimes they’d committed and the jails they’d broken out of. Hall confided that he had ridden with Joe Fowler, a cold-blooded outlaw who had shot a cowboy in the head in Bill Hudgen’s Pioneer Saloon and who’d wound up being hung by a mob in Socorro, New Mexico. They would’ve strung him up too, Hall explained, but his horse was too fast. And Hall finally got around to telling him about his friend Bill McCoy’s great escape. It was Hall’s plan, and it was an escapade he was mighty proud of.

Once McCoy was sentenced to hang, Hall contacted a slick jailbreaker from back east he’d come across in his travels. He paid him $500. The easterner then went off to commit a petty crime and got himself locked up in the Cheyenne jail. Which was also part of the plan, because the easterner had secreted a pair of saw blades in the soles of his shoes. Late at night as the sheriff slept, he sawed through the bars of the jailhouse window. McCoy squeezed through, and then ran to the horse Hall had left saddled for him in an alleyway. He rode straight out to the Keeline Ranch, picked up some provisions, and then hid out in the surrounding hills. There was a sheriff’s posse with one hundred men scouring the territory, but they never found McCoy. He even snuck up on their camp one night and made off with a large bay. Few days after that, Hall went on, McCoy mounted Hall’s pet roan racehorse and, using the bay as a packhorse, he rode on to New Orleans. From there, McCoy boarded a sailing ship to Buenos Aires.

Charlie didn’t know whether to believe Hall. An outlaw hightailing it all the way to South America to avoid the sheriff struck him as a pretty fanciful notion. But a week later Hall showed him a letter he had received from his old buddy postmarked Buenos Aires, and Charlie realized he wasn’t being snookered. McCoy had written to ask Hall to join him; they’d ride together like in the old days. McCoy had hooked up with some outlaws in cattle country, and he provided the name of a dentist in Buenos Aires who could lead Hall to their camp. When Hall asked Charlie if he’d like to head out with him and some of the other boys to try their luck at the rich pickings in Argentina, Charlie realized he had to act quickly.

He rode into Fort Laramie that day and told Mamie it was time to head on back to Denver. And he sent a telegram to the Denver office.

Three days later at daybreak, a large posse on horseback surrounded the Keeline Ranch. At the same time, a group of deputies had crawled up to the cabins and had their Winchesters cocked and ready. Hall considered the situation, and ordered his men to surrender. Along with the others, Charlie walked out of the cabin with his hands high in the air.

At the Cheyenne jail, though, they let Charlie go. When Hall saw Charlie walking off, he suddenly understood. He flew into a rage, screaming how he’d get even, how he’d hunt Charlie down if it was the last thing he did. He just couldn’t believe he’d been taken in by a detective.

CHARLIE SPENT a week in Cheyenne making his report to District Attorney Skoll. He had collected a good deal of information over the months, and the district attorney needed all of it to prepare his case for the grand jury.

When he finished up with Skoll, Charlie sold his horse and saddle and boarded a train for Denver. His reunion with Mamie and Viola was a happy one, and he and his wife shared a laugh about the illicit romance between the young widow and the outlaw in Fort Laramie. Still, Charlie was troubled. Mamie’s cough had grown more persistent. And now there was blood in her sputum. Whenever she coughed, her handkerchief carried a deep red stain.

NINE

uring his long months vagabonding about the West, Soapy had ample opportunity to think about his time in Denver. These memories were instructive. With hindsight, he began to understand his mistakes. Soapy decided his ambitions had been too trivial. The schemes of a circus grifter like his mentor Clubfoot Hall had been tawdry inspirations. It was no longer sufficient, he came to realize, to control a gang of petty thieves.

Like Charlie Siringo, Soapy saw that the West had changed. Certainly, people would always be fools; there’d be no end to the marks who’d believe they could get something for nothing. But all across the civilized new West you could also count on some snooty clique of merchants or do-gooders who’d get the ear of the mayor or the district attorney, and then life for a sporting gentleman like himself would become a continual series of annoyances, harassments, and arrests. There was only one way to guarantee real security and real prosperity: You had to own the entire town. City hall, the police, the courts, as well as the gambling parlors—everything had be under your control.

With these imperial principles occupying his mind, Soapy’s life on the run took him to a remote winding canyon high up in the San Juan Mountains, about 250 miles southwest of Denver. He surveyed the spreading assemblies of tents. He strode through the muddy main street. He heard the constant pounding of hammers and the grinding of saws. He observed the army of hopeful men crowding the narrow valley, prospectors whose dreams were inspired by glittering visions similar to the ones that filled George Carmack’s head. And Soapy knew: He’d found the perfect place to realize the culmination of all his previous endeavors. He would build his empire.

When Soapy came to Creede in 1890, there was no government, no law. There were just people flocking in, as many as three hundred every day, and money pouring out; in a month, as much as $1 million in silver ore could be mined. The town was wild and booming, and it had all started less than a year earlier with the Holy Moses.

“Holy Moses!” Nicholas Creede had exclaimed when he saw the gleaming vein of silver his pickax had unearthed. Along with his partner, he’d spent the summer working a mine above Wagon Wheel Gap, a steep, twisting river canyon, but he’d never before seen anything like this. By the time the mine was sold that winter for $75,000 to the president of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, the claim had become known as the Holy Moses, the town had been renamed Creede, a railroad bed was being laid up the valley, and prospectors were charging in. It seemed as if whenever a miner cleared away a layer of rock from any of the nearby cliffs, silver was discovered. Or at least that was the story, remarkably more truth than rumor, spreading throughout the West.

In the midst of all this tumult, as new fortunes were being made every day, Soapy arrived. He found a makeshift town that to his excited eyes seemed to glow. The business district was nothing more than a field of mud that backed straight up to the rocky face of the canyon. And since there was nowhere else to go, the mountain served as the back wall for the many structures that were being hastily erected. With the clutter of lanterns hanging in these buildings, and with their bright kerosene light reflecting off the slick canyon walls, it struck Soapy as if a glowing sun were shining round the clock. “It’s all day in the daytime and there is no night in Creede,” he said happily. It was just his sort of wide-open, always jingling town. He had no illusion that it would grow to be another Denver. But he recognized what it could become, and he was determined to make it his.

IN THE weeks that followed, Soapy’s plan to make himself nothing less than the monarch of this high valley proceeded on several fronts. But his first order of business was to commission a map. It was an essential piece of intelligence. In order to take control, he’d need to know as accurately as possible all that lay out there.

On a sheet of Denver & Rio Grande Railroad stationery, a gang member dutifully sketched the layout of the town’s mines, stores, and gambling parlors, as well as the names of their owners. And on the top of this crude diagram, he penciled in the observation “Last chance / everything taken.” Yet neither this information nor the long list of owners discouraged Soapy. Rather, he took the warning in stride. It just meant that now Soapy knew whom he need to trump.

And largely he did. He employed a variety of slippery methods. In a town where most prospectors believed that they were on the verge of a big strike if only they could find the funds to carry them through another six months, anyone with cash could make an opportune deal. But a swindler with large promises and a stack of phony checks could make a real killing. Soapy would target down-at-the-heels mine owners, convince them to sign over a controlling interest in return for a generous sum, and dutifully write an exorbitant check on a nonexistent account. When they discovered the check couldn’t be cashed, he’d offer up a flock of intricate excuses until Cap Light and a few other bruisers would come calling. At that tense point in the negotiations, even the most enraged miner would realize that it would be better to walk away holding a quarter interest in the claim than not to walk away at all. Another well-practiced ploy was to lure the unsuspecting miner into a gaffed game of cards or dice. Inevitably, the mark would lose all his money; and Soapy, a gracious winner, would offer to wager his entire pile against a single scrap of paper—the deed to the mine. Talk about a lucky streak! Once more Soapy would draw the winning hand. These gambits, along with some actual cash purchases, helped Soapy acquire not only mines and tracts of wilderness acres but several dozen additional properties—most of Cliff and Wall streets, a hotel, at least a dozen saloons and gambling parlors, and a dwelling lot where he one day hoped to build a home for his wife and children.

But it was when the state officials arrived in Creede to auction off large parcels of school land—properties owned by Colorado whose sale would fund statewide school construction—that Soapy proved his most ingenious. A forty-foot circus tent had been erected, and it was crowded with investors from all over the West who’d come to take advantage of the opportunity to purchase land on the cheap in a boomtown. The sale went quickly; there was a good deal of hot, competitive bidding. It was only when a particularly choice lot was offered that one of the handful of attractive women scattered about the crowd would join in. Soon as she made her bid, shouts would break out. “Give it to the woman!” “Let her have it!” “Don’t overbid her!” And the well-heeled out-of-towners, gallant as well as fearful of the consequences of any perceived ungentlemanly behavior in a rough-and-tumble mining camp, would acquiesce. The ladies succeeded in purchasing every parcel on which they bid. Only after the leases were signed and delivered did the losing bidders learn that both the women and their vocal supporters were employees of Soapy’s. As the Rocky Mountain News reported, “Soapy outwitted the authorities, buncoed the state and school fund, and pulled the wool over the keen eye of Governor John L. Routt to the tune of several thousand dollars. The women in loose flowing scarlet robes and glib tongues were acting as cappers for the far-sighted Soapy, and the title of the cream of Creede realty will soon be vested in Jeff T. Smith.”

NOW THAT he was the town’s largest property owner, Soapy naturally enough wanted assurances that the police and city government would work diligently to protect his investments. So he stuffed ballot boxes, called in favors, grandly canceled several gambling debts, and even padded a few pockets. As a result of these artful manipulations, Creede wound up having officials whose first and foremost allegiance was to Soapy.

Cap Light, a longtime Soap gang tough guy, was appointed the town marshal. He had two obvious qualifications for the job: He had gunned down four men in Texas, and he was Soapy’s brother-in-law. It was a pedigree that discouraged most arguments. Just the sight of Cap, his chest puffed out like a barrel, striding into a rowdy saloon would quiet down the hip-pocket brigade, as the gun-toting miners in town were known. But Cap’s blood had a tendency to heat, and when it did there were consequences. There was, for example, the night he caught up with Reddy McCann in the Branch Saloon. In fairness, Reddy had done much to irritate the marshal even before their paths had crossed that snowy evening. Not only was Reddy making a play for one of the showgirls for whom Cap had a hankering, but he was a faro dealer at a newly opened establishment meant to compete with Soapy’s string of clubs. Add to that, on the icy night in question Cap was already in bad humor after having had to trudge his way through mounds of dark snow as he made his rounds. So when Cap sauntered into the Branch and spotted Reddy at the bar, he couldn’t help himself. He let loose with a bombastic and downright rude greeting. His judgment tilted by hours of drink, Reedy responded with a few mean-spirited remarks of his own. Before he could finish, the marshal decided he’d suffered enough humiliation. He drew his gun and shot the faro dealer five times in the chest. There was an inquest, but the ruling was self-defense. So Cap continued to wear his star and, in his fashion, keep the peace.