The Floor of Heaven (16 page)

But at eight forty-five that evening Soapy looked out from his third-floor window and was startled. He watched with a stern concentration as the companies of U.S. Army troops moved into the front line. At once, he realized his bluff had been called. With a gambler’s long-practiced practicality, he folded his hand. Move out, he ordered his men.

Not a shot had been fired. The only casualty was a spectator who had fallen from his perch on a storm door and cracked his head on the pavement. But in the weeks that followed, the courts reiterated the governor’s order that the commissioners resign, the Waite administration continued to put pressure on what the papers were now calling the “fly-by-night fraternity,” and Soapy realized he’d better leave Denver before he wound up in jail.

The Denver Times reported on his travel plans:

Jeff. R. Smith, the Reverend Bowers, and Doctor W. H. Jackson have announced their intention to go to Japan.… They announce their object is a pleasure and sightseeing trip, but judging from the props they were seen carrying, they intend to be prepared for emergencies.

Fourteen packs of new cards, a dice box, a set of “ivories,” full sets of poker chips, a small square frame covered with canvas, half shells of English walnuts, and quart bottles of good whiskey along with several boxes of fine cigars.

The article correctly reported the items Soapy had packed for his travels. But the reporter had been misled as to his destination. He’d never had any intention to sail to Japan. Soapy was going to Alaska. “This is my last opportunity to make a big haul,” he told his gang as he supervised the packing at the Tivoli Club. “Alaska is the last West.”

THERE WERE three strong toots from the ship’s whistle as the Idaho puffed down the Tlingit fishing ground of Gastineau Channel and headed into Juneau’s harbor on a thickly gray, wet April day. George Carmack stood on deck and looked past a narrow, sandy beach and toward the handful of ramshackle log cabins and wood-frame buildings that made up the small gold-mining camp. In the distance, high mountains formed a steep natural barrier. The mountains were snowcapped, but the rain and fog had painted them gray, too, like the sky. It was an uninviting vista.

He waited impatiently as sailors tied the steamboat up to the wharf. Then, hauling his heavy pack onto his back, George walked down the slippery gangplank and into Alaska.

TWELVE

n their separate ways up to Alaska, the three men encountered many others heading to the north country to leave their old lives behind. Times had been hard back home. The sudden Panic of 1893 had grown into a full-blown economic depression, and two years later it continued to hold the nation in its tight grip. All across the country banks had failed, railroads had gone into receivership, farms had been foreclosed, and jobs had disappeared. The Gay Nineties had turned angry and combative. Sullen mobs roamed city streets searching for food. Fistfights broke out on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as companies went bust and fortunes turned to dust. Strikes erupted into bloody battles, the forces of labor and capital charging at one another without mercy. Coxey’s army, as the resolute thousands who rallied around Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey were known, marched on Washington to demand jobs. Throughout the country there was the feeling that something fundamental had gone wrong. Despair had become a national malaise. Desperate, eager to leave all their disappointments behind, a new wave of pioneers began the journey to the far north. They wanted to believe that in Alaska there would be opportunities to change their luck and, if they were resourceful, to forge new lives.

What had brought America to its knees? Congress certainly deserved a large share of the blame. These legislators had, in their reckless wisdom, created an opportunity to buy dollars at nearly half price. When Soapy set up his keister, he, too, would excite crowds with the come-on that for fifty cents they could buy a bar of soap that’d be worth at least a dollar. But his generosity was just an enticement; he was way too sly to engage in a transaction where there might be a chance that he could take a loss. Congress, though, was more cavalier. It had a sporting attitude toward the nation’s treasury. In 1890 it had passed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which obligated the government to buy 4.5 million ounces of silver each month—and to pay for these purchases at a set price with an equal amount of notes backed by either silver or gold. Gold had a market value of nearly twice that of silver, so it didn’t take considerable financial acumen to prefer a payout in gold dollars. And for once a deal that seemed too good to be true really was true—at least for a while. A silver dollar worth only 58 cents could be exchanged for a dollar certificate backed by gold worth a full 100 cents. But greed being what it is, and human nature, too, it soon transpired that the western mines produced—and then avidly sold to the government—more silver than Congress had ever anticipated. As a result, the U.S. Treasury began running through its gold supplies. When a despairing secretary of the Treasury confessed that the nation’s gold reserves had plunged below the traditionally acceptable level of $100 million, he might just as well have been a punter at the Orleans Club who, nearly wiped out, at last realized the faro box had been gaffed.

With the secretary’s revelation that the Republic’s nest egg was in jeopardy, panic spread. It galloped pell-mell through the national marketplace, destroying illusions, toppling empires, and jamming the machinery that operated everyday life. The forebodings of disaster had become prophecy. Yet even as the country was sent reeling, there remained one economic certainty: gold. Its value was sacrosanct. Its worth held steady. It was the one true thing. So governments demanded it. Investors hoarded it. And prospectors went to great lengths to discover it.

Now gold, too, helped to establish the allure of faraway Alaska in people’s minds. Back in the 1840s Russian trappers had reported that they’d stumbled upon traces of the yellow metal in the jagged spits of rocky land fronting the icy blue-green waters of the Cook Inlet. For these trappers, however, this discovery was just a curiosity; they were too occupied with the fortunes that could be made selling the soft, thick furs of minks, lynxes, beavers, and Arctic foxes to fashionable aristocrats at the court in St. Petersburg.

More recently, in the 1880s, American prospectors had experienced some luck panning in the tidewater Tlingit Indian fishing grounds that ran along the territory’s coastal panhandle. These were small strikes, but they were sufficient to spark large hopes. In fact, the possibility of further discoveries led George Pilz, an engineer who was already working a claim near Sitka, to come up with an entrepreneurial plan. He offered several bottles of whiskey to any Indian who could lead him to a gold-bearing vein. Soon enough, Chief Kowee of the Auk Tlingit tribe showed up with a piece of quartz rock laced with streaks of gold. There were more yellow-veined rocks like this one, the chief promised, along the banks of a fast-moving creek that lay beyond the Gastineau Channel.

Pilz handed over the whiskey, but he didn’t put too much stock in the Indian’s information. Although he was the one who had proposed the trade, Pilz now realized he just didn’t have it in him to trust any Indian. Besides, he knew that an expedition to search for a specific creek among the dozens, or perhaps even hundreds, of creeks that ran north of the channel would have its difficulties. That was rain-forest country, a dense, inhospitable region that stretched seemingly to the horizon in a maze of tall trees, razor-sharp ferns, and dark, murky swamps. A man could easily lose his bearings and never be seen again.

On the other hand, Pilz didn’t relish missing out on a chance to make a windfall discovery. The prospect, however unlikely, was still too tempting.

He recruited two vagabond prospectors, Joe Juneau and Dick Harris, to investigate. When they returned empty-handed, it simply confirmed to Pilz that his initial instinct had been correct. He should never have paid an Indian any mind. Chief Kowee, though, turned belligerent. He thundered: The two men’s search had failed because of a lack of heart. They had been lazy. They had not journeyed far enough beyond the head of the channel. The Indian’s vehemence took Pilz by surprise; it was the indignant tone of a man defending his honor. And that got Pilz to thinking.

He sent the two prospectors out again, telling them to hack their way through the rain forest and the underbrush if they had to. They were gone for over a month, but when they returned they were proud and gleeful. They had seen some colors in a roaring, spring-fed creek and then, on a hunch, had followed its course back several miles to a steep gulch. And there they’d found gold. “Little lumps as large as peas and beans,” Harris rejoiced.

It was a major strike, the first one in Alaska. Around what they took to calling Gold Creek and Snow Slide Gulch, in October 1880 the two men staked out a 160-acre townsite. Word spread quickly, and within a year a tent-city mining camp had been transformed into a shacktown crowded with prospectors, tenderfeet, hurdy-gurdy girls, and tinhorn gamblers. It was the first town to be founded in the nearly two decades since the United States had taken control of the territory. At a high-spirited, celebratory meeting, the miners voted to name it Juneau.

In 1895, while a great depression ravaged America, Juneau prospered. There were a half dozen hard rock mines scattered around the area, and each one was steadily producing large quantities of gold ore. These were loud and clanking industrial operations employing hundreds of workers and engineers. Each day the thick gray smoke from their smelting furnaces would float in an eerie mist above the town, visible testimony to the new fortunes that were being made. In booming Juneau, it was possible to believe that finding gold in Alaska was not simply a figment of the imagination, and that a new, more satisfying future was somewhere out there, another hidden treasure just waiting to be discovered.

A GRAINY photograph taken in 1895 shows a ragtag group of new arrivals coming off a small one-smokestack steamer tied up to the dock in Juneau. It is a rainy day, possibly spring, judging by the hip-length coats most of the men are wearing, and they are making their way in a lackadaisical procession along the narrow wooden wharf. Some have packs on their backs, others carry valises. The photographer must have set up his camera stand on Front Street, at the end of the long wharf, and from such a distance the faces are indistinguishable. Anyway, the rain is sheeting, and broad-brimmed hats are pulled low on many of their heads. Yet perhaps it is not necessary to be able to identify the newcomers to know at least the broad strokes of their histories. The tumult of the age had driven them to look for something better in the far north. At the same time, undoubtedly they were also running away from something in their own lives. The bittersweet legacies of high dramas had assuredly played a part in each man’s decision that it’d be better to move on. Charlie Siringo, Soapy Smith, and George Carmack had, as it happened, walked in similar circumstances down the wooden planks of this very wharf on their way toward Front Street, and on into Juneau. Traveling north with the flow of history, hardened by disquieting events, eager to leave hurtful memories behind, they’d come to Alaska. Like so many of the other newcomers, they were intrepid. They embraced large ambitions. And they, too, had no way of anticipating the mystery, danger, and adventure that lay ahead in such a wild and unknown big country.

THIRTEEN

harlie missed Mamie every day. He had agreed to take the case and go to Alaska for one reason: to forget. He wanted to put distance between himself and his memories, to separate himself definitively from all that had come before. Alaska, he’d reckoned, promised experiences that would overpower his lingering sense of loss. The truth was, even before his meeting with McParland Charlie had realized something had to be done. He knew it wasn’t his nature to keep to himself, or to spend his days all hangdog and steeped in melancholy. He was a garrulous sort, a man who’d spent a lifetime spouting off to whomever he encountered in a loud, cheery, self-confident voice. Why, all through his married days, he’d indulged in a cowboy’s weakness for the company a man could find in saloons and dance halls; a lot of his nights, he freely conceded with a bemused grin, had been spent carrying on in a manner that “would make Rome howl.” But after Mamie’s death he’d retreated to a lonely, private place, and despite his growing recognition of his predicament, he’d found he couldn’t manufacture the will necessary to extricate himself. He just couldn’t see the point.

Then he had met with McParland; and later, in the course of a long night, he’d come to grasp the full measure of what the superintendent was offering. He was being given not only the chance to solve a mystery that had stymied the Portland office, but also the opportunity to reclaim his life. In Alaska he could escape the constant torment of his memories. He could make a fresh start. Newly hopeful, looking forward to reconnecting to his work, he’d agreed to take the case.

Yet as soon as he boarded the SS City of Topeka in Tacoma, Washington, Charlie felt he’d made a colossal mistake. He was being disloyal. Escape, Charlie now decided, was a coward’s play. He was disgusted with himself for trying to steer a course that would leave Mamie behind. Even worse, his plan failed completely. His journey brought him no comfort. The memory of his departed wife was as steady as the hard gray rain that followed the steamship each day on its way north. It clung to him. It would be part of him forever, like the long scar that ran down from his knee, the result of a bullet wound suffered in the course of a foolish night in Dodge.

Charlie, same as any hand who’d cowboyed about the frontier, had been witness to his share of sudden, untimely deaths. Marauding Indians, stray bullets, feisty rattlesnakes, even lightning bolts—all had struck with a lethal arbitrariness that he’d learned to accept as simply bad luck. Nine out of ten times a cowboy could be in that exact spot and nothing would happen—only this time it did. On the plains and prairies either you learn to shrug off the unpredictability of life or else its dangers become too overwhelming. But now each day he would find himself once again dwelling on Mamie’s death, the unfairness of such a kindhearted soul’s dying so young and leaving their daughter motherless. It took all the discipline he could muster to prevent himself from standing on the deck and screaming in raw anger at the vast slate-gray sky above. He desperately wanted to ask for her back; yet he knew that would never happen. He wanted to turn back time and once again be the rascal outlaw sneaking down the hallway to the lonely widow’s bedroom in a Fort Laramie boardinghouse. He wanted to be traveling off to this new case with Mamie at his side. But he was alone.