The Floor of Heaven (2 page)

Yet it wasn’t whim that was determining the course of their journey. Schieffelin had a plan. He was not a trained geologist, but he’d picked up a good deal of practical knowledge over the many years, both as a boy and a man, he’d hunted for gold. He knew what he was looking for in Alaska.

Gold, he understood, was a very singular metal. It had been formed over the course of millions of years in the cauldron of the earth’s core and had then moved upward, toward the surface, into crevices and fissures, as the aging planet shifted about. You could get at it by mining, by sinking a deep shaft into the stony heart of the planet’s underground, shoring this tunnel with a backbone of timbers that would hopefully hold back a suffocating avalanche of dirt and rock; and then with judicious dynamiting and backbreaking shovel work in a dark, narrow, nearly airless hole, someday, if your luck held, the glimmer of a subterranean vein would be revealed. It was a grim, tedious, and dangerous enterprise. And success was as rare as an answered prayer. But there was also another more adventuresome way to find gold.

Gold traveled. As the earth stretched and heaved over the eons of time, rocks containing veins of gold rose up to the surface in this volcanic turmoil. Winds and rains, sleets and snows, streams and rivers, the abrasion of five million active years ground these rocks, honing them, until the gold was set free. And the gold traveled. The light metal was carried along by torrents of water, by fast-moving streams and mighty rivers. It traveled to gorges cut into ancient valleys, to riverbeds and sandbars, across gravel beaches, and down churning streams and quiet creeks. Nature would determine where it was driven, and gravity would dictate where it settled. But it all eventually came to rest, golden specks as fine as sand and tawny nuggets as big as knuckles, a legacy accumulating since the beginning of time that lay like a bright yellow carpet across the planet’s floor.

The prospectors called this, Schieffelin knew, placer gold. To get it, you panned. You stuck your tin pan into the water, gave the muck and gravel you brought up a careful, well-practiced shake followed by an earnest wash, and if you spotted colors, flecks of gold, or, even better, a nugget, you knew you were on to something. You had found your spot. All you had to do was dig down a bit past the bedrock, often just a foot or two, and a bonanza was yours for the taking.

Of course, knowing where to pan was essential to success. A prospector’s instincts were part science and part pure wishful thinking. You had to follow moving water, tracing in your mind the logical course of a bounty of fast-moving gold, and then decide where this millennium-old journey would’ve come to a halt. But since this pathway might very well have been altered over the ages, since a raging stream might once have raced through a now bone-dry valley or a placid creek might one million years ago have been a meandering river, guesswork was a large part of the process. You had to imagine how the earth once was; and in those reckonings, science could guide the prospector only so far. His hunches had to inform him.

And so throughout that spring and summer, as the New Racket had moved up river, Schieffelin had been scouting for placer gold fields and playing his hunches. Time after time, Schieffelin, bursting with his usual confidence, had seen something that had sparked an unshakable prediction. He’d order the boat to drop anchor and then they’d spend an energetic day or two panning near a sandbar, poking around the mosses of a riverbank, or wading through a stream rushing with glistening, ice-cold water. Each of these forays had ended in disappointment. No colors had ever shined in his pan. After each excursion, all Schieffelin could do was to find the faith to swallow his frustration and give the order to hoist anchor and steam north.

But now, staring at this dark stretch of river, he knew in his heart and in his mind that destiny had indeed been leading him all along. Nature had churned this channel, tossing dark sand and alluvial silt up from the depths, whirling it all about in a turmoil until the water was heavy with sediment and ash—and had turned color. Perhaps there had been a volcanic disturbance; the mountains in the distance, Schieffelin judged, certainly looked ominous. Or maybe it was the effects of a relentless, pounding rainstorm. Ultimately, Schieffelin did not care about the reasons; he would let other men dwell on the science. His attention focused on the result. With all the forceful heaving, with all the shifting about of the riverbed, he knew: Gold had been pried and loosened from its primeval resting places and had floated toward the surface. He had not an iota of doubt: This channel would be his bonanza.

They panned for three days. It was orderly, meticulous work. Standing against the terraced bank, he’d submerge his pan into the dark water that ran along the river’s sandy floor; wash off the larger rocks and bits of moss with a gentle, well-practiced circular twist of his wrists, leveling the pan from time to time as he shook it; and then, just to be sure, he’d repeat the entire process before looking for a telltale golden color in the grist of dank sand. Hour after hour, day after day, he kept at it. His success in Arizona had taught him that perseverance was as crucial a tool as luck. He refused to move on. He knew this channel held his next big strike.

On the third day, he found it. A yellow nugget as big as a Yankee dollar lay in his pan. Bursting with excitement, he took it out of the pan and held it up toward the sun. In the bright daylight, it glittered with promise. But common sense required that he give the rock a strong scratch or two with his thumb—and the bright color rubbed off. It was just another big, worthless rock. And with that realization, all his remaining hope might just as well have been squeezed out of him.

Later that day, Schieffelin gave the order to up anchor. Under a fresh head of steam, the New Racket was soon once again puffing up the long, twisting river.

SCHIEFFELIN HAD more hunches; and more disappointments. And when the sun was no longer so high on the horizon and a sharp chill was in the air, he realized they’d better find a place to settle in for winter.

They had been steaming up the fast-moving Tanana River, a tributary of the Yukon, when they saw to their astonishment a trading post. It faced a mossy, high-grassed inlet that was a natural harbor, and when they rowed ashore a wizened trapper greeted them with the announcement that he was the proprietor as well as, for that matter, the king of all they surveyed. The Indians called the place Nuklayaket, the trapper said. Schieffelin looked around and decided it was as good a place as any to hunker down.

He set the men to work building a cabin while each day he went off with his pan. He was not ready to quit. He knew gold was out there waiting for him. But measuring out his days in what had become an unremittingly frustrating exercise began to take its toll. Like the deep, darkening autumn sky that was swiftly beginning to hide the sun, doubts were starting to blot his confidence. Mistake, miscalculation, even folly—a vocabulary of defeat was taking form in his mind.

Then winter came. It didn’t arrive so much as attack. The wind grabbed at you and the snow pummeled, but the cold was the truly vindictive adversary. Schieffelin would wrap his newly purchased polar bear skin over his parka and yet could still feel the frost taking him in its death grip. His body shook as much from terror as from the chill; and all he could do in self-defense was to recall the dry, heavy heat of the Arizona desert. But the cold was never out of his mind for long. The trapper had rigged up a thermometer of sorts: four bottles, each one containing a different fluid. The bottle that held mercury would freeze at forty degrees below zero Fahrenheit, the coal oil at fifty below, and the jamaica ginger extract at sixty below; the Perry Davis’ Painkiller didn’t turn solid until it hit seventy-five below. There were many brutal nights when Schieffelin looked at the Perry Davis bottle and saw a dark mass.

Another sort of cruelty was the trapper’s constant taunting. He said Schieffelin had embarked on a fool’s mission: There was no gold up in the high north country. Sure, hard rock gold had been discovered a few years back in the Alaska Panhandle, near Juneau. But that was ore buried deep beneath the earth. Mining engineers had to dynamite their way near to China to get at it. Anyways, Juneau was near the coast, over a thousand miles from this inland river valley. And, Schiefflin learned to his surprise, he was not the first prospector to roam about the Yukon Valley. The trapper told him in that back in 1873 Arthur Harper had done a fair share of prospecting along the river, and five years later George Holt had crossed over the Chilkoot Pass to look for placer gold. Both men had come up empty-handed. And so would Schieffelin, the trapper assured him. Can’t find what isn’t there, he said flatly.

SPRING AT last came. A thin ray of light pierced the southern sky, and finally the sun itself rose on the horizon. With the new, fresh season, Schieffelin once more found his will. He made up his mind to set out again.

The New Racket steamed upriver. Fortified by this renewed confidence, Schieffelin found encouraging signs. Days were spent panning. Yet the results were always the same: nothing. It was dispiriting; the expedition had turned into a grim exercise. And a second winter would be worse than the first. Schieffelin now knew what to expect, and the prospect was more torment than any sane man could endure.

He gave each of the men $200 as a gratuity for their loyal service, and before the summer was over he arranged for the sale of the steamboat. The Oregon Territory, he’d come around to thinking, was a surefire treasure field.

I was wrong, Schieffelin announced to his team with a weary resignation on the day he departed Alaska for Portland. My theory, my instincts—all were ill-conceived ditherings, foolish mistakes. There is no gold to be panned in this godforsaken frozen wasteland. There’s not a single nugget to be found in the entire Yukon River Valley.

ONE

fter a good deal of thought, Charlie Siringo decided to hang his sign on the new iron bridge spanning Bluff Creek. It would take a bit of doing; he’d need to link chains to the top of the bridge’s battlement and then run ’em through a couple of holes he’d punch in the corners of the painted board that, to his great delight, had turned out “as pretty as a picture.” Sure, Kansas, he’d come to realize, had more than its fair share of weather; on a gusty day the oval-shaped sign would be flaying about. Nevertheless, Charlie was certain. This was the perfect spot.

He remembered that two years earlier—two years? It might as well have been in another lifetime—when he’d led the LX outfit and eight hundred fat steers up the Chisholm Trail, the sight of muddy Bluff Creek had filled the worn-out cowboys with excitement and anticipation. It had been a long, slow drive up from the Texas Panhandle during the uncommonly hot summer of 1882, day after day as dry as the piles of bleached chalk-white buffalo bones they saw scattered across the flat plains. Nights took their time coming, but the thin, cool evening whistling through the scrubland was a blessing—for a while. Once they crossed the Red River, the darkness brought new concerns. They were in Indian Territory. Most of the old chiefs had made their peace, but there was always the fear of half-starved Kiowa or Cherokee renegades swooping in from out of the thickening shadows to pick off cattle from the herd, or some ponies from the remuda, and, for good measure, lift a few fresh scalps. But Bluff Creek was the landmark that told the cowboys their ordeal was over. They were coming out of Indian Territory and heading up the end of the trail. Sporting girls, whiskey, and the railroad were only a short, hard ride away in Caldwell.

The Santa Fe Railroad had come to Caldwell, Kansas, in 1880, and now that there was a shipping point to the eastern markets days closer to the Texas ranches than either Wichita or Dodge City, Caldwell quickly became a hurrah cow town. The “Queen City of the Border” the cowboys called it. And once the LX outfit got near Bluff Creek, it was as if whoring and drinking and gambling was all anyone could think about. Around the campfire, there was a lot of hot talk about the rattling good time the boys were looking forward to at Mag Wood’s celebrated Red Light Saloon.

Charlie, too, had every intention of finding himself a bottle of whiskey and a sweetheart to share it. The way he saw it, after more than two dusty months driving a herd, a cowboy had earned himself a howling night. But he was also the trail boss; a leader had a duty to his men to impart a few words of commonsense restraint. Besides, at twenty-seven he was older and more experienced than most of the outfit. He had seen the trouble a fellow could ride into when coming off the range. So as they were heading up on Bluff Creek and the talk was getting pretty feverish, Charlie decided it’d be a good time to tell the hands about the scrape he had gotten into in Dodge City.

IT HAD been a few years back, the day before Independence Day 1877, and Charlie, a twenty-two-year-old cowpuncher, had completed a long drive up the Chisholm Trail with the Littlefield herd. Sitting with his chum Wess Adams, he’d been happily drinking the night and his pay away in the Lone Star dance hall. The place was rollicking, crowded with buffalo hunters, cowboys, and flirting ladies hoping to take some money off them. Bat Masterson, who usually could be found at one of the poker tables, was working that night as the barkeeper.

By around eleven P.M., though, things started getting strained; buffalo hunters and cowboys had a tendency to taunt one another, and the liquor helped to erode any inclinations toward indulgence. Wess, particularly, had grown vexed by the disrespectful words. He told Charlie that Jim White needed to be taught some manners, and he wanted to know if Charlie would stand by him in a fight. White was a long-haired, greasy hard case of a buffalo hunter, and about the size of a mountain to boot. Yet Charlie wasn’t one to quit on a fellow cowboy. “Start the ball rolling,” he agreed.

Wess threw the first punch, and in an instant cowboys and buffalo hunters were going at it. But it was Bat Masterson who drew first blood.

From behind the bar, Masterson hurled one heavy beer mug after another at Charlie. A mug slammed hard into his head, another cracked against a mirror, and suddenly shards of flying glass cut into Charlie’s face. With blood streaming down his cheek, Charlie watched as Masterson charged into the fracas armed with an ice mallet. As if he were hammering a fence post into the ground, Masterson pounded away at the face of a big Dutch cowboy. With each solid blow, blood spurted from the Dutchman’s face. Charlie wanted to go to the cowboy’s aid, but he was too busy trading punches, trying to keep on his feet; if a buffalo hunter took you down, his friends were certain to pile on, and then all would be lost.