The Floor of Heaven (29 page)

WHEN GEORGE had come back to Dyea from working at the mine in Juneau months earlier, he’d been a changed man. Perhaps it was the experience of spending time in the white man’s world again. Or maybe it was simply the mine itself. Seeing all that glittering gold ore being dug up from the cold ground, day in and day out, had had its effect. Old, sleeping thoughts had stirred. He’d found himself having some mighty fanciful notions about other bonanzas waiting to be discovered in this big country. He’d imagined what life would be like if he struck it rich. And as if they’d never been renounced, the legacy of hopes he’d inherited from his father, the dream that’d brought him to Alaska in the first place, had reclaimed their strong hold. He wasn’t of a mind to turn his back on his Tagish ways, but at the same time becoming an Indian chief was no longer a future he’d be setting his heart on. Instead, he was eager to go prospecting. He wanted to return to the Yukon. In fact, he’d just begun mulling the problem of how he’d find a crew to accompany him up north when, as luck would have it, two recruits showed up literally at his front door.

George had only been back with Kate and three-year-old Gracie for a few days, at the cabin in Dyea he’d built two years earlier, when his wife’s scream woke him from a lazy afternoon’s nap. His first thought was that something terrible had happened to the baby, and in the space of a moment his mind raced with countless dire possibilities. In his bare feet, he hurried outside to find an excited Kate celebrating the arrival of the brother and nephew she’d not seen in over two years. Skookum Jim and Tagish Charley had come to the nearby trading post carrying a load of furs, mostly muskrat and mink pelts that season, hoping to get a good price from old man Healy. Once their business was done, they were looking to get some work packing across the Chilkoot. Another plan, however, had already taken shape in George’s mind.

That night, dinner was a feast. Caribou steaks were roasted on an open fire, and to go with the frying-pan bread Kate had baked up, there was bone butter, a rare delicacy since the fixing required plenty of work. First the caribou bones needed to be fleshed and dried, then pounded with a rock. Next, the crushed bones would be simmered until reduced to a liquid that could be strained through a cloth. Kate would let this liquid cool, and in time a fatty marrow would form. She’d skim the marrow off and simmer it again before finally letting it cool and gel. The whole process would take near a week, but when it was completed there’d be a tub of fresh white bone butter. The butter would be brought out only on special occasions, and whenever it appeared George sure had a taste for it. He’d slobber the bone butter on the hot frying-pan bread and eat until he was near to bursting. Tonight, though, he held back. He felt obliged to make sure there was enough for his guests. He wanted them to be of a good mind.

Shrewdly, too, he waited until the dinner was done and pipes were being lit to share his plan. Jim, Charley, he announced now that the moment seemed right, I want you to go prospecting with me. There’s gold up in the Yukon. I’m certain of it. We find it, and we’ll be rich.

The two Indians were taken aback. The way they looked at it, they were already rich. They could hunt and fish for all the food they needed, and trapping and packing earned them money for whiskey and tobacco. Besides, they knew nothing about prospecting.

I’ll teach you, George insisted. Same as you taught me how to pack. Now it’d be my turn to help you. We’re brothers, right?

Yes, Jim agreed. George had accepted their ways. He was living with Jim’s sister. He was father to Jim’s niece. There was a bond. Still, Jim hesitated. Why you so sure we’ll find gold? he challenged.

Remember, George shot back at once, Wealth Woman is watching over me.

And so it was settled. The next morning they went to the trading post and bought supplies.

“When are you back?” wondered Healy.

“When we make it big and strike it rich,” answered George confidently.

As he had during his first trip to the Yukon, George let his instincts guide him. They went downstream to the Hootalinqua River, and when days of panning failed to reveal any bright colors, they drifted down to the Big Salmon River. This was a broad churning waterway, cold as ice, too, since its waters slithered down from the snowcapped Mackenzie Mountains. They worked the sandbars, and at first they were encouraged. They found colors in nearly every shoveful of sand. But it proved to be only a false promise, nothing but what the sourdoughs called “flour gold.” They shoveled and shoveled, but all it got them were specks that looked like tiny grains of yellow flour. And all the specks didn’t add up to even a single small nugget of coarse gold.

Still, it was an education. Jim, George observed with a teacher’s pride, had learned to be a whale with a rocker. The big Indian could expertly wash down a pan of dirt and sand in just minutes. And Charley, though as lean as a seedling, managed to put lots of muscle into his pick-and-shovel work. Prospecting was an exhausting occupation, but the Indians never complained or slacked off. “There wasn’t,” George would later recall, “a lazy bone in either of their bodies.”

This second expedition into the north country was instructive for George, too. He began to get an understanding of things that previously hadn’t been apparent. Prospecting in the Yukon, he decided, was different. This country had hard ways of its own. You couldn’t do things same as you would elsewhere.

In California, say, there’d be gold for the panning on the banks of the rivers twisting down from the Sierra Nevadas. But California was just a piddling place when compared to the Yukon Territory. This was a big country, with big mountains and big rivers. By the time the gold had traveled downstream from the Yukon ranges, it’d been worn down to a fine sand. You want to find nuggets, George told himself, you’d better stick to panning creeks and small streams. Thousands of years of journeying down the big rivers had given the rocks too much of a pounding.

His newfound knowledge, though, brought George little comfort. It was only a theory, after all. And how many creeks and streams would he need to wade through before it’d be proved? For all George knew, he could spend months—years?—in the Yukon and still wind up empty-handed. Lying sleepless by the campfire, George chastised himself with the single irrefutable certainty he’d learned in the course of this expedition: Once again he’d tried his hand at prospecting and had failed. Kate and Gracie couldn’t count on Wealth Woman to provide for them, and neither could he. If he wanted to earn some money for his family before winter came, he’d better head back to Dyea. Packing work would be better than no work at all.

Full of a bitter resolve after the restless night, that morning he told the Indians he’d be returning to Dyea. He had had enough.

Jim and Charley listened in silence. At last Jim spoke: We stay.

Suit yourself, said George. He shook hands good-bye with each of them. The occasion, he thought, demanded some formality; they were, after all, his pupils. But as he was trudging back to where he’d stowed his canoe, George found himself thinking, Now, don’t that beat everything? The Indians get gold fever, while the white man heads back to do packing.

But his surprise at this unexpected turn of events was soon eclipsed. For waiting for him on the beach at Dyea was the pesky oiler from the Treadwell mine.

THEIRS WAS a short conversation. As was his nature, Charlie would’ve been of a mind to jaw all day, but he could see Carmack was not so inclined. In fact, he was downright testy. When Charlie inquired as to what he’d been up to lately, George figured there was no point in lying, since his interrogator—who he was now certain was a U.S. marshal—knew damn well. Prospecting, he said tersely. Then he turned and went straight back to his cabin.

That night George waited for the marshal to come arrest him. When he hadn’t shown up by morning, George figured he’d better run while he still had a chance. He told Kate that he hoped Reverend Canham up at Fort Selkirk would have some carpentry work for him. Dawn had not yet broken when he slid his canoe into the water. With deep, quick strokes, he paddled off, all the time waiting for the shout ordering him to stop.

There was no work up north. The old Hudson’s Bay Company fort was just as bleak and desolate as when it had been burned to the ground back in the 1850s by the Chilkoot Indians. George found himself sitting on the banks of the river wondering what to do next.

Oddly, despite his predicament, he felt hopeful. He’d a hunch, “a premonition,” he’d call it, “that something unusual was going to take place.” He reached into his pocket and found a silver dollar he’d tucked away. It was near about all that was left of the money he’d earned the previous winter at the Treadwell mine. Cradling the coin in his palm, he formed his plan. Heads, he’d go upriver. Tails, downriver. He flipped the coin high in the air. It came down tails.

Without delay he packed up his canoe and climbed into the stern with his paddle. He sat back and let the swift current take him downstream toward the Fortymile River.

AS FOR Charlie, he wound up acting on a hunch, too. Carmack’s disappearance didn’t bother him much. Sure, the man had pulled him out of a sticky situation back at the mine; he owed him. But there was still no getting around the fact that the man was an odd sort. Besides, no sooner had Carmack hurried off than an agitated Billy appeared. It seemed there was a problem brewing: The young Indian maiden’s father was none too happy about the white man’s attentions to his daughter. Unless I want to take me a wife, Billy warned, I think we’d do best to leave.

The two detectives traveled that day. They still had no idea where Schell and Hubbard had sailed. After only a brief review of their chart, they decided to head south down the Dyea River, toward the small settlement at Skagway. But they both knew it was no better a plan than if they’d simply flipped a coin.

TWENTY-THREE

iringo and Carmack were not the only ones following their hunches as they plied the waters of the far north. Soapy, too, had steamed across the great thousand-mile-wide Gulf of Alaska in pursuit of a sudden whim. But after ten rough days at sea he’d begun to question his decision. What manner of folly, of sheer arrogance, had persuaded me to head farther north? he demanded sourly. Why, he admonished himself, had I even shipped off to Alaska? And the only answer Soapy could find was that for once his instincts had failed him badly.

This was a far cry from the enthusiastic, confident Soapy who, accompanied by his gang, had strutted up the gangplank of the General Canby. Despite two nights in a drafty Juneau jail cell, he’d swiftly managed to shed his disappointments. It was of little consequence that Juneau had proved to be intolerant of his profession. His hopes had already moved on. It had taken only a quick glance at a newspaper report to convince him that there were ripe pickings for a man of his skills in the tent camps springing up around the gold fields in Alaska’s vast interior. Just reading the names of new settlements like Miller Creek, Rampart, and Resurrection conjured up in Soapy’s sly mind images of wide-open frontier towns, of prospectors toting pokes bulging with gold dust. What they’d achieved in Creede, he assured his gang, would soon be repeated in Alaska. Only this go-around, Soapy Smith wouldn’t merely control a town. He’d be the king of the whole far north. He’d rule over a rich frontier empire.

But the long voyage across the gulf tested the reality of his giddy proclamations. Raging storms, battering tides, and heaving seas left him with a new, clear appreciation for how formidable the far north could be. It was May—springtime!—and yet on the rare days when the seas were sufficiently calm so that he might stretch his legs with a walk around the deck, the subzero cold drove him straight back to his cabin. And when the little steamboat pushed up close to the coastline, all that Soapy saw added to his mounting sense of dread. This was fierce country, a land of massive glaciers cascading down to the sea, ramparts of impenetrable mountain ranges, and inlet waterways choked with sprawls of thick ice. The hardships facing newcomers to this wilderness were only now becoming apparent; and Soapy, who knew well both his limitations and his intolerances, began to question whether he’d the gumption for such a rugged pioneer life. After all, he was a man partial to lying down each night in a warm feather bed.

Yet when the boat docked at Cook Inlet, the gateway to the interior, he tried to persuade himself that the worst was over. He’d survived the misery of the sea voyage, and soon he’d be heading to the gold fields and to the pockets ripe for fleecing. In steadier spirits, he wrote to his wife.

Cook Inlet near Coal Bay, 600 miles from Juneau on board the Gen. Canby 2500 miles north of San Francisco.

Dear Mary

Am well, will be to my destination tomorrow if nothing goes wrong. Have had a hell of a trip. You can write to Resurrection Creek, Cook Inlet, Alaska … Yours Jeff

Love to all

Then, before rushing to deliver the brief note to the southbound steamer that would take it to San Francisco, he had an afterthought. He turned the envelope sideways and wrote across it: “Gold here in big quantities—all country talking up here.”

Of course, he’d no idea whether that was true. However, if he told Mary that his prospects remained promising, perhaps he’d find further reason to believe, too. He had told so many lies in his life, where was the harm in telling one to himself? It was also important that Mary understand that a big score would soon be within his grasp. He needed Mary to know that he’d traveled to the ends of the earth—twenty-five hundred miles from San Francisco; who knew how many from his family in St. Louis, Missouri?—for her, too. The fortune he’d earn with his ingenuity and boldness would be theirs. He wanted her to know that wherever he went, regardless of how great the distances between them stretched, she was in his thoughts. Without her, there was no point in his journeying on deeper and deeper into this miserable frozen country. In a life shaped by guile and lies, she remained the one true thing. He thought of her, and found the will to plow on.