The Floor of Heaven (39 page)

But while Soapy was frank to his associates about how his life had spiraled down to slim pickings, he could not bear to tell his wife, Mary, the truth. To do so would have been to acknowledge that the prospect of their growing old together, of their one day living in a big house and being respected by their neighbors, was a lie, too. If Mary knew the truth, he feared, she would leave him. And then he’d truly have nothing. So he wrote her a terse note. He provided no specifics; perhaps he hoped her imagination would embroider the optimistic mood he was hoping to impart. And as if to compensate for his brevity, he made the letters large enough to fill the entire page:

Dear Wife

This far on my journey to the North.

God bless you.

Jeff

Owl Saloon

Spokane

But Soapy had no intention of going north, or going anywhere, for that matter. He didn’t care if he never left the Owl again.

THIRTY-THREE

eorge Carmack felt like celebrating, so he decided to splurge and buy a can of peaches. On the way back to his cabin from filing the claims at the police post in Fortymile, he stopped at Healy’s trading post.

Same as he’d done at Bill McPhee’s saloon, George couldn’t resist boasting about his discovery. And once again he was treated as if he was making the whole thing up. The white-haired Indian fighter had heard about far-off wilderness creeks sprinkled with gold too many times before. He didn’t put much truck in Carmack’s tale. But then George said he’d like a can of peaches, and he emptied a hill of gold dust from his caribou poke onto the counter. This should more than cover it, I expect, he said with a gloating smile. All Healy managed to mutter at last was “By golly, Carmack. You gone and done it!” George agreed that he surely had.

Stuffing the can into his pack, George couldn’t help feeling that simply by making the purchase he’d done something nearly as extraordinary as what he’d accomplished up on Bonanza Creek. He’d a taste for peaches ever since he was a child, but after coming to Alaska he had learned to do without. Years back, in Juneau, he’d wanted to buy a can, only the price had been alarming. Now it wouldn’t be long, he teased himself, before he’d be drinking French champagne like some New York swell in one of the Horatio Alger books he’d borrowed from Reverend Canham at Fort Selkirk. It was an extravagance, no getting around that. At the same time, George felt proud that he could afford such a luxury. Once he started working his claims, George reckoned, he’d become very rich. Might as well get use to the high life, he told himself. Anyways, it wasn’t just for him. It was a gift, too.

As he walked toward the cabin, little Gracie spotted him. She ran down the beach to meet her father, her long black hair twisted into a single braid and her dark eyes sparkling. George noticed, with a father’s anxious pride, that she’d soon be growing up into a young woman; she was already about mule-high, and although she was still as thin as a seedling, she was a pretty little thing, with an Indian’s chiseled face. As Kate approached, he called out, “I brought you something.”

George had never given her a present before. She’d no idea what to expect. Perhaps, she hoped, they’d shot a bear up north. Winter was coming, and a bearskin would come in handy.

“A can of peaches,” George announced. The way he said it, he might as well have been presenting a diamond.

For a moment all Kate could think was that George had been drinking and the whiskey had led him to go off and do something crazy. But when he handed her the big tin can, he didn’t seem drunk. He was just grinning. Then a thought occurred to her, but still she had to struggle to get the words out.

You found gold? she finally dared to ask.

George began to tell the story, only his Chinook couldn’t keep up with his galloping excitement. So he wound up grabbing Kate’s hand, and then Gracie’s, too, and in the next moment he had them dancing around in a circle. He broke out in a wild hoot, and Kate started in with a Tagish chant, and Gracie, not really understanding but still caught up in it all, began making her own happy noises. The jubilant commotion carried on for quite a while.

That night Kate and Gracie ate their first canned peach. The only fruit the girl had previously tried was a dried apricot. Biting into one was like chewing a stone. A peach, she discovered, was nothing like that at all. It was as soft as bone butter, and the syrup trickled down her throat like melted honey. It was the most wonderful taste she’d ever experienced, and even as an old woman she’d still be treasuring the memory.

WITH THE new day, the celebration was over. There was so much to do. George needed to get back to his claim. He’d already been away too long, and the thought of Jim and Charley working on their own left him uneasy. He told Kate to pack up. They’d take whatever they could carry and just leave the rest.

George had built the cabin with his own hands. It was the home where he and Kate had raised their daughter; where they’d taken shelter when gusting winds had hurled the snow so high that the white drifts reached toward the roof; and where they’d lain together warding off the brutal freeze of the subarctic nights. But George had no qualms about abandoning it. That was the way frontier life was lived in the far north. Alaska wasn’t like the West. Most pioneers didn’t think about putting down roots; this wilderness required too much of a struggle. It was a place in which to seek your fortune, and then ramble on. George walked away from the cabin without a sentimental thought.

In fact, in the aftermath of the first giddy moments when he’d grasped the significance of his discovery on the Klondike, George had started to erase all the hardscrabble years from his memory. There was nothing, he told himself, worth remembering; it had been a time when he simply did what needed to be done to get by. He’d always been a man susceptible to whims, but now he fixed his mind on the future and held it there as steady as a compass needle. He focused on the day when he’d return to California to show his sister, Rose, the fortune he’d earned. But first, George knew, there was plenty of hard work ahead of him, and he hurried north, eager to get on with it.

When he arrived along with his family at Bonanza Creek, George was relieved to see that Jim and Charley had been productive. Over just a few days the two Indians had felled a small forest of trees, hacked the branches off the trunks, and then piled the logs into a high pyramid. George was about to tell them they’d done good work when Jim approached. The big Indian revealed that he’d also put in some time panning on his own claim, and he held out a handful of gold dust for George to admire. Another week, Jim predicted, and he’d to be able to fill an entire poke, maybe even two.

George exploded. The circumstances called for patience, and a bit of instruction, as well. Since the California days of ’49, working a claim had evolved into a time-tested craft that’d been passed on by one prospector to another. The Day brothers had tutored George when he’d arrived in Juneau as an ignorant cheechako. And there’d been a time when George was of a mind to share all the tricks of the prospector’s trade with Jim and Charley; he was the one, after all, who on their first expedition to the Yukon had shown Jim the sourdough’s art of panning with a smooth, gentle roll of the wrist. George could have explained that in only another month winter would be blowing in, and before the heavy snows there was a sluice box to build, thick layers of bedrock to uncover, and a deep shaft to dig. Panning would need to wait until the spring. But George felt no need to have a discussion. It was his success, and he was beginning to resent having to divvy up his fortune with two Indians just because they’d the good luck to partner up with him. He’d come around to thinking that he should never have gotten involved with those two Chinooks. It had been a mistake. All his time with the Tagish, in fact, now struck him as sheer foolishness, an experience best kept buried. It wouldn’t do at all for the man who’d pulled the first nugget out of Bonanza Creek to be known as Siwash George. So in this irritated, put-upon mood, he gave Jim a stern talking-to. He wanted it understood, he barked, that he was in charge. From now on, they’d do what he said. And that meant no more panning.

Jim, prideful as he was, was not a man to complain. If George wanted to be the boss, he’d follow orders. At least that way they’d get the gold out of the ground. But at the same time he pondered the change that’d quickly come over his partner. He’d best be wary, Jim warned himself. Gold made white men unpredictable.

George grew uneasy around Kate, too. She’d always been a formidable woman, willful and commanding. That’d been part of the attraction; George had appreciated that she knew her mind like his sister, Rose. Only now George was unwilling to be subject to a stiff, uncompromising squaw. His accomplishment had convinced George that he shouldn’t be letting anyone tell him what to do. He was no squawman, and it was suddenly irksome that people had ever referred to him in such a snide fashion. Full of his newfound confidence, George wouldn’t give an inch; and Kate, still the unbending granddaughter of a Tagish chief, wouldn’t either.

On their first day at the claim they locked horns. Kate looked at the pile of logs and told George he’d better start in on building a cabin. George snapped back that there was no time for that right now. There were too many more important things to get done before the freeze-up. Then he just walked off. So they slept in a tent, and each night the cold’s sting seemed particularly mean since they were no longer sharing the same bearskin robe.

ONCE AGAIN, George found that he stood alone. Without his thinking too much more about it, things got so that he barely spoke to Kate and he only bothered to talk to Jim and Charley when he needed to tell them what to do. He threw himself into working the claim, and that suited him fine.

Straight off, he poked around the riverbank until he found a gully that’d do as a saw pit. Then he borrowed a two-man whipsaw from Dave McKay, who’d struck a claim downstream, and he and Jim started in on the pile of logs. Jim was top-saw; even in his self-important mood George had to concede that he was no match for the big Indian’s strength and mulish endurance. Standing in the bottom of the gully—the “underbucket,” as it was known—George’d grip a handle and do his best to keep up. Stroking back and forth, the two men moving in unison, they sawed one after another of the logs they’d laid across the pit into fairly straight planks.

After a stack of boards had been cut and roughly planed with a sharp knife, George set to work on constructing a sluice box. It was a contraption the early panners in California had devised to mimic nature: Just as the rush of ancient rivers had carried the heavy gold downhill to stream beds, the prospectors would shovel gravel into this raised funnel-like box, and the water shooting through would push the gold along until it was trapped in slow spots created by a peg frame—called a riffle—along the way or in the crossbars and the matting at the far end.

Years of practice had taught miners that a good “box length” was about twelve feet, while the height of the sides should be half that, with an opening at one end wide enough for a long-handled shovel piled high with gravel. A “string” of wooden boxes would be hammered together, forming a continuous waterway; the device, in its makeshift way, held to the same principles that had guided the Treadwell mine engineers when they’d welded together the metal pipeline stretching across Douglas Island. George kept at it; and still it took him more than two weeks to build this twelve-foot funnel.

Positioning the sluice box over a “cut” in the stream bed was a careful business, too. Experience in the California mines had led to a precise formula for achieving the best downhill flow of water. The general rule of thumb, George knew, was a one-inch drop per foot of the length of the box. So from the “lead box,” into which the gravel was shoveled, to the “dump box,” where the gold would collect, the incline was about a foot. The elevations had to be just so, and although each gust of wind whooshing down from the mountains was a reminder of winter’s imminent arrival, George refused to be rushed. He was meticulous in his work. A miscalculation, a slipshod bit of carpentry, and there was no telling how much gold might never complete its journey to the dump box. A small fortune could be as good as lost.

While the sluice box was being completed, George made sure Jim and Charley kept busy. Snapping out his instructions with a terse authority, George had them fill sacks with shovelfuls of dirt and gravel lifted from the cracks and crevices of the exposed bedrock scattered about the site. Although the bulk of the gold would be below the surface, in the core bedrock, the outcroppings might be laced with gold veins, too. There was no wheelbarrow, so the two Indians had to carry the sacks of “paydirt” to the site of the sluice box at the edge of the creek. They emptied the sacks, and soon a gravel hill miners called the “dump” started taking shape. In the spring cleanup, the dump gravel would be shoveled into the sluice box and washed. Until then, a long eight months off, they wouldn’t know if they’d dug up a heap of dirt or buried treasure.

As the two Indians continued filling and unloading sacks, George began sinking a shaft on his claim. With the first frost the ground would be as hard as granite, so George had to start work without delay. He’d need to dig a hole wide enough for a man to stand in and that might need to go straight down for forty or even fifty feet; there was no telling how deep the bedrock would be buried. The work required a good deal of muscle: slamming a pickax into stiff ground, then pushing the long-handled miner’s shovel through the heavy rocks and thick dirt. By the end of each long day his arms and back would ache, and he’d be so weary that he felt as if couldn’t find the strength to make it back to the tent. Still he kept at it, going deeper and deeper, until soon he began to feel as if he were standing in his own grave. He worked surrounded by solid walls of muck and dirt, the air tight in the narrow space, and after a few weeks he’d gone so deep that when he looked up he could see only a tiny patch of sky.

He was determined to keep digging until he reached bedrock; and while this was backbreaking work, George took comfort in the fact that getting the job done was simply a matter of will. Any man who put his mind to it could dig a hole. It’d be the next step that would be tricky.