The Floor of Heaven (40 page)

The subterranean bedrock would be the sign that he’d reached the stream that millennia ago had carried the gold to the floor of Bonanza Creek. This was the path to real riches. The muck and gravel of the buried waterway would contain the greatest concentration of gold ore.

But this was not always easy to find. George would need to read the “dip,” or slant, of the bedrock and use that as his guide to decipher the path of ancient stream bed. Then he’d start in tunneling, digging through a wall of dirt.

A stream, though, would more often than not run “spotted”; it could twist and turn at will. Chasing the right direction required a talent where intuition was as important as hard work. A miner could tunnel for weeks, working fifty feet below ground to shovel out a tunnel through a dense mountain of earth, only to realize that he’d lost the path of the stream. Then he’d need to start in on a new “cross-cut.”

But once he hit the old creek channel, he’d have found the “paystreak.” There’d be yellow nuggets as big as a man’s thumb studding the soft creek bed. He could pluck them out with his hand. And every shovelful of clay and gravel would be laced with gold. So George kept digging.

Then on the morning of October 13, George walked out of the tent and discovered that the ground was covered in a fresh white coat of snow. His boots crunched against the hard ice as he walked over to see about the creek. It was frozen solid. Winter had come to the Yukon, and he still hadn’t hit bedrock.

THIRTY-FOUR

eorge swung his pickax, but it didn’t even make an indentation. There was only a sharp clink. The ground beneath the fresh snow was frozen solid. Still, George was determined not to let the Yukon winter stop him. He was in a hurry to get rich. All his instincts told him he was close to reaching bedrock. He refused to sit idle, staring helplessly at buried treasure as he waited out the months until the spring thaw.

Years back he had heard the old sourdoughs talking about how in ’87, up on Franklin Gulch, a prospector by the name of Fred Hutchinson had also grown impatient. When winter came, the notion struck him to build a fire at the bottom of his shaft. He’d let it burn all night, and in the morning he’d clear the ashes, shovel out a swamp of thawed muck, and then he’d be able to keep on digging through soft earth. To hear the sourdoughs tell it, the technique had turned out to be as effective as the spring sun. “Winter burnings,” they called it. George made up his mind to give it a try.

He told the two Indians to start cutting cords of wood. At the same time, he went to work building a spruce-log winch—a windlass—over the shaft. Turning the crank would lower into the hole a wooden bucket attached by a spiral hook to a thick rope. That way, once he hit bedrock he’d be able to get the paydirt out of the shaft. Standing on top, the Indians would hoist the filled bucket up and carry the gravel to the dump. The bucket was big enough to hold about eight shovelfuls of dirt, so George figured that one hundred buckets would be a good day’s work. Come the spring cleanup, with any luck he’d be rich.

The first time George built a fire in the bottom of the shaft, he piled on too many logs. The roaring blaze thawed the earth, but a fog of gray smoke remained trapped in the narrow shaft. Work was impossible. The next night he used fewer logs; in the morning smoke was still wafting through the hole, stinging his eyes and seeping into his nostrils and throat, but he didn’t feel the overpowering need to escape. He could work, and he filled more than fifty buckets. Encouraged, the following night he tried building an even smaller fire. But it proved too weak to thaw the earth, so he resigned himself to working through the smoke. He tied a bandanna over his nose and mouth, and in time he got used to it. He even found that there were advantages to working underground in the winter. The possibility of the shaft’s walls crumbling around him and burying him alive had been a constant fear. Now it was no longer a concern. “The ground is frozen and never caves in,” he observed with relief.

Only now that winter had arrived, it became clear that they could no longer continue living in tents. They’d freeze; the temperature would hit sixty below when the icy spears of wind came hurling down from the Arctic. As much as he wanted to concentrate solely on working the claim, George knew it was time—way past the time, truth be told—to build the cabins. Besides, that might put an end to some of Kate’s complaining.

He picked out sites on flat land, and they set to work. The cabins would be built from logs chinked with moss, and each would be about the width and length of three canoes placed side to side. There’d be a window made out of empty glass jars, but it’d let in only a hazy light. The single room would be a tight, shadow-streaked space. Jim and Charley would share one cabin. About a hundred yards away was another site for George, Kate, and their daughter.

As he started in cutting the logs, just the prospect of settling into the pokey cabin left George feeling as if he were heading off to prison. The confinement would be worse than being wedged into the narrow shaft and surrounded by walls of dirt. In the tiny cabin there’d be no place to escape Kate’s constant carping. He mulled building a separate cabin just for himself, but considering all he had to do, he realized this was not a possibility. Instead, he retreated, as he’d done so many times in his solitary life, into the comforting seclusion of his imagination. He lived in the future, and there he built his own home. In his mind he’d left Bonanza Creek and was already in California with Rose, the prodigal brother who’d returned a wealthy man.

Yet as it became clear that the work on the cabins would drag on for a spell, not even the distance he was putting between himself and the others was of much comfort. After three days he was ready to explode from the frustration. He didn’t have time for what the sourdoughs called “dead work.” He needed to get back to digging his way to the bedrock. There was a fortune within his grasp—only he was sawing logs.

George gave his predicament some thought, and soon he came up with a plan. Why not set the fires in the shaft in the morning? That way he could spend the day finishing up the cabins, and at the same time the shaft would be thawing out. After a quick supper, he’d head off to dig for bedrock.

It became an arduous routine. He’d work all day; and then at night, he would climb down into the dark, smoky hole and dig by the soft glow of candlelight. He was at the point of utter exhaustion. The shovel felt very heavy in his hands. But he knew he was getting nearer to the bedrock, and that goal drove him on.

JIM, HOWEVER, was troubled. It wasn’t that he was averse to the hard work and the endless hours. And he could tolerate the change in George’s attitude; he’d never expected too much from a white man anyways. But the thought that George was exploiting him had begun to take hold. They’d been working the site for over two months, and only one shaft had been dug. And it was on George’s claim. He was beginning to suspect that Charley and he were working to make George rich. The white man had no intention of assisting them. When Jim felt he could no longer tolerate the one-sided way things were proceeding, he confronted George.

“When we dig shaft on my claim?” he demanded.

George didn’t reply. Instead, he gave Jim a long, cool look. He was the boss of this outfit; he didn’t have to answer any questions. And he didn’t cotton to the big Indian’s tone. It was damn impertinent. Hell, it was one more reason why he should never have partnered up with a couple of scraggly Chinooks in the first place. He was of a mind to let the Indians stew. But in the next moment, George realized it wouldn’t do to have them storm off. So he swallowed his pride and told Jim the truth.

“Listen, Jim, and you too, Charley,” he said sharply. “We have to work together to get gold out. I can’t work my two claims by myself. I need your help. You fellows can’t work your claims alone either. You need my help. That way everybody helps, no fighting. Jim, Charley, George—three partners. Savvy?”

Jim gave no sign that he knew what George was talking about. For a moment George thought that the two Indians would indeed return to their village for the winter. For that matter, the way Jim was staring at him, his face hard and full of scorn, George wouldn’t have been surprised if the Indian had thrown a punch. George, though, extended his hand. And Jim shook it. Charley did, too. And just like that, an agreement was formalized.

George was true to his word. Over the next four years, more than $1 million worth of gold would be taken from their claims on Bonanza Creek, and they would share it equally. It had never, in fact, been George’s intention to exploit the two Indians. His plan had always been to dig one shaft at a time; once he hit bedrock, they’d move on to Jim’s site. He’d reckoned there was no need, though, to share his plans with them. Just as there was no reason to explain that while they were still his partners, they were no longer his friends. His accomplishment had shattered the bonds of whatever they once might have had in common.

EVEN DURING that first winter, George and his crew were not alone on the Klondike. The outside world still had no idea that gold had been discovered in the Yukon, but the river valley was overrun with veteran prospectors who’d heard the news and rushed north to stake claims. Within days, George had neighbors up and down Bonanza Creek. The next wave of sourdoughs had to settle for sites on nearby Eldorado Creek. “Bonanza’s pup,” they grudingly called it. They’d soon discover, however, that the short snaking creek held untold riches. The days had turned cold, and yet the wilderness was bustling with miners working claims. At night the strong, bright flames from hundreds of fires rising up from thawing shafts reached toward the starry sky, and the crimson reflections crawled up icy mountainsides lit by the white moon.

It was a heady time. The Yukon River Valley was a snow-covered wilderness populated with men who just six months earlier had been dead broke and who now were intoxicated by the realization that they’d soon be millionaires. At the center of all this merry commotion a tent city began to take shape. A winter ago Dawson had been nothing more than a quiet stretch of frozen swampland near the mouth of the Klondike. There was a sawmill that was shut most of the year; a squalid saloon with the same defeated drunks at the bar day after day; and a trading post famous throughout the north for the credit it routinely extended to prospectors. Now Dawson was the richest community in the world.

Except no one had any money. In the spring, the sourdoughs would wash off the gravel piled in their dumps and sell the accumulated gold in Seattle for cash. But that first winter they were a collection of millionaires with empty pockets. The only tangible resources they possessed were the nuggets and yellow dust they’d scoop from their piles of paydirt. All they had was gold; and they had plenty of it.

So gold became the accepted currency. Dawson, a disorderly ragtag collection of dirty tents in the middle of nowhere, was a more expensive place to live than Paris, London, or New York. A small keg of bent nails cost $800. Salt was literally worth its weight in gold dust. Eggs were traded for nuggets. A Juneau butcher came north with a raftload of beef cattle and in weeks had sold off his small herd for $200,000 in gold. Poker was played for fantastic pots, piles of nuggets and dust that could easily ransom a king. A round of drinks would wind up costing the price of a house in other parts of the world. Every night that winter the saloon would be packed with high-spirited men who couldn’t believe their luck.

THAT WINTER, George hit bedrock. The weather had turned so cold that some days his mustache became coated with a white frost. But he would still trudge out of the cabin and climb down into the shaft. His bandanna offered only a small protection from the curl of smoke that continued to rise from the embers of the bonfire. After all the weeks, smoke had seeped into the frozen walls of dirt; the sharp, strong smell enveloped him. Yet he didn’t hesitate. He’d shovel off the ash, fill the bucket with the melted ooze, and then dig. He’d reached fourteen feet when he heard the clear, unmistakable sound of his shovel banging against solid rock.

George was elated, but there was no time for celebration. Instead, as he’d always planned, he went straight to work sinking a shaft on Jim’s claim. They hit bedrock there in no time at all, or so it seemed to George after all the frustrations at his site. Then they went to work putting in a shaft on Charley’s section.

By February, they were hoisting up buckets of paydirt laced with veins of gold from all four claims. George couldn’t wait to tell Rose how things were working out. He wrote:

I sent you a letter last Fall telling you of the strike I made. Well, it has growed wonderful since then. Everybody here is a millionaire. Eldorado Creek comes into Bonanza about a half mile above me, It is something wonderful. The pay has been located for four miles now and some the claims they think will pay a million and not one of them are blanks.… This is only one chance in a lifetime and I must make the best of it.

After they ran the gravel through the sluice box in the spring, then weighed the gold in Dawson, George no longer had any doubts that he was a wealthy man. The yield for that first winter from the four claims totaled about $60,000. Two of the sites were in his name, so his share would be $30,000. That would be sufficient to buy a sizable ranch in Modesto, and there’d still be money left to pay off Rose’s mortgage, too. But it wasn’t enough for George. He had written his sister that this was “one chance in a lifetime” and he was not prepared to walk away from it.

By June, many of the prospectors along the banks of the Klondike had booked tickets to Seattle. They stuffed their haul of gold into coffee cans, valises, and backpacks and made the trip to St. Michael to board the steamer. But George was not ready to cash in. When he returned home, he wanted to be very rich.

THIRTY-FIVE

oapy was transformed. He now had his sights set on a new, breathtakingly rich scheme, and he was raring to go. Just three months after he’d mailed the misleading letter to his wife, an event happened that as if by magic restored his wily energy and his old assurance.