The Floor of Heaven (42 page)

As a result, the steamship companies settled on a route that took ships along the southeastern Alaskan coast and then through the long Lynn Canal. Pointing like an outstretched finger, the canal led directly to the headwaters lapping at the crescent beaches of two new hectic tent towns. The boats would anchor a mile offshore and unload their passengers and cargo in a haphazard flurry of activity. Terrified horses and mules would be dumped into cold waters. Packing cases loaded with carefully purchased provisions would be heaved onto snub-nosed transport boats only to smash apart on landing, the goods scattering into the sea. And these small makeshift ferries quickly filled to capacity; for many of the new arrivals, there would be no choice but to wade through numbing water to the beach.

The rocky beaches were scenes of constant pandemonium. Hundreds of confused, exhausted people would be searching frantically for their belongings or scrambling to make camp, while yelping dogs and whining horses raced about fitfully. John Muir, the well-known naturalist, made his bewildered way through the high-pitched tumult and compared it to “a nest of ants taken into a strange country and stirred up by a stick.”

From the teeming beaches, the stampeders had their choice of two boomtown destinations just six miles apart. One was Dyea, the same spruce-forested inlet where Charlie Siringo had happened upon a suspicious George Carmack. Here prospectors could start out on the dauntingly steep Chilkoot Pass, the very route that had nearly done in Carmack. If they made it to the other side and down to Lake Lindeman, then it was a six-hundred-mile voyage across placid lakes and down the Yukon River to the Klondike.

The other beachfront settlement was Skagway. This was the entry point to the White Pass, another gap over the mountains. The White Pass was ten miles longer then the Chilkoot Trail, but it had the seeming advantage of being far less steep; its summit was six hundred feet below the lofty Chilkoot’s and there were trails for pack animals. Still, as one old sourdough who had struggled over both passes reckoned, “There ain’t no choice. One’s hell. The other’s damnation.”

But to the newcomers gazing up toward the mountains as they huddled in exhaustion around campfires on the beaches, the distant rolling hills of the lower White Pass seemed an easier passageway. All through that first fall and winter people flocked to Skagway, the settlment whose name was inspired by the Indian word Skagus—the home of the North Wind.

It was a idyllic site, a flat patch of windblown land nestled between a beach, clear blue alpine lakes, and a fortress of jagged-peaked mountains. Its only inhabitants were a single self-sufficient frontier family living in a log cabin. But by the spring of 1898, as the thick crust of ice on the trail began to melt, Skagway had been transformed into a rip-roaring tent city bustling with over 10,000 inhabitants, and more were arriving each warm day.

A QUIET decade before the Klondike gold rush, Skookum Jim had led a surveyor through the undulating hills, canyons, and valleys that became known as the White Pass. And as was the case when he accompanied George Carmack on the momentous expedition that discovered gold on Bonanza Creek, the big Indian’s role became only a footnote in the white man’s history. It was seventy-one-year-old Captain William Moore who became renowned for charting the long, snaking trail. And it was the sturdy white pioneer who in time grew rich as the sole founding father of Skagway.

Yet even if Moore’s achievement has been heralded generously and Jim’s largely ignored, there is no denying that the captain was a remarkable man. Arriving from Germany in his teens, he was soon piloting towboats on the Mississippi. But the lust for gold grabbed hold of his dreams, and for the next half century he sought it—in California, Peru, and British Columbia. Along the hard-charging way he made a fortune, built a mansion in Victoria, and lost it all. For a while he ran a fleet of steamboats up the Fraser River, even carrying camels to the Canadian gold fields in an quixotic scheme that in the end turned into a shambles. By the time he arrived in Alaska in 1887, he was dead broke.

Moore’s mind, however, was churning. He still dreamed of gold. Only now he became fixated on the Yukon Valley. A lifetime of experiences in gold fields in North and South America had sharpened his intuition. He possessed not a single tangible piece of evidence, yet he was certain: The next big strike would be in the Yukon.

Moore, though, didn’t set off with his pack and shovel. Finding gold, he knew too well, was a chancy business. You could spend decades panning and never see a single yellow nugget. Besides, he was in his sixties; traipsing through the wilderness was a younger man’s occupation. Instead Moore focused his ambitions on a sure thing: He’d create and own a boomtown.

Moore had heard stories about a pass through the mountains that was less precipitous than the Chilkoot, and with Skookum Jim leading the way, he went out in search of it. It was two months of grueling work. Yet they succeeded in marking the path of a forty-five-mile trail wide enough for men and pack animals. It led through high country that twisted and turned along narrow cliff-sides; passed through deep bogs and swampland; crossed and then recrossed fast-moving rivers; and built to a thousand-foot climb over sharp rocks before it scurried down to Lake Bennett and the beginnings of the Yukon River. Moore named the trail in honor of Sir Thomas White, the Canadian minister of the interior.

But—and this stroke showed the reach of Moore’s genius—his activities didn’t stop with the creation of this new route to the north country. His visionary intelligence predicted that the little valley below White Pass would one day be filled with prospectors heading off to find their fortunes. Registering with the government in Washington, D.C., he and his sons claimed a 160-acre townsite, the maximum size American law allowed for new settlements. They built a cabin and a mile-long wharf stretching out from the beach, and they cleared a four-mile wagon road through spruce forests and swampland that led to the beginning of the White Pass Trail. He called it Mooresville.

For a decade he lived in lonely isolation. He owned nearly as far as he could see from his cabin door, but it was a barren accomplishment. After all the years spent waiting, after all the brutal winters, his confidence in his success began to fray. He was in his eighth decade, an age when many take stock of their lives, and he found himself beginning to acknowledge his doubts. Perhaps his guiding instinct had been erroneous. Perhaps the Yukon Valley held no treasure. Perhaps Mooresville would forever be a forest and he would die unknown and in disappointment, another humble creature left to decompose in the vast north woods.

Then suddenly they came. The boats spewed them forth by the hundreds, then the thousands. They came charging up from the beaches, pitching tents, cutting trees for shacks. Moore was there to welcome them to his town, but the impatient newcomers had no time for some crotchety old sea captain. With the swagger and the authority of a conquering army, the new arrivals made their own rules. By August a prospectors’ committee had laid out the town of Skagway with sixty-foot-streets and thirty-six hundred lots that measured fifty by a hundred feet. It was Moore’s land by deed, and a $5 registry fee was collected by the town from anyone who wanted a parcel, but Moore was never consulted and he never received any compensation. Surveyors even condemned his cabin, since it lay in the middle of a new thoroughfare. When they came, all he could do was fight them off with a crowbar as his wife stood sobbing in the doorway.

In the end, the founder of Mooresville moved from the cabin where he’d passed a contemplative decade imagining the day when people would come. Beware of what you wish for, he might have told himself, and then surrendered with a glum resignation. But old age had not dampened his fighter’s spirit. He brought his arguments to the courts. It took four frustrating years before authorities in Washington ruled that he was entitled to 25 percent of the assessed value of all the lots so cavalierly carved out of his original townsite. By then he’d also earned another fortune from the fees he’d collected from the boats that docked along his wharf. He ended his days in contentment, satisfied that his vision had been confirmed.

But there were limits to his pride. Even Moore had to concede that the town that took shape in the flatland of his valley had little resemblance to the bucolic village of his imagination. Skagway was from the start a roaring, wide-open town. Its main commercial thoroughfare was only a stretch of black mud grandly christened Broadway Avenue, but four pokey saloons—the Pack Train, the Bonanza, the Grotto, and the Nugget—kept things hopping all day and all night. The whorehouse and the dance halls were just tents, but the painted good-time girls were always busy; there were offerings for every taste. It was a town without rules or law, a spreading tent city of restless, overwhelmed new arrivals who had traveled thousands of hard miles.

Until the steady snow stopped falling and the ice on the trail and the Yukon River melted, the newcomers were stranded in Skagway. People grew insensible with drink and reeled down muddy streets. Deadly fights broke out over insults real and imagined. Piano music and gunfire echoed through the hills day and night. And come November, winter began to take its suffocating hold. The hordes grew impatient, cold, and bored. It was a dark, dangerous season.

“It seemed as if the scum of the earth had hastened here to fleece and rob, or … to murder,” complained one Englishman who found himself stuck in Skagway late in the fall of 1897. “There was no law whatsoever; might was right, the dead shot only was immune to danger.”

It was American territory, but the nearest U.S. marshal lived in Dyea, and he was in no rush to visit. When a Frenchman was caught stealing, the town elected a committee to deal with the transgressor. Justice was swift. The thief was tied to a pole in front of a tent, and a fusillade of bullets pounded his body as he pleaded for mercy. The bloody corpse was left for three days as a warning to other would-be thieves.

When Superintendent Samuel Steele of the NorthWest Mounted Police crossed the border for a visit, he felt as if he had entered “hell on earth.” Bullets ripped through the walls of his cabin, roaring gunfights left mortally wounded victims lying in the streets, and shouts of murder and cries for help were so frequent that quite quickly, he admitted, they ceased to be startling. “Skagway,” the veteran Mountie decided, “was about the roughest place in the world.”

It was here that Soapy Smith came with his gang.

SOAPY BOOKED passage on the City of Seattle in August, less than a month after the news from Bonanza Creek reached Seattle. The captain was his old friend Dynamite Johnny O’Brien, and even before they shipped off Soapy asked for a favor. The departure date was the thirteenth. Would Dynamite Johnny indulge a gambler’s superstition and delay the voyage for a day? Soapy still vividly remembered the fiasco his previous trip to Alaska had turned into, and he reckoned he could use all the luck he could get. Of course, agreed the captain. How could he refuse to accommodate the stalwart hero who had helped him calm a mutiny?

They were not long at sea before Soapy repaid the captain’s courtesy. A passenger had thought to ease the monotony of the voyage by swinging playfully from the halyards as the ship rolled through the ocean swells. But as he swung back and forth, a ten-pound lantern came loose and struck him on the head. He plummeted to the deck, and lay there dead.

The other passengers, already agitated by the overcrowding on the steamer, promptly held a mass meeting. They wanted revenge on the captain and the steamship officials for the unsafe conditions that had resulted in a death. They decided to initiate a $50,000 damage suit against the company.

That was when Soapy intervened. Furious, he announced that the dead man was a stowaway. Then, as the crowd watched in stunned silence, he went through the dead man’s pockets. He pulled out a medal and an envelope addressed to Jefferson R. Smith—both of which, he bellowed, had been stolen from him yesterday.

“Now, you scum,” he said fiercely, “if you want to stand up for a man who’s a stowaway, a cheat, and a bum, I’m off you.”

Moments later, the passengers, their anger spent and deflated, dispersed. And Soapy felt restored. He’d let his talents rest dormant for so many months that even he’d had to wonder if he’d lost his touch. But now he had demonstrated to himself—and to his attentive gang members, as well—that he still could manipulate the emotions of a crowd. He could dish out the most preposterous story and the marks would obediently accept it without question. He was once again brimming with confidence. He couldn’t wait to get back into business.

This time he was not disappointed. After his first day ashore, Soapy, like the jubilant George Carmack on Bonanza Creek, knew he’d discovered the mother lode. He had crammed a lifetime of plots, scams, and adventures into his hectic thirty-six years, but Skagway would be his golden opportunity. He’d earn both wealth and respect.

The money started quickly rolling in. In three brisk weeks he and the gang had made nearly $30,000. He proudly wrote Mary, “I have had luck in trade” and sent her $1,600.

He had no doubts that this would only be the beginning.

THIRTY-SEVEN

oapy was king.

In a whirlwind of ruthless ingenuity, Soapy had become, after just a few busy months, Skagway’s preeminent citizen. He was monarch over a tent-city empire that included underworld enterprises, saloons and whorehouses, businesses of varying degrees of legitimacy, the best restaurant in the territory, as well as, in one more sign of his complicated ambitions, philanthropic and civic organizations. Soapy’s control over the town was total.

He surrounded himself with members of his Denver gang, veterans up to their old tricks in a new, fertile stomping ground. John Bowers was back to wearing his reverend’s white collar, once more the pious “grip man” offering fraternal handshakes to newfound friends and lodge brothers as he steered the tenderfeet to Soapy’s establishments. “Old Man Tripp” had headed north, too. Now he posed as a benevolent white-haired sourdough who had returned from the Yukon, only the pack on his back carried feathers rather than the prospector’s heavy supplies and the mother lode was fleecing a miner who’d already struck it rich. “Professor” Turner Jackson had transformed himself into an authority on the geology of the Klondike bedrock, an erudite adviser to the ignorant and unsuspecting. George Wilder was once again the confident dandy, primping around Skagway’s dank saloons in his bowler hat, wing collar, diamond stick pin, and shiny high-buttoned boots, a picture of entrepreneurial success who was only too glad to let a new friend in on a sure thing. “Big Ed” Burns and “Red” Gallagher had come north, too, thugs ready to dish out—as they’d done so effectively in Creede and Denver—savage beatings to any mark who turned belligerent.