The Floor of Heaven (8 page)

As soon as he read the story, Soapy flew into a rage. He immediately rushed over to the newspaper and went directly to the colonel’s office. Without a word of explanation, he raised his walking stick and hammered it into the startled editor’s skull with so much force that the impact could be heard outside in the newsroom. A punishing fusillade of blows rained down before the astonished pressmen could hurry over and, with some trouble, drag off a wild Soapy. Arkins lay motionless and prostrate on the floor, blood streaming down his face. But he was not dead.

Soapy was arrested and charged with attempted murder. After a little politicking, this was reduced to assault. He was freed on a $1,000 bond. As soon as he got out of jail, Soapy took Mary and the children to the Union Depot and bought them tickets to St. Louis. They would stay with her mother. As he watched the train pull away from the station, he realized with a resigned practicality that his carefully constructed life in Denver had collapsed all around him. He left the city the next day, not bothered at all about jumping bail.

ON THE run, accompanied by members of his gang who still had faith in his resourcefulness, Soapy drifted through the smaller cow towns. They tried to get scams going in Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, and Ogden. But after Denver, the pickings seemed very small.

Pocatello, Idaho, though, held out a bit of promise since it was a railroad company town and that meant workers would be flush with weekly wages. Yet as soon as the Soap Gang hit town and settled down in a Main Street saloon, the Rincon Kid and his crew came looking for them. Pocatello was his turf, and he had no intention of sharing it. Shots were fired, and two men were killed. In a letter to Mary, Soapy tried to laugh at the incident, joking that he nearly “got his moustache shot off.” “The smoke of the pistol blinded me for a moment, but I returned the fire and shot both my assailants. One through the thigh, and the other through the calf of the leg and the heel.”

The next day the sheriff escorted the Soap Gang to the station. With a gambler’s doggish philosophy, Soapy boarded the first train without protest. Yet he was uncertain of where he was going. He silently longed for the opportunities he had found in Denver, and the comforts he had enjoyed there, too.

SIX

eorge Carmack, meanwhile, had already embarked on his own journey. It had been a rough fifteen-day voyage through choppy ocean waters, but unlike his fellow seasick marines on the USS Wachusett, George didn’t complain. Day after day he would lean against the rail on the rolling deck of the three-masted ship and look out over a whitecapped, gunmetal-gray sea toward the horizon. It was February, a season when the North Pacific was a heavy curtain of dense fog and pelting rain; nevertheless, George’s eyes strained against the darkness as if at any moment he would be rewarded with the first sighting of land. He was unsure about what he could expect once his platoon disembarked, but he could not help feeling a building excitement. He was on his way to Alaska.

On orders of the secretary of war, George and the contingent of marines on board the sailing ship were being deployed on a peacekeeping mission to the coastal harbor town of Sitka, the commercial trading and shipping center of the Alaska Territory. Of course, the War Department did not seriously believe that a small garrison of young marines could effectively put down another Tlingit Indian uprising, rein in the rum and whiskey smugglers, enforce the laws protecting the extermination of walruses, whales, seals, and sea otters by marauding trading vessels, or even effectively police the muddy streets of Sitka. In the fifteen years since the United States Congress had reluctantly finalized its purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, the official policy toward the district had been one of neglect.

At the time of the sale, feelings had run high in the House and the Senate that Secretary of State William Seward had engineered a frivolous and expensive deal simply to repay a cash-strapped Russia for its support of the North during the Civil War. The sale was loudly dismissed as “Seward’s Folly,” the half-million-square-mile wilderness mocked in congressional debate as “Seward’s Icebox” and “a polar bear garden.” The New York World compared the territory to “a sucked orange,” insisting “It contained nothing of value but furbearing animals, and these had been hunted until they were nearly extinct.” Horace Greeley, in the New York Tribune, grumbled that Alaska was a “burden … not worth taking as a gift.” Similarly, one congressman spoke for many prominent and influential national voices when, brimming with frustration, he ranted, “Why didn’t we give her [Russia] the seven million and tell her to keep her damned colony? It’ll never be of any use to us.” In 1877 the territory had been officially declared the Alaska Customs District, but this deliberately vague designation brought no formalized civil government to the area. There were, it was estimated, 33,000 people, largely Indians and Eskimos, spread throughout a wilderness that was nearly one-third the size of the entire continental United States at the time, and for all practical purposes they lived in a state of lawlessness. It was an unruly and untamed land, and the preoccupied lawmakers in Washington accepted this with a philosophical shrug of disinterest. After all, Alaska was undeniably a distant, frozen, and worthless place. The marines on board the Wachusett had been sent as a token force, and, it was openly acknowledged, they were a slight token at that.

Yet it was Alaska’s very remoteness, the promise of a vast, virgin, and uncivilized country, that attracted a certain kind of individual. As the Wild West grew civilized, as the vanquished Indian tribes settled with dour resignation on government reservations, as the wheels of steam engines clicked and clacked against the metal tracks that stretched across plains where short generations ago herds of buffalo had thundered, and as homesteaders pounded sturdy fence posts and plowed the rich brown earth, stubborn men flocked to this newly acquired territory. Wanderers, trappers, Indian fighters, cowboys, and lawmen, the very men whose fierce, independent, courageous, and often violent ways had shaped the West, now moved on to another lonely and challenging American outpost. They had succeeded in taming one frontier, only to become victims of their own success. They were heroes who had outlived their usefulness. Their spirits found neither joy or comfort in the routine; and—a curse? a blessing?—they had grown accustomed to the sharp edge of uncertainty that shaped an active, dangerous, self-sufficient life. They wanted to grow old boldly, and in the company of new adventures. And so they packed their saddlebags and, as if driven by some natural instinct, began to migrate. They turned their backs on the towns they’d helped build, on the Main Streets where families now strolled, and journeyed north to the last American wilderness.

Along with this legion of daring, restless men came the prospectors. These indomitable sorts had tried their luck in the California gold fields; then, hearing news of fresh strikes, they’d hurried off to the mountain mines in Colorado, Nevada, and Idaho; and now, still dreamers of the elusive golden dream, they arrived undaunted in a new big and promising country. Armed with picks, short-stemmed shovels, and gold pans, they believed their luck would at last change, and that they would finally make the strike that would enable them to purchase new lives. With a faith that was rooted beyond all reason, they knew that somewhere in the icy, desolate silence of this immense, unexplored land, perhaps in the bed of a frozen waterway, possibly in a rocky cave deep in the snowfields of a dark spruce forest, or in the core of some towering mountain capped by thick, glistening layers of snow and ice, lay what they had been searching for all their working lives. It would take a miracle to find their boodle; but, like all zealots, they knew in their hearts that they were individuals whose lives would in time be blessed by the miraculous. And when in 1880 hard rock gold was discovered near what quickly grew into the mining town of Juneau, there was a collective burst of feverish excitement among this resilient fraternity. This was not the mother lode, but, many were easily convinced, it was a providential sign. Their instincts and calculations had been correct. This last frontier held hidden treasure. Alaska was rich with gold.

In California, George Carmack had heard the rumors of the fortune that was to be found in the harsh and distant north. When the Wachusett anchored amid the flotilla of tiny forested islands that dotted Sitka Harbor, George immediately stared out toward the gloomy thicket of mountains with their armor of dark ice that rose high behind the small coastal settlement like the walls of an impregnable fortress. He tried to imagine what lay beyond, out in the wild. He had arrived in Alaska in a marine’s blue uniform, but his mind and spirit were seeking another, more heartfelt occupation. Beyond Sitka, in the unexplored snowbound high north county, an empire of unknown dangers and challenges, he would at last fulfill the hopeful destiny his father had passed on to him. George Washington Carmack would strike it rich.

SHOULD I make a run for it?

From the moment of his arrival in Sitka, George began thinking about his escape. His daily life, the U.S. Navy made certain, was rigidly prescribed. Each morning in the numbing cold, his breath nearly freezing in the dawn air, he would turn out with his platoon for inspection. Afternoons would be spent with his fellow marines perfecting endless marching drills on the parade ground across from Sitka’s crescent-shaped beach, the late-winter wind too often howling off the Pacific like a discordant military band. And at the end of each exhausting day, tiredness clinging to his bones, he would wrap himself in scratchy U.S. Navy–issued wool blankets and lay in his cot among the rows of beds in the drafty three-story barracks and fall quickly asleep.

Yet even while a busy marine, George remained tightly locked in his own private world. The shepherd’s lonely life had taught him how to take shelter in a castle built out of ruminations, and this discipline was once more serving him well. In his active mind, George was so deeply immersed in explorations beyond Sitka’s ring of granite mountains that it was as if he’d already fled. The prospect was very sweet.

It would be, he told himself, so easy. Leave his uniform on his cot, walk out of the barracks, and disappear into the seamless pitch-black curtain that fell on a starless subartic night. And yet he hesitated.

There was also—perhaps this, too, a product of his many years of youthful diligence—a practical side to this most optimistic of dreamers. George needed, he realized, to be prepared for what lay out there. If he were to make his solitary way through Alaska, he would need to know how to survive when the cold set in.

He had arrived in Sitka in February, and a month later there were still storms raging, with pelting ice and driving snow so fierce that they shook the little collection of shacks that made up the marine base to their foundations. When storms erupted, the marines had no choice but to slam the shutters tight, stoke the wood fires, and remain inside, praying that the dark weather would pass before they were all blown into the Pacific. How could a man on his own make it through the full blast of a northern winter?

Another anxious realization: As long as he was a marine, George never had to worry about where he’d get his next meal; it was more often than not salt pork and beans, but the cook doled it out regularly and with a generous ladle. In the wilderness, he’d need to make do with what nature offered—provided he had the skill to hunt in bleak or frozen country.

George was shrewd enough to understand that he needed an education in a way of life that was foreign and, by instinct, even unnatural to him. And so while the other marines made it a point to steer clear of the Indians who lived outside Sitka in a compound set off by a high wicker gate, snarling rudely about their god-awful smell and poking fun at the scraggly wisps of mustaches many of the braves sported, George decided he wouldn’t be so finicky. He would seek out the Tlingits. He would go through the gate.

IT WAS Aleksandr Baranov, a heavy-drinking, bulbous-nosed merchant and the first administrator of Russian America, who, back in the early 1800s, had originally ordered the construction of a sturdy cedar fence along the outskirts of what was then called New Archangel. “Russians inside the wall, Tlingits outside” was his official edict.

There were three major Indian tribes in Alaska: the Athabascans, hunters who had settled in the harsh interior; the Haida, seafarers and whale hunters who inhabited the islands south of Juneau; and the Tlingits, who numbered about 12,000 and were spread in a variety of clans along the southern coast. The Tlingits were different from the other tribes. They were artists, skilled in carving masks and totems. By instinct they were competitive and ambitious. And as Baranov had discovered when he’d tried to take their land and claim their hilltop fortress, they were warriors.

Swinging stone-headed hammers, the Indians had smashed open the heads of the invading Russian sailors as easily as if they were cracking summer melons. Three separate attacks on their fort had been quickly repulsed. Yet after the failure of the third charge, Baranov, with a cruel practicality, came up with another plan. He directed the captains of the four Russian naval ships in the harbor to fire their cannons at will. The cannonade was relentless and devastating. Booming barrage after barrage of heavy iron balls pounded into the fortress and its small log houses. They whistled through the air and landed with a thudding power that mocked the swing of a Tlingit hammer. The earth shook. Buildings broke apart. And bodies cracked in this thick hail of hard iron balls. Warriors, women, children—all were victims. There was no refuge, and there was no escape.

It was after the Tlingits had surrendered, after Baranov had barked the order that the remains of their fort be burned to the ground, and after he’d begun building his own ample cottage, forever known as Baranov’s Castle, on the commanding site of the old Indian fortress, that he decided it would be prudent to keep the Tlingits outside the heart of the settlement. He was still scared. He feared that led by a new bold chief they would arm themselves with their stone hammers and try to reclaim all that had been taken from them. Yet except for a short-lived attack in 1836 and another rebellion following the rape of a squaw by some drunken marines in 1877, the Tlingits, once a tribe of legendary warriors, accepted their defeat with passive resignation.