BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) Page 8

  "Hundreds of men, women too, built their boats in Edmonton because the water route was supposed to be easier, never mind that it was twice as long. After you'd floated down two rivers and sailed a hundred miles on the Great Slave Lake, you got a thousand miles left on the Mackenzie River. Then you had to pull your boat up a steep tributary and cross the mountains, or climb onto the headwaters of the Porcupine River up near the Arctic Sea. When you finally got to the Yukon, you was two hundred miles downriver from Dawson, with no easy way back up.

  "Almost everyone who made it to the Klondike came over the passes on the trails from Dyea or Skagway. Those trails meet at Bennett Lake, but some of the men who got that far couldn't build decent boats, and they was wrecked and lost all their gear on the lakes. Some who got past the lakes drownded in Miles Canyon, in freezing rapids twenty feet deep that could smash a boat to pieces, swallow a man in seconds. And some who made it partway down the Yukon froze to death on the banks, just a few days or weeks from Dawson when winter iced 'em in."

  Zimmerman stops to swirl his whiskey and take a sip, and I find myself doing the same, too easily persuaded. He puts his cup back on the table and turns his head toward me.

  "Them that made it all the way to Dawson – they found out the truth. There's no gold waiting at the mouth of the Klondike. You can pole your boat up that shallow river for miles and see pretty stones in the water, fat salmon in the summer. You can pull ashore and follow the creeks up through the willows and niggerhead swamps, then climb the pup streams through the trees and up into the gulches. The gold is under your feet, but you never see it, because the pay-streak is buried ten feet deep. Sometimes thirty feet deep. When you try to reach it, you learn that everything below the first foot of moss and muck is frozen solid. Even in the summer, a pick and shovel will bounce right off.

  "A couple hundred stampeders reached Dawson in October of '97, before the Yukon froze, and then thousands more got there in June '98, coming downriver after the ice cleared. But any of them cheechakos that was willing to spend months digging for pay-dirt was too late, because the rich ground was already claimed. All the Klondike gold was on the tributaries and their pups, and old-timers from the mining camps along the Yukon had staked every foot of them creeks by the time the stampeders arrived.

  "Cheechakos that wanted their own claims had to find new creeks forty or fifty miles upstream and into the hills, or cross the ridge and go just as far up the Indian River. That's because miners on the Inside started rushing to the Klondike – mostly from the Forty Mile and Circle City camps – in September '96, almost a year before anyone on the Outside ever heared that word."

  "What's a cheechako?"

  "That's a Siwash word, means someone new to Alaska. It's what old-time miners call the tenderfoots, who don't know what it takes to get into the Yukon, wash out gold worth more than it cost you, and carry it back Outside. A miner that has paid his dues and knows how to survive is a sourdough. A cheechako is the opposite. But that didn't stop 'em from coming.

  "In August of '96 when George Carmack found gold on rim-rock at Rabbit Creek, the mouth of the Klondike was just a place where Indians strung their fishing nets. The downstream bank on the Yukon was a big mud flat with a few Siwash huts on it and salmon drying on poles. By the end of the year, a thousand miners that was already Inside heared about Carmack's strike and came into the Klondike valley. Joe Ladue moved his sawmill at Sixty Mile River down to that mud flat, staked out a town site and called it Dawson.

  "By the end of '97, all the creeks on the Klondike and the Indian River and most of their pups was staked. And Dawson was four thousand people, most without enough food for the winter.

  "In summer '98, Dawson was the fastest growing city in the world. Maybe a hundred steamers made it upriver from St. Michael that year with thousands of people and all the grub you can imagine. You could have champagne for breakfast, then walk down Front Street and buy a silk hat or a telescope or a horse. At night you could order a lobster dinner before you went to the Opera House.

  "And by the end of '99 it was almost over. Thousands of people – cheechakos, sourdoughs, dance-hall girls, gamblers, men who got rich without ever touching a shovel or a pan – left Dawson for good. A couple of Swedish prospectors that was stuck near the Yukon delta found gold in the beach sand on the Bering Sea, and the stampede moved on to Nome."

  Chapter 11

  The air in the scow's cramped cabin seems warmer now, so I unfasten the top button on my shirt and lean back against the wall, keeping my distance from the orange coals burning in the stove. Zimmerman raises his cup, lowers his nose to the vapors, then tilts back a quick sip. His reflections on the Klondike stampede have pushed my thoughts off track, so I try to recover my line of inquiry.

  "When we realized Gig Garrett had come back from Alaska to live on Cabin John Creek, you and Drew agreed that he should submit his fingerprints to the sheriff, to see if they could find a match on Jessie's locket. That was in the summer of 1902. At that point you probably suspected Garrett was responsible for Jessie's death. But five years earlier you followed him out to the Yukon. So when you left you must have believed he didn't kill Jessie. Either that or you didn't care. Which was it?"

  "When I went out to Alaska, I didn't think Gig killed her."

  "Then what changed your mind?"

  "It wasn't any one thing. Just a sense I got after being around him for a while. He never told me he done it, and I still don't know for sure."

  I remind myself that the real reason I'm here is to decide whether Zimmerman is telling the truth about what happened the night Garrett and Drew killed each other. Had he really been planning to help Drew apprehend Garrett? Or was he helping Garrett settle a score? To understand Zimmerman's attitude on that night, it seems important to find out what happened during their days in the Yukon.

  "Well, so far all I know is that you rushed to the Klondike as part of the stampede. But you didn't freeze in a snowbank or get bled to death by mosquitoes – you made it to Dawson. And when you didn't find nuggets waiting to be scooped up, you turned around and came home. Maybe Gig dug out some gold dust before he came home too, or maybe he stole it. There must be more to it than that."

  Zimmerman doesn't answer right away, and I turn toward him just as he opens his eyes. "There's more," he says softly. "And it's true I got caught up in the stampede, but that ain't why I went. I was already in Juneau when the word got Outside."

  Juneau? I backpedal along the timeline in my mind. The Klondike stampede was decades ago, so maybe I've confused the dates.

  "And it's also true Gig convinced me to come out to Alaska. He guessed bigger strikes was coming, though nobody expected what happened. When word got out that them Klondike creeks – Bonanza, Eldorado, Hunker, Dominion, Bear, all of 'em – was ten times richer than any ground that was worked at Forty Mile, Circle City, or anywhere else on the Yukon, everything changed. It happened so fast that I got caught by the stampede before I could get an outfit together and hump it over the pass. By the time I did I was just one of thousands heading for Dawson.

  "But Gig got into the Yukon before the Canadian government put customs up at the passes. Before the Mounties was stopping anyone who didn't have tools, a tent, and a thousand pounds of grub. They said you had to have food and supplies for a year, and that meant forty trips up to the pass with fifty pounds on your back. That was toward the end of '97, and Gig already been Inside for over a year."

  I ask whether Inside means Alaska or the Canadian stretch of the Yukon or both.

  "Both. Or neither. Inside means across the mountains. You can start in Alaska and cross into Canada, or stay in one or the other. You could be panning bars on the Pelly or the Stewart or the Klondike, and them rivers start and end in Canada. Or you could head five hundred miles up the Tanana River from its mouth on the lower Yukon and never leave Alaska. Once you're Inside it don't really matter what flag you're under... you're still cut off from the Outside. Any news you hear is most of a year
old. Whatever grub don't get carried in by miners comes thirteen hundred miles upriver by steamer from St. Michael on the Bering Sea, when the Yukon's clear of ice. And it's frozen seven months a year. There ain't no easy way to get Inside, and once you're in there's no easy way out."

  "So Gig disappeared when Jessie died in September '94, and you're saying he made it Inside – over the mountains and down onto the Yukon – sometime in '96, more than a year before the Klondike stampede. That's a long way to run from Cabin John, even if he killed Jessie. What made him go that far?"

  Zimmerman squints at me as if the answer should be obvious.

  "Gold," he says. "You hang around mining camps and talk to miners, that's what you hear about. A rancher is stringing fence along a creek up in the woods and his dog run off on a scent, don't come back right away. The feller follows the dog up along the bank until a dead tree comes loose when he grabs it – and there's a nugget the size of his thumb where the roots tore out.

  "Or a miner finds colors in the water on a lazy stream that's been crossed a thousand times. He works the banks and follows a trail of flour gold to a dry pup and up into a gulch. The gulch ends in a granite overhang with a vein of quartz, and that vein is the mother lode.

  "Gig and I was working on and off at the Big Pool railroad yard since '92. That was when the Western Maryland Railroad ran a line across the Potomac to Virginia, then into the B&O yard at Cherry Run. When that line opened, Western Maryland started carrying B&O freight, and things got busier. At least until hard times come in '93.

  "So by '94, Gig and me, we knowed our way around freight yards and trains. Didn't surprise me he was able to hop a B&O train west and get hired as a brakeman. For a good part of the year that's a decent job, riding a fair breeze through open country, even if the train shakes and screeches and you're mostly on your own. Jumping between the cars can get your mind focused when it's wet, 'cause everyone knows someone who fell and got killed or lost a leg.

  "But what drives fellers off that job sooner or later is the cold. A light rain that don't normally bother you might start freezing as you climb a long hill or night comes on. Then the brake wheel ices up and gets hard to turn. The foothold you brace against gets icy too – it ain't much use when you got to twist your whole body against the wheel. Then the rain changes to snow so you turn your back, but the snow drives into gaps around your neck while the wind cuts against your ears. A few long nights in the snow and some close scrapes will get a brakeman thinking about finding something else to do.

  "After Gig made it out to St. Louis, he switched onto the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe and worked hisself into Colorado by springtime. By then he wanted his feet on steady ground. He started washing glasses and sweeping floors at Turner's Saloon in Colorado City, which got miners coming and going from Cripple Creek. The silver mines in Leadville and Creede was all shut down during the Panic of '93, but hard-rock mining in Cripple Creek was booming – they was getting three hundred dollars in gold from a ton of ore. The saloon-keeper started trusting Gig to pour whiskey, so he got to hear stories from miners at the bar. Like how Winfield Stratton turned his grubstake at Cripple Creek into millions when he staked ground on Battle Mountain, dug a chute, found the Independence lode.

  "Other miners was sure the next Independence was somewhere in the hills south of Pike's Peak, and after a couple months of tales and rumors Gig was ready to start prospecting hisself. He convinced Jeremy Turner to grubstake him for six months, for half of whatever rich ground he come into. Teamed up with a miner named Olson he met at the bar. Olson was heading back to the Cripple Creek District to work a claim. He hired Gig to work alongside him for wages, so Gig could learn the ropes.

  "Olson and Gig dug out a few tons of ore from his claim but it never assayed over three dollars a ton, so they gave up after a while. But Gig got familiar with a pick and shovel... learned a little about colors and veins. So he set off exploring the hills east of Victor, but his wages and outfit was burned up before he ever found ground worth staking. When it got cold he headed back to Colorado City, and Jeremy Turner hired him back at the saloon. I guess he aimed to recover his investment by teaching Gig to run a card game. And Turner was probably right about that – Gig did have some natural ability with cards.

  "Faro was the biggest game in them mining-town saloons, but with five or six sets of eyes watching every card the dealer turns, it's hard to cheat. So even though the house wins most of the time, there's more money to be made in a crooked game of poker or blackjack.

  "Better yet, three-card monte. Gig met a couple of fellers who worked a monte game at a dance hall down the street, and they hired him to come by and shill sometimes after his shift ended. In monte, you want the mark to be part of the crowd watching the shill play a game. When the cards stop moving the mark knows for sure that the card on the left is the red queen. So he can't believe it when the shill picks the center card. And when the dealer flips the cards, the shill loses – the queen was on the left.

  "The cards move faster and another shill loses a game the mark would of won." Zimmerman leans toward the table and puts a hand over each of our almost-empty cups. He twists them clockwise, reverses them, and then moves them quickly forward and back like pistons. "Pretty soon the mark can't wait to play. And that's when the monte dealer works his magic."

  I can't see the yellowing teeth behind Zimmerman's closed lips, but his eyes momentarily flash the singular focus of a predator.

  "You like to gamble, Owen?"

  "Not particularly," I say. "It doesn't make much sense to go against the odds."

  Zimmerman stands and pivots toward the cask with our cups in his hands. His sudden change of position startles me and I instinctively grip the pistol in my lap as he fills the cups halfway. He slides a cup to me across the table and smiles so his teeth emerge.

  "What if you don't know the odds?"

  "Then I try to push them in my favor or avoid the game."

  "You couldn't avoid the game tonight," he says, gesturing with his head toward the gun, "so I guess you tried to improve the odds."

  I don't reply, but my stomach tightens as I admit to myself that he's right.

  "Maybe Gig was more of a gambler than you or me," Zimmerman says as he takes a sip and settles back onto his stool. "Not with cards," he adds. "Like you, Gig only wanted to play when the odds was in his favor. So when he wasn't running a straight game of faro for the house, he learned how to deal blackjack with marked cards. And he taught himself monte, which don't require any sense for odds at all. You just need three cards, good hands, and a hundred hours of practice dealing alone.

  "For Gig, cards was just a way to make a few dollars so he could get by from day to day. It wasn't a way to get rich, and that was the kind of gambling he was interested in. Looking for gold was how you struck it, and that's why he left Turner's and used up his grubstake prospecting in the hills near Cripple Creek. When he knowed he had to work for wages again, he went back to the saloon.

  "By January of '95 he was dealing a steady game of faro at Turner's and a game of monte at the dance hall that was better than most. Didn't cost him much to bunk at a boarding house and eat leftover meals at Turner's, so he was starting to save up a little grubstake. Maybe two or three hundred dollars by mid-winter. When it got to be enough, Gig would go prospecting again. Never mind that he already gone bust at Cripple Creek.

  "Sometime that winter a bookseller come through Colorado Springs and stopped at the mining taverns in Colorado City. One of his books was just published by a Seattle company and Gig bought a copy as soon as he seen the cover. It was only about eighty pages, plenty of pictures. I still remember that book because he mailed it to me a week later, after he read it forward and back three times. That book changed both our lives.

  "It was called Guide to the Yukon Gold Fields, and it was by a man named Veazie Wilson. He made it over the Chilkoot Pass in '94, traveled two thousand miles down the Yukon to the Bering Sea, and come back by steamer from St. Mic
hael before the port iced over that fall. Then he wrote his book and died just as it got printed. It says that on the first page."

  Zimmerman shakes his head as if the author's death was still a recent surprise.

  "You read that book and Wilson made most things on the Inside look easy – the pass, the lakes, the rapids, the long tramps through the brush – and then back Outside he's dead of fever at thirty. It ain't what you expect.

  "Anyway, Wilson said that the best place to prospect in the Yukon was at Circle City, a new camp on the northern Yukon up near the Arctic Circle. The richest diggings was back in the hills on Birch Creek, where miners was getting as much to the shovel as anyone still working Miller Creek at Forty Mile. Circle was a hundred and seventy miles downriver from Forty Mile, so it was easier to reach for steamers that was bringing in supplies and grub from the coast.

  "And Circle was on American territory, so you had no Canadian customs, no royalties to the government, no mounted police. If there was a dispute, miners held an open meeting, heared both sides, and reached a verdict. Anyone guilty got fined on the spot. Them that stole was sent downriver on a raft. Maybe strung up for a serious crime. That was the kind of justice that miners from the California and Colorado camps knowed and expected. So after the prospects at Birch Creek proved out, Circle City was the place that miners headed Inside was going, back in '95. Gig was sold on being one of 'em."

  I try to visualize the location of the mining camps that Zimmerman has mentioned, remembering that the Yukon flows northwest toward the Arctic Circle, then turns southwest and runs twice as far to the Bering Sea. So Circle City must be near the Yukon's northernmost reach. And Forty Mile is upstream, but south? Closer to Dawson? Undermined by the whiskey, I map it hazily onto the sinuous river in my mind's eye.