BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2)

by Edward A. Stabler

  "The next morning Gig and Nokes and the Swedes paddled their canoes up the Klondike, which ain't much of a struggle, even in early June. Two miles up, Rabbit Creek come in from the south, so they pulled the canoes onto the bank and headed up the creek on foot. The Swedes took a pan and a shovel and Gig had the rifle. You start by climbing through spruce, and every mile or so the Swedes would cut a shovel into the creek bank and wash out a pan. Never found more than trace colors, which you see on every creek in the Yukon.

  "After a few miles the valley opens up and the spruce give way to pasture. The creek can't decide which way is uphill, so it winds around like a snake. From a distance the meadow looks like good walking, so you might try a straight path to its head, but that ain't something you would choose to do twice. Niggerheads is little mounds of solid mud with waist-high grass growing from the tops. None of 'em is bigger than a foot across – if they was, they'd stay froze all year round and only moss could grow on 'em. When you step on a niggerhead, it rolls to one side or the other, and sometimes you slide off into the muck between 'em, which might be knee-deep. So most sourdoughs would rather walk horseshoe bends up a creek-bed or bushwhack spruce than cross a niggerhead swamp.

  "They picked their way along the creek and the Swedes washed out a couple of worthless pans while Gig and Nokes was scouting stands of willow. Seven or eight miles up, they still ain't spotted a moose, and the Swedes seen about enough of Rabbit Creek. They sat on boulders and ate dried fruit where the main valley turns east and a pup that's almost as big as Rabbit Creek come in straight ahead from the south, down a wooded gulch that's steeper and narrower. Lindfors pointed at the pup and said that it almost looked like a gold stream, and maybe they should climb up to the first pool and wash out a pan.

  "As the four of 'em was studying the gulch, they seen a brown shape moving a couple hundred paces up, just inside the first patch of trees. When it stopped and lifted its nose toward 'em, they could see it was a bear. Not one of them brown giants with silver-tipped fur that picks a fight out of sheer orneriness, just a plain old black bear.

  "Gig raised the rifle but Nokes put his arm on the barrel and pushed it down. 'He ain't worth it,' Nokes said. 'No salmon running yet, too early for berries, and he probably just woke up this week, hungrier than all of us put together. If you shoot him, we can cut him up and drag the hams down the valley on poles, but you'll bust your jaw trying to chew that meat. He ain't fat enough. Probably on his way down to the Klondike to fish for trout.'

  "Gig pulled the gun loose, aimed, and fired, but the bear already decided he wanted no part of them fellers and started humping back into the trees, so the shot wasn't close.

  "'Well that's a waste,' Nokes said. 'Next time we spot a herd of caribou, we'll want that bullet back.'

  "Then Nokes looks out at the Rabbit Creek valley rising gentle to the east. He swings an arm from that direction toward the pasture they been climbing the last few miles. 'Down to the bottom,' he says, 'this whole damn valley ain't worth the fish you could pull out of the Klondike in an afternoon.' He jerks his thumb toward the gulch and says, 'and I'd trade that pup for a few bullets and a decent shot at a deer.'

  "When I met him in Dawson two years later, Gig remembered them exact words. By then the place where he fired at the bear was called Grand Forks. Rabbit Creek got renamed Bonanza Creek by Lying George Carmack, who filled a shotgun cartridge with coarse gold he found on rim-rock just a mile below the Forks. When George showed that gold to a few oldtimers, they realized he wasn't lying this time and followed him up Bonanza for a look. The word spread fast and all of Bonanza got staked in a month.

  "Then some fellers climbed that pup and washed out fifty cents to the pan, and Knut Halstead named it Eldorado. At the Fortymile and Circle camps there was still plenty of sourdoughs who swore the Klondike was a joke and Lying George was up to his old tricks. But after Carmack and Antone Stander and Clarence Berry started sluicing summer diggings, anyone who tramped up to their claims could fill a pan and wash out coarse gold and nuggets hisself.

  "Pretty soon the camps at Fortymile and Circle emptied out, and Joe Ladue's sawmill was running round the clock at a new townsite called Dawson, next to the mouth of the Klondike.

  "By the end of the year, a dozen more Klondike creeks was staked end to end, and miners on a hundred claims was digging shafts toward bedrock every day and burning fires in their shafts at night. And every man Inside knowed something Nokes never would of believed that day. Bonanza and Eldorado was the two richest creeks in the world."

  Chapter 20

  "Show me the Klondike again," I tell Zimmerman, sliding him the knife. He leans toward the table and jabs the eastward scratch furthest from the wall, about two-thirds of the way from Juneau to Circle City. Then he sticks the knife into the table where the Klondike intersects the Yukon and leaves it upright.

  "And that's Dawson," he says. "Starting three months after Gig and Nokes paddled up the Klondike."

  "You said Nokes never believed there was gold on the Klondike."

  "Or the Indian. He was wrong on both."

  "Why?"

  Zimmerman squints at me as if he doesn't understand.

  "Why was them creeks rich?"

  "The Swedes were panning all the way up Bonanza Creek. If the ground was so rich, why didn't they find gold?"

  "They wasn't the first. Lots of fellers prospected on the Klondike and didn't find gold. Joe Ladue didn't find it. Arthur Harper didn't find it. By '96, the oldtimers was pretty sure they knew what a gold stream looked like, and them Klondike creeks wasn't it."

  "Then how did Carmack find it?"

  "Two ways," Zimmerman says. "First, he ran into Robbie Henderson after Henderson crossed the divide between the Indian River and the Klondike, then took gold out of the headwaters near the dome, on the creek he named Gold Bottom. When Henderson was sure that creek had good prospects, he started down to the district office in Fortymile to record his claim. Ran into Lying George fishing with his Siwash friends at the mouth of the Klondike and told him about Gold Bottom Creek. Told him where it was and that he should stake a claim.

  "Henderson and Carmack was old friends from the Fortymile camp, and that's the way miners work. Whatever man strikes it will stake his claim and then tell every miner he runs into exactly where it is. Don't matter who you are, you only get one claim per district. A creek claim is five hundred feet long, and the width is rim to rim. If you're the first, you get a thousand feet instead. Then the claims get numbered up and down from Discovery claim.

  "So Robbie Henderson told Carmack to climb the ridge and follow it around toward the dome between the Klondike and the Indian. Told him where to find three men he brought over the divide from the Indian to dig on Gold Bottom.

  "Carmack wasn't keen on it, but he went up anyway with two Siwashes. Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie. They found Henderson's men and saw what they was getting to the pan, but they wasn't excited enough to stake. When they was heading back to their camp on the Klondike, they come down the Rabbit Creek drainage instead of climbing down the far side of the ridge to the Yukon. They took a few pans along the way, since Carmack reckoned the headwaters of Gold Bottom and Rabbit Creek was both on the same divide, and not too far apart. If Gold Bottom had prospects, so should Rabbit Creek."

  I stop Zimmerman there. "You said there were two reasons Carmack found gold that Gig and Nokes and the others missed, and that the first reason was running into Robbie Henderson. What was the second?"

  "Luck," he says.

  "What kind of luck?"

  "Skookum Jim shoveled out some dirt at rim-rock," Zimmerman says. "Probably 'cause he saw colors or part of an exposed nugget. Rim-rock ain't the creek itself," he explains. "It's where the valley floor changes and gets steeper. Could be a hundred feet or more from the creek. Then Jim put the dirt in the pan and washed it out in the creek and got fifty cents. Took a few more shovels from under the same birch tree and got up to a dollar on every pan. That was better than Gold Bo
ttom, so all three men staked there. It wasn't proper for a Siwash to stake Discovery, so Carmack took that, and Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie took claims one above and one below."

  "So you're saying Skookum Jim was lucky to spot an exposed nugget at rim-rock?"

  Zimmerman nods. "They was lucky. Most of the gold on them Klondike creeks is in the pay-streak, and that's a vein of gravel and gold at bedrock. Between the pay-streak and the creek, you got ten to thirty feet of frozen muck. So you won't find nuggets or coarse gold by dipping your pan in a slow-moving creek.

  "Skookum Jim and Lying George didn't know it then – nobody knowed it for two more years – but the rest of the Klondike gold is on the hillsides, maybe two hundred feet above the creeks. They call that ground the benches, and the gold there come from a stream that dried up or got buried a thousand years ago. Maybe ten thousand years ago. The gold you find at rim-rock come from the benches, when the dirt slides down to where the slope of the hill levels off. So that was bench gold that Skookum Jim found at rim-rock on Rabbit Creek. And the three of 'em found enough in a couple hours to convince 'em to stake. Then Lying George collected the gold in a shotgun cartridge and started spreading the word."

  Something seems inconsistent in Zimmerman's account. If Carmack started the Klondike stampede by showing off his shotgun shell full of coarse gold, but he and his Indian friends had been lucky to find the gold at rim-rock, did all the miners who followed him up Bonanza Creek get lucky too? If not – if they washed out nothing, like Gig and Nokes and the Swedes – why didn't they dismiss Carmack's gold-filled shell as another prank from Lying George?

  Some oldtimers did, Zimmerman says. But they couldn't explain two things. First, if Carmack didn't find the gold on Bonanza, how did he get it? Second, why didn't it look like gold from the other mining districts? The gold from each area had a unique combination of traits – color, texture, shape – and the oldtimers saw that Carmack's coarse gold didn't resemble anything from the Fortymile or Circle or Cassiar Mountains districts.

  And the miners who decided to investigate Bonanza for themselves would have gone first to Carmack's Discovery claim and the two adjacent claims staked by Skookum Jim and Tagish Charley. They would have seen Carmack and the Siwashes, digging from rim-rock both sideways and toward the creek, and finding more gold that had slid from the benches. Every man would measure off his five-hundred foot claim from the last claim staked, then cut a wooden post, carve his name and the date on it, and plant it at the edge of his claim. So if the Indians had one above and one below Discovery, the next man could stake either two above or two below. Then three above or three below. Carmack staked Discovery in mid-August. By the end of September, Zimmerman says, Bonanza was staked into the 70s, both above and below.

  Then he explains summer diggings. Even with a pick and a shovel, you could only dig out a foot of dirt before you hit frozen ground and got stopped dead. But the sun could thaw a few inches of newly exposed frozen earth each day, so in the summer you dug wide instead of deep, then carried your diggings to the creek and dumped it on a pile for sluicing.

  For that, you needed to dam the creek above your claim, then divert part of the flow into the narrow sluice boxes, which fit together end to end for at least fifty or sixty feet. Shovel the diggings into the top of the last box, and the dirt and sand washes out the bottom as tailings. The gold is heavy, so most of it sinks and gets trapped by a plank of riffles that lines the bottom of the box. Then you turn off the water, lift out the riffles, throw away the pebbles, and clean up the gold. When you're done, you re-sluice the tailings in case any gold was lost.

  Having Zimmerman describe how the Klondike gold was harvested doesn't provide any additional insight into my brother's killer, but I give in to my desire to understand the process – if only because of the obvious contrast with my own excavations at the Pecos pueblo.

  Summers are short in the Yukon, Zimmerman says, so two men working a single claim can't reach bedrock during a season of summer diggings. The fastest way to hit the pay-streak at bedrock was to dig a shaft, and the only time you could do that was in the winter. In the summer, surface water from the creek-bed would fill the bottom of your shaft.

  But in winter the surface is frozen hard, and you could clear the snow and build a log fire to burn all night. In the morning, you shovel aside the embers and dig out half a foot of thawed ground, four foot square. Light another fire that night and dig deeper the next day. When the shaft is shoulder deep, you build a cribwork of logs around the opening and mount a windlass on it, then use a bucket every day to bring up the diggings, which get dumped around the cribwork and gradually grow into a cone of earth around the shaft.

  When you get down to bedrock, maybe you intersect the pay-streak just above it, which might be three or four feet thick, gold dust and nuggets mixed with gravel and sand. If you miss it, you dig sideways for thirty feet and try to find it. After that you give up and dig another shaft, halfway toward the creek or halfway toward the rim. Sometimes it takes several shafts to find the pay-streak.

  Visualizing the shaft is easy for me, I tell Zimmerman. I got an intimate look at one when I was eight years old. At Rock Run, on the day we first met.

  He squints at me and his mouth draws tight, as if he's trying to remember.

  "You and Jessie pulled me out," I remind him, reflexively glancing at his severed ring finger. "After you lowered Drew into the shaft and he put me on his shoulders."

  His nod reminds me of a pistol hammer drawing back halfway, and he seems to withdraw into a space behind his eyes.

  "Rock Run," he finally says, easing the hammer down. "We never found five cents to the pan on that damn creek."

  Chapter 21

  "Six miles below the Klondike you get to Fort Reliance, and that's mile zero. So you know you come sixty miles from Joe Ladue's post at Sixtymile, and you got forty miles downriver to Fortymile. Fort Reliance was one of the first posts on the river, back when the Yukon trade was mostly fur. But after prospectors come Inside and started staking the gold creeks, nobody had much use for it, so Gig and Nokes and the Swedes drifted right by.

  "By mid-June, the sun barely dips below the hills and you can read the labels on your bags of grub at midnight. Or read whatever you ain't already memorized. Miners at the camps was always starved for news from the Outside, so most men coming in try to bring a newspaper or magazine or two, but there's always a cold, wet night when you care more about lighting a fire than saving old news.

  "When you lose track of the sun for a few hours, the sky turns a color almost like amber. That's the closest you get to darkness, which is something you don't miss until it's gone. And since it don't get dark, the day never really cools off neither, and the summer heat just builds up day after day. It seems strange, but on the Yukon ninety degrees in July feels worse than forty below in January. The air dries out in the winter, and forty below on the Inside ain’t as bad as zero on the coast.

  "But there ain't a breath of wind in the summer, so you got to cover yourself against the mosquitoes day and night, awake or asleep, inside the tent or out. Them bloodsuckers is only in business from June to September, but they make three months feel like a year, and you want to dance a jig the first morning you see frost on the ground. In June and July, at least you got cold water drifting down the Yukon, and that's a small relief. The mosquitoes will follow you, but there ain't as many as on land, so you cook and eat on the river, catch a few hours sleep when you can. And even if you pull ashore or get stuck once in a while, you can make seventy miles a day.

  "When you get to Fortymile, it's the first real town you seen since Juneau. Things was starting to favor Circle City by '96, but Fortymile still had everything a miner could want. Blacksmith shops and bakeries if you was working, saloons and dance halls and billiards if you was on a spree. They even had a opera house with a orchestra and girls singing songs that was popular Outside the year before. Not the kind of girls you'd pay to see somewhere else, but it don't take re
al talent or beauty to win the heart of a lonely miner.

  "Some fellers might strike it back on the creeks and some might not, but them dance-hall girls would take home gold every night. Even the horsiest of 'em could fill a dance card, and every two-minute dance cost a man a dollar and a drink. The bartender would give the lady a chip worth twenty-five cents, and at the end of the night she'd cash 'em in for dust weighed out at the bar. Everybody from cooks to carpenters carried a buckskin poke, and you didn't have to be a miner to fill one up. Every establishment had a scale for dust. No one passed paper bills, because gold dust was money, and if you ran out, you went back to the creeks to dig for more. When you cleaned up enough gold to come into town again, you went to the saloon and bought everyone a round of drinks.

  "Gig and Nokes and the Swedes pulled up at Fortymile and headed straight for the first saloon they seen. But on the Yukon, what they call whiskey could pass for paint thinner in most places, and it cost twice what it does Outside, so you don't drink much until you had your first clean-up.

  "They shared a table with a couple of sourdoughs who come into town from their claim on Miller Creek, and heared from them fellers what they heared from Joe Ladue – Mosquito Creek was staked end to end, same as Miller and Glacier. The sourdoughs said there was a couple of other creeks being prospected seventy miles back into the hills, but they didn't hold much faith in 'em. Said they thought it made sense to head on down to Circle, where new creeks was still being located. Malamute and Mastodon was two they heared about.