BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2)

by Edward A. Stabler

  "When Gig got down to Circle and went straight to one of the big saloons for a whiskey, miners there was still talking about news that come over the ice by dogsled a month ago. One of the ACC drivers brought a letter to Oscar Ashby from a man up in Joe Ladue's new town called Dawson. By then a couple of rumors about a Klondike strike made it downriver, but most of them sourdoughs in Circle knowed enough about Lying George Carmack to be sure the Klondike was a hoax. Probably Carmack and Ladue was just trying to sell town sites and lumber in Dawson to hard-luck miners that ain't found gold in Fortymile or Circle.

  "This letter come into Ashby's saloon in mid-November and got read aloud to seventy-five miners, and it gave 'em a good laugh. It said the Klondike was the richest strike in the world, and there was no telling how much they was getting to the pan. The writer said he saw a hundred and fifty dollars panned out, and others seen a thousand dollars from a single pan. Keep in mind ten cents to a pan is good, and a few dollars to a pan was the best anyone ever seen until then. Them miners at Ashby's thought it was crazy to write a letter like that. Might as well say you climbed a ladder to the moon and found a mountain made of gold.

  "But then another letter come down from Dawson for Harry Spencer and Frank Densmore, who was successful men with business prospects in Circle. That letter was from a trusted friend and said the Klondike was real, so Densmore outfitted a sled and took a dog team upriver to see for hisself. That happened two weeks before Gig sledded down to Circle.

  "Now there was some restless feet and hands in the saloons, with fellers sensing maybe something big was happening upriver. But the ones talking the loudest was still saying they wouldn't cross the street based on anything they heared from Lying George.

  "Gig slept in a bunkhouse and took the sled down to McQuesten's warehouse the next day. Bought dried salmon for the dogs, beans and flour and bacon and sugar and coffee, and put it all on Nokes' account. McQuesten would always grubstake a miner who was working a real claim, and you would pay him on clean-up, even if that was months away. When Gig was done he went looking for Wylie and found him at the Pioneer Saloon.

  "They told stories over a couple of whiskeys and Gig said he was getting sour about his work at Mammoth Creek. The claims was both good, but he didn't think Nokes would offer him a lay, and he was tired of cutting and stacking cordwood. Wylie told Gig about his work at the saloon, and Gig said maybe they could work a monte game together there if he come down to Circle. That's what they was talking about when Tom McPhee, who was the owner of the Pioneer, busted through the front doors.

  "'Bottoms up, men!' McPhee calls out. 'And the last round is on me!' He grabs a bottle in each hand and walks along the bar filling everybody up. 'Might as well finish it, because we're closing down tonight, once and for all!' Then he stands at the end of the bar and tells everyone that he just come from the Gold Bar Hotel, where a sled team brought the latest mail from the upriver camps. There was a letter from Dawson, by Frank Densmore for Harry Spencer, and it said that all the rumors about the Klondike was true.

  "You never seen a stampede," Zimmerman tells me, "but I seen a couple of small ones in Dawson, out to one new creek or another, and that's how it starts. One man gets off his barstool and heads for the door, then two more follow on his heels. In an hour every man in town without something too good to leave behind is scrambling to load a few weeks grub on a sled and harness a dog-team. The first ones got some notion of where they's headed and the rest are just following. Get to the Discovery creek, find the last ground claimed, and stake off the next five-hundred feet. Some fellers that was dead drunk ended up stampeding without even knowing it... their friends put parkas and felt boots on 'em and strapped 'em on a sled.

  "Wait a few extra hours or days and there might be no ground left to stake. And you ain't done when you carve your name on a post – you still got to record your claim at the district office. When the Klondike first hit, that was downriver at Fortymile. By the time the news got to Circle, the Canadians opened a registry in Dawson.

  "Densmore's letter was proof that a man them sourdoughs respected was going to walk away from bigger success in Circle than most of 'em could hope for. He was going to try for something better on the Klondike, even though hundreds of other miners got there first. That was all them fellers needed to hear. By morning, half of Circle was heading upriver, and it would of been a lot more if there was enough dogs. Malamutes you could buy for twenty-five or fifty dollars was selling for two-hundred fifty. Some went for whatever the seller wanted. Five hundred. Fifteen hundred.

  "At the Pioneer, Gig and Wylie watched a dozen men rush in and out through the saloon doors as they drank the last of Tom McPhee's whiskey. By the time they was finished, Wylie made his case. He had a little money and could leave right away, and two men was faster than one driving a sled up the frozen Yukon. Gig had five good dogs, dried salmon to feed 'em, and the grub that Nokes sent him to Circle to buy.

  "Nokes would miss his chance to stake on one of the Klondike creeks once the Circle stampede got to Dawson. If he knowed what they knowed, Nokes would tell 'em to head upriver and stake. He would grubstake 'em in exchange for a share of their claims. They could leave a note for him at the ACC warehouse telling him to meet them in Dawson. And right now they was in better position to move and keep moving than the other miners that was sliding out the door.

  "Gig listened to Wylie and knowed he was right, except for the part about leaving a note for Nokes and sharing the claims. When he thought about it for a few minutes, everything that ever bothered Gig about Sam Nokes come back to the surface and cracked like a whip. It was better to make a clean break with him, and this was the time to do it."

  Chapter 23

  "It's two-hundred-twenty miles back upriver from Circle to Dawson, and even with a good dog-team and solid ice, that's a hard tramp. Others was ahead of Gig and Wylie, so at least the trail was packed, but that ain't saying it was smooth. Up toward the passes, the lakes freeze and melt and freeze again, and the wind blows 'em flat and clean, but the river is a different story. It freezes and melts in different places, and cakes of ice flow downstream and get jammed together and snowed over. When the river freezes for good, you got stacks and humps taller than a man piled up with no rhyme or reason, and you either got to find your way around 'em or carry the sleds across yourself. Even where the ice looks flat it's full of crevices and ledges, so the dogs stumble and cut their feet and the sleds turn sideways or tip over.

  "It's easier when you're coming up behind an island, so when there's islands the trail snakes from one to another. But that don't make it any shorter. Still, sledding up to Dawson from Circle ain't nearly as rough as the upper Yukon back to the lakes – when that fast water freezes and breaks and locks up again, you get ramps and ice cliffs forty feet high.

  "After you spent a few hours watching your dogs slip and yelp and taking them in and out of harness, you start to wonder whether you'd be better off without 'em. Especially when you're out for ten days on the ice and half of what they're pulling is their own food. But that feeling goes away every time you pass some poor devil dragging his sled into the wind at night. And in December it's almost always night.

  "Gig and Wylie was better off than most of the miners stampeding out of Circle. While Gig was cutting trees back at Mammoth Creek, he got comfortable with the dogs and learned how to handle a loaded sled on a hillside, so a bumpy trail on the ice wasn't no worse than he was used to. And they had enough food and a small tent and a stove, all of it bought from Jack McQuesten and charged to Sam Nokes.

  "On a few nights they camped in the lee of an island with other miners heading for Dawson. If you pack the tents close enough together you get some shelter from the wind, and the heat don't seem to disappear as fast. But you still wake up most mornings with new snow frozen to the roof and sides. Other nights they was by themselves.

  "Their last night on the ice before Dawson, the clouds disappeared and it was about the coldest night of the year. When
the wind dies down, every step on crusted snow and every breath you take cracks and echoes in the air. If you look up, you see the stars have doubled, and it makes you dizzy just trying to pull the constellations out of the chatter. Gig and Wylie made camp on the sheltered side of a small island a few miles below Fort Reliance. A bigger island just upstream pushed the current through a channel that made the small island a trash heap for driftwood. You can spot that kind of thing after a few weeks on a raft.

  "While Gig was lighting the stove and heating up dried salmon for the dogs, Wylie crossed the island and dug some sticks and branches out of the snow on the upstream bank. They got a decent fire going behind a screen of trees near the tent and was able to have dinner outside and stay warm.

  "When they was finished Wylie went back to the upstream bank to get more driftwood, and Gig headed to the tent to make coffee. He let it brew and come out to the check on the dogs. They was all curled together in the snow and staring at the sky, so Gig looked up and saw waves and swirls of fire, only they was green and gold and pink and purple, like ghosts the color of stained glass.

  Zimmerman pauses for the first time since Gig and Wylie left Circle. He checks the whiskey in his cup and inhales its vapors before knocking back a slug, then looks at me with apparent condescension in his sunken, watery eyes.

  "You ever been north, Owen?"

  "No," I admit. "Not past Chicago."

  He snorts and leans back against the wall, seeming genuinely amused.

  "There's things you can't see until you go past what's comfortable."

  The room seems suddenly warmer and tighter, so I take another sip to relax my shoulders.

  "Northern lights is one. I seen 'em for the first time in Alaska a year later, when I was working as a packer on the Skagway trail, still trying to put together an outfit so I could make my way Inside.

  "Wylie seen 'em too, that night, and he come running out through the trees. Didn't bother dropping wood on the fire 'cause his arms was empty. Instead he goes straight to the sled, unstraps his rifle, and loads a shot. 'She's here!' he tells Gig. 'I seen her!'

  "Gig tries to ask what he's talking about but Wylie got a wild look in his eyes and won't stand still. He says she was staring at him from the island across the channel, and he's going back to the upstream bank to shoot her."

  "Shoot who?"

  "The Indian girl. The one that swamped his boat at Miles Canyon, and was going to keep coming back until she killed him. The girl that was glowing like the sky in his dreams."

  "I thought you said Wylie was sane. You said you met him later in Dawson and he told you he had dreams about an Indian girl that was trying to kill him. Now you're telling me that Gig saw him hallucinate twice. Once after his boat flipped in Miles Canyon, and again when he saw northern lights out on the ice. He sounds like he had a few loose screws."

  Zimmerman shakes his head. "Wylie had his head screwed on – ask anyone in Dawson. Gig never saw that girl and I never saw her neither, but that don't mean she wasn't there, even though she was gone when Wylie got back. After that he wouldn't sleep outside under the lights. If he was on a winter tramp and the sky was glowing, he'd wrap himself in furs and blankets and sit all night against a tree with his rifle at his side."

  Chapter 24

  When Garrett and Wylie reached Dawson the following day, Zimmerman tells me, they found a frenzy of activity on the frozen mud flat below the mouth of the Klondike. Hundreds of lots had been staked off and sold by Joe Ladue, and his sawmill was operating around the clock, cutting lumber for the cabins and commercial buildings rising on the town's emerging grid. In Ladue's saloon, stampeders from Fortymile and Circle queried miners who'd come down from the creeks for supplies. A rising tide of gold dust was already circulating, since gold was the one commodity whose supply now appeared inexhaustible. Men who had started digging toward bedrock on their Bonanza or Eldorado claims could wash out whatever sellers were asking for a few pounds of salt or beef or candles or nails – or anything else they needed to keep working through the winter. And while the supply boats remained iced in at their moorings far downriver, more Klondike hopefuls arrived over the ice, sending prices sky high. Prospectors who couldn't afford to work their claims also couldn't afford to buy food for their dogs, so they had to kill them if they couldn't find a buyer.

  "Gig and Wylie sized up the situation after a few hours talking with the fellers who come into the saloon," Zimmerman says. "By then it was the end of December, and Bonanza and Eldorado was staked top to bottom two months ago, with plenty of claims overlapping or measured wrong. The Canadian government said they was going to send a surveyor to straighten things out. Maybe when that happened there would be pieces of claims freed up, but you couldn't guess if they'd be big enough to pay. And the limit was one claim per man in the Klondike district, so most fellers wanted all five hundred feet.

  "Even with a thousand miners in the Klondike valley by the end of '96, there was still rich ground for the taking on the hillsides above the creeks, but nobody knowed about bench gold yet. So them that missed Bonanza or Eldorado was pushing further up the valley and staking on Hunker Creek and its pups. Sometimes all it took to start a stampede from Dawson was for someone to check the filings at the commissioner's office and notice a new discovery claim. Word would spread through the saloons and a posse or two would drain their whiskeys, throw supplies for a week on a sled, and mush off toward the next Eldorado.

  "Of course them fellers would come right back to record the claims they staked. After recording, a man who come to Dawson with nothing might put his feet up in the saloon while other miners was spending the time and money to find out what that new creek was worth. Or maybe he'd just sell the claim for a few weeks of grub to someone who had the means to work it.

  "Gig and Wylie was better off than some. They had a good team of dogs, a tent and stove, food for a month, and a little dust left in their pokes. They needed to stake the best ground they could find, even if they couldn't work it yet, and then they needed to find shelter for the winter. It was twelve dollars a day to bunk at one of the taverns, but the lumber and carpenters you needed for a cabin would cost hundreds. They couldn't feed the dogs, so they needed to find a buyer, the sooner the better.

  "They got lucky on that score, 'cause Clarence Berry was down from 6 Eldorado, where his hired men was burning shafts to bedrock. He needed to move sluice-box lumber and grub up to the creeks, and money wasn't a problem. Berry got rich by staking his claim on Eldorado and trading his way into two more. Worked another claim on Bonanza at the same time, so to pay wages he was washing out a hundred and fifty dollars every day. That might be ten days' diggings at Miller Creek at Fortymile, but on 6 Eldorado it took ten minutes and two or three pans. Berry already knowed that if he could use dogs to move supplies and keep his men working all winter, he was going to need horses to haul all that gold down to the assay office in the fall, after cleaning up his winter dumps and summer diggings.

  "In August '96, when George Carmack walked into a saloon at Fortymile and showed off his shotgun shell full of Klondike gold, Berry was already three years on the Inside with nothing to show for it, and his spirit was beaten thin as paper. What he heared from Carmack sounded like just another hoax with seeded gold, and it took the woman he carried in over the pass and down the Yukon to convince him to go visit Lying George's claim on Bonanza.

  "Before the year was out it was hard to tell how much Berry was worth. Hundreds of thousands, maybe more. Them hard-luck cases from Fortymile was the first to take a chance on the Klondike, and a few got lucky, but mostly the handful that stuck with it and didn't sell or give up was the ones that got rich. That's how it was with the Klondike Kings."

  Zimmerman has been veering off course, so I steer him back to my quarry.

  "So Gig and Wylie sold Nokes' dog team to Clarence Berry?"

  "Kept the sled and sold the dogs for three hundred dollars. That didn't sound like much to Gig, who just come from Circle where dogs
was fetching two hundred each from miners that was desperate to get to the Klondike. But in Dawson everyone was starting to realize that the next steamboat was six months away, and there was more people and dogs than food."

  "How long did it take Nokes and his partner to figure out Gig wasn't coming back with their supplies?"

  Zimmerman's eyes glimmer and he cracks a grin. "Hard to say. They probably went down to Circle after a couple weeks, when they was running low on food. That's a long tramp in the snow from the head of Mammoth Creek, when you got no sled and no dogs. There's other miners working claims on Birch Creek along the way, so they wasn't going to starve – any sourdough with a winter cabin and a stove will share his dinner with a feller that needs help. But you can bet Nokes was fixing to string Gig up if they found him in the saloons, drinking away their winter grubstake.

  "What they wasn't expecting was to see Circle emptied out, and when Nokes heared everyone was off to the Klondike, he must of reckoned they all gone mad. That was the thing with those oldtimers that took ten or twenty thousand out of the ground in a year's work at Fortymile or Circle. They knowed what a gold stream looked like. They seen the Klondike, and plenty of 'em had walked its creeks like Nokes, and they knowed that wasn't it. So them fellers never got rich like Clarence Berry or Tom Lippy or Antone Stander.

  "Most of the saloons in Circle was shut down, but there was probably still a few businesses open when Nokes got there, so someone must of told him that Gig ran off to Dawson with Wylie and the dog team. Maybe Nokes went looking at the hotels for a note from Gig, but he probably realized pretty quick that there wasn't none. If Circle was still going strong, Nokes would of called a miners meeting and it would only take ten minutes for the sourdoughs to hear his case and vote. Then Gig would have been fined and banished. If he ever set foot in Circle again, they'd send him downriver in an empty canoe.