BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2)

by Edward A. Stabler

  On Bonanza, claim 2 Above was staked by Jake Dusel, and he used a generous length of measuring rope to make sure his claim reached high enough to capture the mouth of Skookum Gulch, which runs into Bonanza from the south, roughly parallel to Eldorado and a little downstream. Dusel's claim was cut down to five hundred feet when William Ogilvie arrived to survey the Klondike creeks on behalf of the Canadian government and resolve any errors or disputes. Ogilvie's survey released an eighty-six foot fraction between 2 Above and 3 Above on Bonanza, and an observer from Circle City named Dick Lowe thought hard about whether the undersized, wedge-shaped patch was worth claiming.

  Like Gig and Wylie, Lowe had reached the Klondike after Bonanza and Eldorado were located end to end. What if he staked the fraction and another rich prospect was discovered soon afterward? He'd be ineligible for a full claim on the new creek. Lowe walked away from the little wedge, hoping he could find a bigger fraction as the survey proceeded. Then he changed his mind, came back, and staked it. Skepticism returned, and he tried unsuccessfully to sell it. No takers. Nor was anyone willing to work a lay on a fraction that small.

  Out of alternatives, Lowe decided to sink a shaft on the claim himself, but that too yielded nothing. As a last gesture he sank a second shaft, and this time he hit the pay-streak dead center. In eight hours he took out forty-six thousand in gold. "Dick Lowe's Fraction" ultimately yielded over five-hundred thousand, making it the richest square-footage ever staked in the Klondike or anywhere else.

  On lower Eldorado, Clarence Berry and Antone Stander found pay-dirt under nine feet of glacial drift, and the streak ran the full length of their claims, averaging three feet thick and a hundred and fifty feet wide. But on upper Eldorado, Zimmerman says, the pay-streak was buried deeper, and it was thicker but not as wide, making it more elusive even if the creek basin was narrower from rim to rim. So the Swedes and Gig and Wylie burnt their first shaft near the east rim on 48 Eldorado, reached bedrock at fifteen feet, and drifted twenty feet toward the creek, but found no layer of gravel laced with gold.

  The second shaft went down simultaneously near the west rim and also came up empty. Even on the upstream reaches of Eldorado the grade of the basin is minimal, so the creek wanders lazily through bends and half-loops between the rims, offering no insight into the location and path of the submerged pay-streak, which traces the path the creek followed thousands of years ago, after glaciers scraped away all the accreted muck and debris.

  "That shaft is four by six, with cordwood three foot high across the bottom, and when you light a fire it smokes like a volcano. Even smokier when you drift sideways at bedrock, 'cause then the fire gets starved for air. So keeping that fire burning long enough to thaw the ground ain't easy. And then you got embers and ashes to shovel into the bucket every morning before you haul any dirt up to the surface. Until you hit the pay-streak, you just empty the bucket around the crib-work and it builds into a cone. But when you're raising pay-dirt, them buckets get carried over to a pile they call the winter dumps."

  "But they missed the pay-streak with the first two holes."

  "And the third. Cut into it on the fourth, after drifting eight feet. That showed 'em where to sink next, and they was taking out pay-dirt all along the drift on that fifth hole until water starts seeping in. April was wearing out by then, so even though they knowed the lie of the streak and could hit it every time, it was getting too warm to burn another shaft.

  "It's twenty days to sink fifteen feet and drift twenty – when everything goes right. When you got problems with the fires or the hole, it's thirty days. So even though Lindfors started working that claim in October, then Ruud come on in December, and Gig and Wylie hired on in January, they only got one shaft into the pay-streak that winter. Took out a hundred buckets a day for about a week. Eight pans to a bucket, and averaging about two dollars a pan, which don't sound like much when Clarence Berry can find a five-hundred dollar pan, but what counts is average across the whole streak, and two dollars is ten times what anybody ever seen in Colorado or California."

  "So the Swedes finally struck it on Eldorado," I say, "thanks to Gig and Wylie."

  Zimmerman smirks and shakes his head a few inches, as if he's recalibrating.

  "When they got to sluicing that summer, they cleaned up ten thousand dollars in dust and nuggets from the winter dumps. But most of that gold runs through your fingers before you get a chance to count it. Every shaft you sink costs ten dollars a foot, if you got hired hands. Firewood is twenty-five dollars a cord. Thirty dollars for a sluice box with riffles in it, and it takes dozens of boxes to sluice a claim all summer.

  "Shovels and picks, wheelbarrows and buckets for moving dirt. Saws and hammers and nails for building a trestle through your summer cut to carry water for sluicing. The creek grade is so low you need to dam two hundred feet upstream and channel the water from there. If you ain't got someone to haul supplies, you pay ten cents a pound from Dawson to the mouth of Eldorado. And that's in the winter. In the summer it's twenty-five cents a pound, 'cause you can't run a sled and no dog carries more than forty pounds. Add that all up and maybe the Swedes cleared a couple thousand dollars from the winter dumps, but you need all of that and more in Dawson to lay in grub and supplies for the next winter."

  "You've been saying that Eldorado was the best creek in the world, but it sounds like the Swedes were barely scraping by."

  "The gold was there," Zimmerman says. "Maybe not like Dick Lowe's fraction, but even the top of Eldorado was rich. You had to be smart or lucky to get it out without going bust first. And you had to have the nerve and stomach to stick with it, which lots of men didn't that first year on the Klondike."

  He leans away from the wall and twists to put his hands on the table, then stares momentarily into his cup.

  "It got easier in '98," he says, "after the main creeks proved out and all the claims was being worked. But by then there was thousands of stampeders coming into the Klondike from Outside, and some men figured there was easier ways to get rich in Dawson."

  Chapter 27

  "So Gig and Wylie stuck it out as hired hands through the summer?"

  "Mostly," Zimmerman says with a smile. "Gig wasn't too happy when they was digging the first few shafts and coming up empty. Makes you wonder if you was going to get paid. But while they was working for the Swedes up on Eldorado, they had ears to the ground. Gig reckoned there'd be more discoveries and he wanted to be ready. The Swedes knowed that if a good prospect got located, Gig and Wylie was going to stampede. And there was a run of new creeks in the spring and summer of '97.

  "In late April it happened just below the mouth of Eldorado. A sourdough named Taylor working down at American Creek on the lower Yukon – that's a few hundred miles past Circle, down near where the Tanana River come in – got the Klondike news after the Yukon froze, so he set out for Dawson in the dead of winter with a dog team, six hundred miles over the ice, fifty or sixty below zero most of the way.

  "He got up to Dawson in February and there was nothing left on Bonanza or Eldorado, so he joined a couple other men and took a lay on George Carmack's Bonanza claim. A Discovery claim is a thousand feet, and Carmack couldn't afford to work it all.

  "Skookum Gulch come into Bonanza just a stone's throw upstream from Discovery, so when Taylor and his men wasn't busy they staked claims 1 and 2 on Skookum Gulch and started panning the creek-bed and cutting wood for a shaft. They found a pay-streak only four feet down, and that was enough for 'em to walk away from Carmack's lay, even though they already cleaned up seven thousand on it. Like most fellers, they didn't like giving away half of what they worked for.

  "In the first week of drifting they took out almost three thousand dollars. That set off a stampede and Skookum Gulch got located top to bottom in a few days. This time Gig and Wylie was in on it. They come down Eldorado when word got out and climbed Skookum Gulch early enough to stake 19 and 20. Went down to Dawson to record and then back to 48 Eldorado. To work their claims, they was
going to need full pokes, so through May and June they spent most of their time with the Swedes and got over to Skookum Gulch when they had a chance.

  "But Skookum Gulch was like most creeks on the Klondike – some fellers didn't believe in it. There was miners that struck the pay like Taylor, and other sourdoughs that didn't find much. By July, Taylor and his men cleaned up forty thousand. They sold out for more than that, based on what everyone reckoned was still in the ground.

  "That made Gig and Wylie want to dig faster. In the summer you can't sink a dry shaft, so you work a cut from rim to rim. It stays warm 'cause the sun don't really go down. You shovel off the top few inches of moss and mud, then let the warm air melt what’s frozen underneath. Go as wide as you can, then scrape off another layer the next day. Keep that up until you have a pile of summer diggings you can sluice.

  "And that just means letting the water run down your line of boxes and shoveling the dumps into the top of the last box. The dirt and sand and gravel wash out the bottom into the tailings pile while the gold gets trapped by the riffles. At the end of the day you turn off the water, pull out the riffles, and clean up the gold.

  "Gig and Wylie started working a cut, but they was only down a foot or two by July when Taylor sold out. Some of the other claims on Skookum Gulch was abandoned. If you ain't found pay-dirt yet, it can make you wonder how much you want to spend on your claim.

  "A man named Coxey was buying into claims when he thought the price was right. He owned a lumber-yard in Juneau. Was thinking about setting up a mill in Circle and was on his way down the Yukon when the Klondike hit. Coxey come up to Skookum Gulch in late July when Gig and Wylie was working on 19, and he asked 'em how things was going. By that time Gig knowed the ropes and he pointed at the ground to show where the pay-streak ran and where they was going to sink and drift that winter. Coxey offered 'em seven thousand for both claims, and a few hours later they shook hands on it."

  "So Gig and Wylie settled for the bird in hand? I thought Gig wanted to get rich."

  Zimmerman gives me a dismissive look. "They was two men with a pick and a shovel, and the only thing stopping 'em from cleaning up all that gold was a million cubic feet of frozen dirt." He fingers his cup and tosses back a shot. "They was right to take the money. Seven thousand dollars buys a year's outfit for two men. And enough supplies to work another claim the right way, with some left over for a spree in Dawson."

  The spree was a mining-camp tradition, Zimmerman explains. After cleaning up a season's worth of work on a backwoods creek, a miner hungry for camaraderie and cheer would tramp back into Fortymile or Circle or Fort Yukon with a saddlebag full of nuggets and dust, ready to celebrate. Anyone present at the first saloon he entered would hear him cry, "drink up boys, the next one is on me." After calling out two or three rounds of whiskey for the house, he would toss his poke on the bar, watch the bartender weigh out the price, and then wave his hand to lead the gathering out the door and down to the next saloon, where the scene would be repeated. A good spree would last hours and disperse hundreds of dollars worth of dust.

  "Of course what they called whiskey on the Yukon in them days was bottom of the barrel to start with, and no telling what the saloon-keeper would mix into his bottles to water it down. Sometimes a clear-colored hootch they made from sourdough and brown sugar. Cooked it in a still made of coal-oil cans and pieces of rubber boots, heated up over a stove.

  "Gig and Wylie went to the gold commissioner's office to record the sales on Skookum Gulch, then walked around Dawson, where there was houses and hotels already popping up that summer. They watched the builders work and had a two-man spree... wandered from one saloon to another. Saloons don't close until Sunday, so they slept a few hours on one of the floors. They had breakfast at a hotel the next morning and was coming out when they noticed a couple of men loading up a pack team in the street.

  "Gig asks 'em was they stampeding somewhere and they say Skookum Gulch. Gig tells 'em it was staked end-to-end in April and he just sold his claim, but they say the stampede ain't to the creek claims. It's to the benches above the creek. Some greenhorn flipped over a boulder two-hundred feet up the hillside and saw gold nuggets poking out of the mud.

  "No one can reckon why it's up there, but it ain't buried deep. And it's nuggets and coarse gold, heavier than what they been digging out down at the creek. Ogilvie said he would record claims that was square and a hundred foot a side, and they was going fast.

  "That was the start of the bench claims," Zimmerman says, "but all the miners on Bonanza and Eldorado thought it was a joke. Some said the discovery claim was salted. Ed Peterson and Caribou Billy, the men who found it on Skookum Gulch, was new on the Yukon, and the fellers who stampeded to the benches was the ones who missed out on the main creeks. Miners was working the Skookum benches all winter, but even by spring of '98 there was no ground staked above Eldorado until Caribou Billy went prospecting up the west hillside with the Staley brothers. They took three pans out of a four-foot hole, carried the dirt down to the creek, and washed out two hundred dollars.

  "After that everything got named and staked. Gold Hill, French Hill, Cheechako Hill. Some fellers said the pay-streak up on the benches is older than the one at bedrock. They figured the creek was up there before the glaciers carved the mountains down."

  "So did Gig and Wylie join the stampede back up to Skookum Gulch and try to stake a bench claim? They should have been eligible, right?"

  "They knowed exactly what ground the stampeders was talking about," Zimmerman says. "It was right above the trail to their claims, and they walked past it a couple dozen times by then. But Gig been Inside for more than a year, and he cut his teeth in Cripple Creek before that. He was thinking like a sourdough, and when the stampeders started talking about gold two hundred feet up the hill from the creek, he didn't believe it."

  Zimmerman works his closed lips back and forth a few times, then turns his head toward the corner of the cabin and spits. "Probably spent too much time listening to Sam Nokes."

  Chapter 28

  "I guess Gig and Nokes had something in common," I say, to see if I'll get a rise out of Zimmerman. "They both missed chances to stake rich ground. And Wylie sounds like he always deferred to Gig. So the only winners in this group were the Swedes."

  He doesn't take the bait. "The Swedes was still building sluice-boxes up on Eldorado in the summer of '97, while Clarence Berry, Tom Lippy, and Joe Ladue was riding the steamboat down to St. Michael and sitting on piles of fifty-pound sacks of gold. All them Klondike Kings made Seattle and San Francisco by mid-July, and that's what started the stampede from Outside.

  "Every man coming into Dawson that first year knowed there was going to be more rich creeks discovered. Maybe on the Klondike, maybe somewhere else. There was rivers that no white man explored yet. You could put a million prospectors in the Yukon and give every man his own creek. Spread 'em out far enough they could die of loneliness.

  "Most of the sourdoughs from Circle didn't like prospecting on Canadian ground. They was hoping the next big strike would be down the Yukon in Alaska so they wouldn't have to pay the royalty. It was Americans that done most of the work finding gold, and it burned 'em to give ten percent to the Gold Commissioner.

  "The Klondike run into the Yukon from the east, and the gold creeks run into the Klondike from the south, off a ridge that's bare granite and rises up to what they call King Solomon's Dome. That ridge is the divide between the Klondike and the Indian River basin, and creeks come down from the dome like spokes on a wheel.

  "One of 'em is Gold Bottom, where Robbie Henderson staked after climbing up to the divide from the Indian side, before he told George Carmack about it on his way to Fortymile. Then there's Hunker, Bonanza, Eldorado, Independence, Last Chance. All them creeks is on the Klondike side.

  "But there's just as many on the Indian River side, and they all got headwaters up on the same ridge. So it makes sense that fellers who missed out on the Klondike creeks would go up a
nd over the divide. That was the next stampede, in August, and Gig and Wylie was in on that one too."

  "So they didn't go back to Eldorado to work for the Swedes?"

  "They went back, but the Swedes didn't need 'em so much anymore. When Gig and Wylie was going off to Skookum Gulch every couple of weeks, Lindfors started looking for other men to fill in. By August the Swedes got their summer cut down to the pay-streak, so they was taking out enough gold they could pay wages every night. Fellers that needed to put some dust in their pokes would stop by to work for a few days. When one of 'em headed down to Dawson or out on a tramp, another man shows up to take his place.

  "Gig and Wylie both had three thousand left from selling the Skookum claims, so they didn't have much use for digging out someone else's gold at fifteen dollars a day. But Skookum gave 'em a taste for staking new ground, and that's what they wanted to do. Find something like Eldorado and they could put their money to work on it, then start pulling out a few hundred a day. Maybe more. If it cost too much to dig to pay-dirt, they could wait for the right time to sell.

  "They was up on 48 and 49 Eldorado with the Swedes when the stampede to Sulfur Creek got going. That was about the middle of August, and it was a big one, over five hundred men climbing over the divide. What made it so big was going into the Indian River district. So even if you already staked in the Klondike, you can stake again in the Indian. And Sulfur come into Dominion Creek the same way Eldorado run into Bonanza, so that made fellers excited.