BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2)

by Edward A. Stabler

  Zimmerman explains Moore's reasoning. The Dyea Trail over Chilkoot Pass to Bennett Lake is thirty-one miles. The Skagway Trail is fourteen miles longer, but its White Pass is almost a thousand feet lower than Chilkoot Pass, and the climb to the pass is less steep. So the Skagway Trail is suitable for pack animals.

  "The NAT man told me people was coming up and down the Dyea Trail, and there was always some feller with too much of something and not enough of another. Others would change their minds or take sick. He said I could buy or trade my way into an outfit if I had money and time. I told him I had more time than money, so he said maybe I should go down to Skagway. Said Captain Moore was sure a stampede from the states was coming, and he was hiring fellers to work on the trail."

  Zimmerman says he spent a few days getting his bearings in Dyea. He cached his goods and walked fourteen miles up the trail to Sheep Camp, where he asked other miners about the lakes and rapids and got his first view of the shining white summits guarding Chilkoot Pass. Then back in Dyea he paid an Indian boatman to row him and his two bags back up the Lynn Canal to Skagway. The following day he walked the first four miles of the Skagway Trail with Captain Moore.

  "The Skagway River got its headwaters near White Pass," Zimmerman says, "and drops twenty miles down to the bay. The trail follows the river up the valley, and them first few miles you could ride a horse and pull a wagon. You wish it would stay like that but it don't.

  "You get to Devil's Hill and the river climbs into a gorge, and you can't follow it no more. So the trail cuts back and forth up the hillside until you're five hundred feet above the water. From the top you come right back down to the river on the other side. Captain Moore put me to work on low ground between Devil's Hill and Porcupine Ridge. A Metis feller and his full-growed son was building a corduroy bridge over a pup stream running into the river, and that takes three sets of hands. Climbing over Devil's Hill for the first time, even before hundreds of men and horses got there, I knowed trouble was coming.

  "There's places where you squeeze past one boulder and step up onto another. The tops ain't level and there's loose rock and deep cracks with scrub bushes growing out of 'em. Take a bad step one way and you fall ten feet into a pit between the rocks. Slip the other way and it's five hundred straight down to the water. Most places the trail ain't more than two feet wide, so you got to back up and find a spot to pass someone coming the other way.

  "Porcupine Ridge was even worse – steeper than Devil's Hill, with boulders waist-high and muddy ground between 'em. And sloping rocks you got to cross sideways. Lose your balance and you're falling off a cliff.

  "After we finished that first corduroy bridge, we climbed over the ridge to put one across a pup on the other side. Them bridges is a lot of work, but when you build 'em right they hold up, and they don't spook the horses 'cause the footing is good. You use split logs with the flat side down for the planks, and stringers nailed top and bottom for the rails.

  "When we finished a bridge, we'd go back to Skagway and Captain Moore's cook would feed us for two nights, pack a few days of grub on our backs, and send us back out to build the next one. Must of put five or six between Devil's Hill and the last pitch on Summit Hill. And when we was done, the best parts of that trail looked good enough. But that was before the first boat unloaded at Skagway."

  Zimmerman tells me that Captain Moore had been prescient, and that steamers from the west-coast ports began arriving in the last week of July '97. All were full of greenhorns who had assembled their outfits and booked passage for Alaska within days after the Klondike Kings disembarked in San Francisco and Seattle in mid-July. Some stampeders brought lumber to build a boat, some brought photographic plates and tins of film, and some brought wheeled contraptions of their own design that they hoped to pull up the trails.

  Word of the Skagway Trail's moderate grade had spread south to the states, so most of the greenhorns also brought their own pack horses, along with tons of hay and oats. For the hundred and fifty stampeders on a typical steamer, there might be five or six hundred horses on a lower deck, packed shoulder to shoulder in stalls too narrow for them to lie down or turn around.

  Until Captain Moore and his crew finished building a long wharf across the tidal flat to deeper water in the fall, Skagway Harbor operated like a hastily-designed machine. Steamboat captains were only willing to approach the tidal flat at high tide, and passengers were responsible for handling and off-loading all of their baggage and animals.

  So the passengers organized themselves, and some were assigned to bring goods up out of the ship's hold. Others helped load the ship's dinghies, which had been lowered to the water. The dinghies then ferried the bags and crates as close to dry sand as the tide allowed, where they were transferred to horse-drawn carts and carried a quarter-mile up the beach to higher ground near the trees. Finally the goods were separated into a different pile for each owner. And at every step along the way, an overseer was designated to guard against theft. Unloading a hundred tons of baggage and supplies took most of a day.

  "We brung the passengers off in rowboats, twenty-five cents a head," Zimmerman says. "Maybe a dozen Siwashes in canoes doing the same. Didn't move the horses until everything else was off the boat. Then we walked 'em down a ramp onto a scow, a dozen at a time, and towed 'em in with rowboats. Dropped 'em in shallow water and let 'em wade ashore. Even with two scows working, getting the horses off took most of a day. Sometimes longer, if you got two steamers unloading at the same time.

  "So then there's a few hundred tenderfeet, most of 'em in groups of two or three but some on their own, all moving their outfits back from the beach into the woods, cutting down trees, lighting fires, and putting up tents. Soon you got tents for half a mile along the trail. When you watch 'em start packing, you figure this might be the first horse they ever saddled. And they probably bought a used-up horse that nobody wanted no more, 'cause that's what the outfitters was bringing to the docks in Seattle and Victoria.

  "You need a frame and a diamond hitch to keep a load on a horse's back, and if you try something else the load will slide off and you might as well use saddle-bags. One time when I was rowing passengers ashore I seen two fellers up the beach dressed in riding gear, with three horses tied to a downed tree and a fourth they was trying to load. The first time I noticed 'em they got a hundred pounds on its back. The next time I rowed out they got two hundred up. The third time the whole load was off and they was arguing about something. The next time I seen the horse shake off two fifty-pound bags. I rowed out and back for three hours and they never got that horse packed."

  Zimmerman says the Skagway Trail filled up within a day or two and then deteriorated rapidly. At times the traffic slowed to a standstill. Combining a trail that wasn't fit for horses with horses that weren't fit for a trail – and men didn't know much about either – proved lethal.

  "It rains a couple hours most days, so the first four miles got worn out right away," Zimmerman says. "Whether you're a man or a horse, your feet and legs is wet and covered with mud. Then you climb Devil's Hill, and the rocks get slick with mud and manure. A horse's load shifts and he slips a foot and falls, and sometimes his back goes out and he's done. Or a leg gets caught in a crack and breaks. Then you got to shoot him in the head and pull the carcass off the trail if you can. Four or five horses died that first day.

  "More often you got to unload the bags and get the horse back on his feet, then calm him down so you can start loading him again. Sometimes everyone gets stopped for an hour while that happens. And most of them horses behind you is standing on boulders or ledges, carrying two hundred pounds and can't move. That happens more often every day, 'cause the trail keeps getting worse.

  "The train starts moving again, but then a horse gets spooked on the other side of the hill, 'cause it lost a shoe and the next step is three feet down onto a wet rock that slants off a cliff. And when you look over that cliff you see a dead horse at the bottom.

  "The low ground between th
e hills was even worse. The corduroy bridges held together, but mud pits opened up where pup springs drain into the river. First the horses was sinking up to their knees. Pretty soon the men was knee-deep and horses was buried to their tails. Scared 'em bad. Some lost their footing and fell over, and they was panicked or heart-broke by the time you hauled 'em out. And if the horse was packed by tenderfeet that don't know how to cinch a saddle, its back is bleeding from scrapes and sores.

  "After a couple weeks most of the trail smelled like rotting horses, and sometimes you had to step across what was left of 'em. If they been dead a day, their eyes was pecked out by ravens. When the eyes was still there, sometimes you see 'em blink or hear a groan when you pass by. That makes you want to stop and find a bullet. But your own horses just step past and don't look down.

  "It was taking four or five days to get to the pass and you never knowed when the train would stop, so when it was moving you kept walking through the night. When it was stopped you could rest, maybe try to start a fire in the rain, but if you unload your horses it might start moving again, so stampeders kept 'em on their feet and burdened twenty-four hours straight. Three fellers swore they saw a loaded horse walk off a cliff on Porcupine Ridge to end the pain.

  "By mid-August there was as many men turning around as making it over, so you had people going both directions on the trail. I was out there with the Metis building corduroy bridges over the sink-holes, and some of the stampeders was stopping to help. Others didn't want to lose time getting to the Klondike. If the trail was open, they was going to push forward and let someone else fix it. There was disagreements, but finally there was nothing to do but close the trail. The stampeders got organized and started cutting down trees and building corduroy bridges over all the worst spots on the hills and swamps. I went back to Skagway to get paid.

  "After them bridges was built and the ground froze, you could almost call it a trail, and stampeders started moving up it again. But then it snows, and the tracks melt and freeze into ice on the rocks, and the horses start falling, so you got to leave 'em behind. If you ain't got dogs, you pack seventy pounds on your back, move it five miles forward, and go back for more. In the winter it was lines of men going up and down the trail with caches buried on the sides in ten foot drifts. Your outfit weighs a ton, so that means climbing over White Pass and down to Bennett thirty times. Maybe you could pull a sled, but the trail is an icy ledge, and if your sled falls off you got to haul it back up and wait for a break in the line, and that takes hours.

  "That winter a man named Brackett started blasting a wagon road into the gorges along the river, and by spring they was turning that track into a railroad. Meanwhile most people getting to the lakes was using the Dyea Trail. But two years later the White Pass Railroad turned Dyea into a ghost town.

  "The papers said three thousand horses started up the Skagway Trail ahead of the snow. Maybe a few hundred made it to White Pass. Crossing into Canada you had to unpack and pay customs on your outfit, and if the Mounties seen your horse was hurt they shot it, so stampeders would wash the blood off its legs and drape a blanket to hide the wounds on its back. On the other side was twenty-five miles and two more hills before Bennett Lake. A couple dozen men and even some women made it quick enough to sail the lakes before they froze.

  "The others camped and started building their boats. There was a tent city at Bennett, with stampeders coming over Chilkoot Pass all winter. A few horses that made it up the Skagway Trail got sold and led back down, but the rest was turned loose. They was carrying their own food, and after a week or two on the trail it was gone. And there wasn't nothing to graze around the lake.

  "If you was cooking flapjacks or bacon up at Bennett, you might hear a snort and turn to see a bony cayuse poking his head into your tent. They was starving for company as much as food. And maybe the first morning you give him a handful of dried apples or a hunk of bread. Then at night he comes back, and if you wasn't too tired from whipsawing green lumber all day, you led him out into the trees and put a bullet behind his ear."

  Chapter 33

  Zimmerman stops for a taste of whiskey, then leans back against the wall and closes his eyes. I let him catch his breath. For the first time since his Yukon narrative began a few hours ago, a hint of compassion has crept into the story. Not for the victims of Garrett's thefts, like Nokes or the cheechakos in Dawson. Not for the hapless stampeders who drowned in the rapids or expired out on the ice. And not for those Garrett killed, like Jessie Delaney and Drew.

  Zimmerman's compassion is for the three thousand horses who suffered and died on the Skagway Trail. It reminds me that he grew up driving mules on the C&O towpath, so there were months on end when he spent as much time with mules as with people.

  And the sight of his truncated finger resting on his trousers reminds me that he's one of Garrett's victims himself, and that Garrett never showed remorse for gigging Henry's hand. But lack of compassion and remorselessness seem like different stages of the same current, with one flowing toward a misanthropic act and the other receding downstream. If Zimmerman has more sympathy for suffering horses than suffering men, does that increase the likelihood that he was complicit in Drew's killing? Or maybe that's just tonight's whiskey drawing my thoughts into a swirling eddy. I reach for my cup and tilt back a sip, then prod Zimmerman back into the story.

  "You said they closed the trail and you went back to Skagway to get paid."

  For a moment his eyes look lifeless, as if the ghost of '97 that has been inhabiting him has departed. Then the internal projector snaps on and the animation resumes.

  "Captain Moore told us he was done with the trail. We was going to build a wharf instead."

  Moore's plan, Zimmerman says, had been to make sure the Skagway Trail gained acceptance, then sell building lots on the harbor townsite he had sketched out. Businesses would flock to Skagway as the gateway to the Yukon, and their proprietors and employees would need to build stores and houses.

  But the stampeders ignored Moore's claimed ownership of the Skagway beach and the level ground beyond it. Instead they formed a committee, appointed a surveyor, and laid out evenly-spaced streets and standard-sized lots themselves. And while Skagway wouldn't realize its potential as a Yukon gateway until the White Pass Railroad was finished two years later, stampeders continued to arrive from the west-coast ports, and the impassable state of the Skagway Trail ensured that most of them remained in town for weeks or months.

  By November, the Mounties at White Pass were preventing anyone without a full year's outfit from crossing Inside, and that policy kept some stampeders in Skagway even when the trail became usable again. Zimmerman was one of them.

  He says that before long, Skagway's muddy streets were home to one-room hotels and saloons, and at various tents along the trail you could have your shoes repaired or your hair cut, or buy medicines or a sled dog. Denied the opportunity to sell land in Skagway, Captain Moore found another way to profit from the stampede. He hired Zimmerman, the Metis, and others to build a long wharf across the tidal flat to deep water, then charged the steamers a fee for using his dock to load and unload.

  "I worked all winter in Skagway," Zimmerman says. "Drove a mule-train for a packing outfit until I seen too much of that trail. Then back on the wharf unloading boats. Hauling logs to the sawmill with a couple of horses that was still strong enough to pull. And I watched that town turn into hell on earth."

  Zimmerman says that half the five thousand people who landed in Skagway during those first six months were stampeders determined to get to Dawson, and the other half were opportunists determined to get rich without leaving town. Maps of the Klondike gold fields drafted by artists who'd never set foot Inside were marketed on the streets. Lime juice was sold for five dollars a pint to stampeders who'd brought no defense against scurvy. Others paid sky-high prices for dried cherries or chocolate or tea. Packers with a team of mules cleared a hundred dollars a day hauling outfits to the foot of Devil's Hill, and husbands
and wives opened restaurants in roomy tents and served scrambled eggs and beer-fried sausages.

  Gamblers played faro and blackjack at saloons with names like the Golden Rose, the Midnight Musher, and the Trembling Scale. Alaska law prohibited the sale of spirits, so the whiskey flowing from behind the bar was siphoned from casks that came ashore bonded and signed through to customers in Canada. Dance halls sprung up, and men paid a dollar for a two-minute whirl with colorfully-named women like the Ethel Tower and Diamond Lil. Actresses emerged to sing and dance on stage, whether they possessed those skills or not.

  Out on the streets of Skagway, conjurers and fire-eaters collected a few dollars after each performance, and so did a Wild West sharpshooter and a Russian with a trained bear. Captain Moore's daughter traveled through town in a moose-drawn cart. A young soothsayer named Verity Bowen scanned the palms of eager greenhorns and foretold whether riches awaited them across the mountains. With one blue eye and one brown eye framed by long chestnut curls, she struck an arresting presence on her street-corner stand. The daily Skagway News was launched to chronicle the arrivals, openings, fist-fights, and flying bullets that characterized the town's raucous growth. And Soapy Smith and his confidence men slipped into Skagway, intent on plying the parasitic trades they'd mastered in mining towns like Leadville and Creede.

  "In Dawson you got Inspector Constantine and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Up at the passes, you got the Mounties and Sam Steele. They was honest and they had guns. Try to bribe or smuggle your way past 'em and they'll give you ten days chopping wood. From the minute you crossed Inside you knowed you was on lawful ground, and none of them crooks made it ten steps into Canada.