BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2)

by Edward A. Stabler

  "Gig stops pouring and snaps his head up and looks me in the eyes. Then his eyes go quick to my hands and back to my face. That's when I realized I probably looked a fright myself, moving every day for three months, washing up out of a bucket, and no proper shave or haircut since Dyea.

  "'A man don't have to set out for anywhere at all,' he says. 'But if you're coming to a place like the Klondike, you best get there before everyone knows its name. You let ten thousand cheechakos beat a path for you and by the time you make it to Dawson pouring whiskey might sound like a tolerable idea.'"

  "Then his face cracks into a smile and my eyes get watery and we're grabbing each other by the shoulders across the bar, and he says 'I sent you that book almost three years ago. I guess I was giving them mail carriers too much credit.'

  "He finishes pouring my whiskey and fills up another glass for himself, then leaves the bottles on the bar and comes around to sit next to me, tells two fellers at a table to serve themselves. For the first hour I'm telling him about leaving home and how I got to Alaska, then about working in Skagway and packing on the Dyea Trail. Joining up with Rafferty and Orrie and building a boat at Lindeman. Then Gig's shift ends and another feller comes in to work the bar, so we move over to the restaurant and order poached eggs and bacon and wine.

  "When I want to hear his story, Gig don't focus on how he got to Dawson. He wants to talk about what happened there in the last year. So he loads his fork and holds it up and says 'this egg tells the story of the Klondike stampede.' He says when he first come through on his way to Circle in summer of '96, Dawson was nothing but a mud flat where the Siwashes dried their fish, and probably none of 'em ever seen a chicken egg.

  "Late summer of '97 you got sourdoughs stampeding into Dawson from up and down the Yukon, and them fellers might buy an egg at Fortymile or Circle, if they was on a spree, and if the steamboats from St. Michael just come through to restock the camps.

  "This past May, after the ice gone out of the Yukon, a couple of canoes got down to Dawson from the Stewart River, ahead of the fleet that was getting ready to launch from the lakes. They brought a case of eggs and sold 'em for eighteen dollars a dozen. That's how starved the Klondike miners was for something different to eat.

  "The ice was still holding at Laberge, but when it gone out all them boats pushed downriver, and they started landing here the first week of June. The ones that brung eggs sold 'em for ten dollars a dozen. Two weeks later there's a thousand boats tied up in Dawson, some carrying twenty tons and some no bigger than canoes. And eggs was selling for three dollars a dozen.

  "By the end of June, Gig says, Dawson was the biggest mining camp anyone ever seen. There was stands on Front Street selling vegetables and fruit, and miners was pouring dust out of their pokes to buy apples, oranges, and lemons at a dollar a piece. Cans of milk and tinned mutton was a dollar or two each. 'That first year', Gig says, 'a restaurant in Dawson was a slab table and a tin plate with beans or canned meat or flapjacks. But after the boats come in, it was full menus and five-course meals... linen tablecloths and china plates.'"

  I study Zimmerman's face and can tell he's watching his internal movie again. He must be replaying his reunion with Garrett, but it almost seems like he's reliving Dawson's halcyon summer – the one he didn't actually witness himself. He tells the story Garrett told him. In the spring of '98, even before the lower Yukon opened up, all manner of cargo was assembled in west-coast ports and loaded on ocean-going steamers that would carry it out to the Aleutians and then north to St. Michael on the Bering Sea. Hats and horses, pianos and printing presses, watermelon juice and whiskey, whatever the enterprising newcomers thought they needed to tap into the stream of the gold dust that coursed through Dawson's veins.

  And dozens of river steamboats of all different sizes were shipped to St. Michael in pieces from those same ports. Klondike Kings like Pat Galvin and Alex McDonald launched their own steamboats on the Yukon that summer, as did others who wanted a piece of the transport business that Harper and McQuesten's ACC and Healey's NAT had shared for years. Some of those boats were winched up past the Rink and Five-Finger Rapids. By August, small steamers above the rapids at Whitehorse and Miles Canyon began working in concert with each other and the downriver boats, and for ninety-five dollars you could book passage from Dawson all the way up to Bennett Lake.

  And Zimmerman says Garrett told him at least one small steamboat was launched at the Yukon's headwaters. Its parts were hauled over the Chilkoot Pass and assembled at Bennett Lake, and it ran the Whitehorse Rapids intact.

  As Zimmerman describes the trickle of small steamers into the upper Yukon, that imagery conflicts with the vision I've formed of his own trip downriver on Abigail. Something seems wrong with his story.

  "So Gig told you that there were steamboats running on the upper Yukon that summer. You said you pushed off from Lindeman in the first week of September, and it didn't take you more than a week to get down past the rapids. Why didn't you see any of them?"

  Zimmerman looks at me as if he doesn't understand the question. "I never said we didn't see none."

  "Then why didn't you mention them earlier? If you knew there were boats running, you could have flagged one down and told the captain about the three dead bodies in Bennett Lake."

  "We seen one later, when we come back from prospecting up the Pelly River."

  "Heading upriver or downriver?"

  Zimmerman pauses momentarily, as if he's weighing the ramifications of each.

  "Downriver. Passed us by while we was still getting Abigail squared away. We pushed off downstream a half-hour later but never caught up or seen it again. After that it was too late for steamers to make it back up through the ice."

  I decide not to challenge his answer. It could be the truth. But my eyes find the east-west scratch on the scarred table that Zimmerman carved for the Pelly River. Near its confluence with the scratch representing the Yukon, there's a nick in the wooden surface, and I stare at it for a few seconds to burn the association into my mind. The absence of steamers upriver from Dawson in the late summer of '98 is a nick in Zimmerman's narrative.

  If he's telling the truth about what Garrett told him, then he should have seen steamers between and above the rapids, or even on the lakes, and seeing them would have colored the impressions and expectations of Abigail's crew. The steamers would have been part of the story. So maybe Zimmerman is incorrectly remembering what he heard from Garrett. Or maybe he's fabricating the reunion for my benefit, and he got the details wrong.

  I let him go on, and he says that Garrett told him British law prohibited the celebration of American holidays on Canadian soil. Since Dawson was overwhelmingly populated by Americans, the Mounties saw trouble looming as July first and Dominion Day approached. The authorities solved the problem by announcing that Dominion Day would be celebrated three days late. And when Dawson's clocks ticked into the fourth of July, celebratory gunfire rang out across town and along the Klondike valley, echoing off the hillsides in the dim light of midnight.

  The fusillade persisted throughout the day, escalated occasionally by louder blasts of black powder struck on anvils. By afternoon Dawson's dogs had reached their breaking point, and hundreds leapt into the Yukon River and swam a thousand feet to its western bank to escape the frightful noise.

  "Gig said most of 'em come back on their own when the shooting died down," Zimmerman says. "But about a hundred stayed over there and turned wild. No one knowed if they found dead meat to get through the winter or got rounded up by the Siwashes or mixed in with the wolves and learned to hunt. But on nights when the dogs in Dawson was quiet, sometimes you could hear 'em howling on the other side."

  Chapter 39

  I ask Zimmerman if Garrett's description of the summer of '98 made him think he'd arrived in Dawson too late. He shakes his head.

  "There was tens of thousands of men and women stampeding from all over the world. Like me they went month after month as fast as they could, trying
to get to the Klondike before everybody else. After a while it was about making it there, more than it was about the gold. When they finally got to Dawson, they found out no one was in a hurry, and there wasn't no fields of gold. So thousands took a river boat down to St. Michael before the Yukon iced over, then a ocean boat back to Seattle or San Francisco. The main thing was they made it to the Klondike, not that they was going back empty-handed.

  "But for every feller that left Dawson, there was another that stayed, and some of 'em learned how to get rich without picking up a shovel."

  As Zimmerman continues painting a picture of Dawson in the fall of '98, it's hard to know whether he's describing it through Garrett's eyes or his own.

  "Dawson was a outdoor market all day and a carnival all night. If you was putting up telephone poles in town or helping build a hotel, maybe you knock off at four and get a massage at a stand on Front Street. When you was done you could sit on the dock and read the Klondike News or the Nugget while across the street one feller is preaching, another is reading palms, and a third is selling mammoth tusks he got by trading with the Siwashes. Gig told me that a cheechako that come downriver in August pulled out a Seattle newspaper from June, and a hundred men paid a dollar each to hear a auctioneer read it cover to cover from a outdoor staircase.

  "At night the pianos and organs and fiddles started up in all the dance halls, and they kept going until six in the morning. Plenty of men was busted, so all they could do was watch, but miners that come down from the creeks with full pokes was paying a dollar a dance, and the girls would go a dozen dances without a break. When the music stopped they steered their feller to the bar so he could buy 'em wine or champagne and the bartender could give the lady her chip.

  "Didn't matter what you was selling, you got to have a scale for gold dust, 'cause that's what kept things running, even after a couple of banks opened up in Dawson and started swapping their own notes for gold. Bank notes was for the fellers that got tired of watching the man behind the scale spill a little dust onto a trap-mat every time they handed him their poke. But pretty soon the dance halls and restaurants was taking either bank notes or gold."

  I try to steer Zimmerman back toward Garrett.

  "So if you and Gig are eating eggs and drinking wine at the Fairview, it sounds like he found a way to tap into that flow of gold dust and notes."

  "There ain't many miners that can stay holed up back on the creeks all winter, burning shafts and hauling dirt when it's dark most of the day, without coming into town once in a while to put their feet up and raise a glass with their fellow man. The saloons bring in the miners, the miners got the gold, and the gold pulls in the gamblers and dance-hall girls. It don't matter if you're a sourdough or a sled-maker, everybody carries a poke, and you don't keep it tied up in your pocket. You got to spend whatever dust is in it, the faster the better. When you run out, go shovel more out of the ground, or do whatever you done to fill it up the first time. There wasn't no use in Dawson for a feller afraid to spend his money. When Gig was dealing faro or blackjack, there was dust and nuggets changing hands in every direction, and he was right in the middle of it."

  Zimmerman says that most of the saloons scattered sawdust on the floor to soak up whiskey and trap spilled dust. Sometime after daybreak when the bar closed down and the last patron staggered home, a broom-wielding boy would emerge from a back room to sweep up the sawdust and pan out the gold, finding twenty or thirty dollars worth each morning.

  "We finished our eggs and Gig told me where to get a bath and a haircut and shave. Said I should come over to the Monte Carlo that night. He was dealing from eight to midnight, and there was a couple fellers there I should meet."

  "Was one of them Wylie?"

  "Wylie come later. The first feller I met was Max Endleman, an old sourdough from Juneau who come into the Yukon in '96. He was building a saloon in Circle when the Klondike hit, so he dropped his plans and sledded up over the ice to Dawson that first winter, like Gig. When he seen what was happening out on the creeks, he wanted to build close to where the gold was, so that's what he done. Next summer he opened the Gold Hill Hotel where Eldorado drops into Bonanza. A couple dozen cabins was there already and Belinda Mulrooney started a saloon that brung in fellers like Dick Lowe and Antone Stander – some of the Klondike Kings. By the time I got to Dawson everyone called it Grand Forks."

  "It seems like we keep coming back to that place," I say. "Isn't that where Gig took a shot at the bear, and Nokes said he'd trade both valleys for a few bullets?"

  Zimmerman's eye twitches as if a blade has nicked the skin beneath it, but he ignores my question and continues. "Times was good out at Grand Forks and Max was looking to put a second story on his hotel before the snow got too bad. So he was in town to buy lumber and hire a couple fellers that knowed framing and roofing. Max had a twitchy nose and a white beard and yellow teeth. He sounded like a crow and called everybody 'chief'."

  "Gig tells Max we growed up together working on the canal, and says maybe Max got a job for me building up his hotel. Max puts his hand on my shoulder and says 'Chief, I wouldn't of guessed it until this minute, but you're exactly the man I need right now. With luck like yours, I suggest you sit in on a few card games tonight! Just not when this feller is dealing,' he says winking at Gig.

  "Max says all the packers is booked up and nobody can start hauling his lumber out to Grand Forks for three weeks, and he don't want to wait that long. If Gig says I'm all right, Max will grubstake me three hundred dollars to buy and feed a team, 'cause that's what the packing companies was going to charge him. Horses, mules, dogs, whatever critters will haul his lumber and nails. When I'm done I can sell 'em and keep what they fetch or hold onto the ones that's worth feeding. Max don't care – he just wants to get his lumber out to Grand Forks and start building.

  "So after that first night with Gig at the Monte Carlo, I got back in the packing business. I done it at Skagway and Dyea, so I figured I could do it again. Gig told me there was as much gear to move in Dawson as I seen on the coast, only it was lumber and hardware and grub going out to the creeks instead of outfits going over the passes. And there was a lot more dust to push things along. After the spring and summer cleanups, Gig says, most of them miners on Bonanza and Eldorado was going to need a pack train just to haul their gold down to Dawson.

  "Greenhorns been leading horses off the boats all summer, then steaming home when they found out prospecting wasn't just riding around the gold fields and scooping up nuggets with a net. So there was more horses in town than men that knowed how to handle 'em. Most of 'em got sold or given to a trader in Lousetown or another one in Bear Creek, and that's where I went with Max Endleman's money the next day. Took me a few days to find four I could use, and one of 'em was a packer pony I bought for ten dollars from the Mounties. They was done building their garrison and got no more use for it."

  "You said meeting Wylie came later. You mean later that night at the Monte Carlo?"

  Zimmerman nods. "I played faro at Gig's table until I lost the chips he gave me. When he was done dealing his shift, we went to the bar for whiskey and sat at a table in the back near the dance floor. I ain't seen much in the way of women for months, and nothing like the girls that was twirling around on that floor. Wrapped down to their toes in dresses of all different colors, with ribbons and feathers and bows in their hair. Some had lace pulled around their shoulders or across their chest. A few of 'em would get up to sing songs or act a skit, and the ones that fellers loved best had a necklace or a belt made of gold nuggets that sourdoughs tossed at 'em when they was on stage. The rest was just there to dance all night and take home twenty dollars worth of dust. Put any one of them girls under the lights in Baltimore or Philadelphia and she'd get hooted off the stage and sent back to the kitchen, but in Dawson they was angels.

  "So I'm talking with Gig and thinking maybe I could ask the girl with the big smile and red hair for a dance when Gig pulls his hat off one of the empty chairs and sta
nds up. I do the same, and he introduces me to a feller with straight dark hair, eyes like a otter, and a gap between his front teeth.

  "Gig says 'this is Penson Wylie, and here's Henry Zimmerman,' and we shake hands. But I can hardly notice Wylie, 'cause the girl standing next to him and looking at me must be the prettiest one I ever seen. She has blue eyes and pale skin and lips like Lillian Gish, with thick blond hair pinned up in back, and loose curls twisting down across her temples.

  "Wylie says 'this is Miss Alice Maine,' and I mumble my name and say 'pleased to meet you,' and she smiles at me and holds out her hand. I feel drops of sweat break out on my scalp and my chest starts drumming like a woodpecker."

  Zimmerman stops to raise his cup and take a sip. "You know that feeling, Owen? When your heart starts hammering and everything closes in around you?" He puts his cup down and shoots a glance at the knife lying flat beside me on the table.

  I don't answer, but my eyes slide toward the orange coals in the open stove and I remember the dream where I'm trapped in the culvert by a wall of driftwood, and Gig Garrett is on the other side, lighting the pile on fire. Now I'm aware that my heart is thumping faster, and sweat is pooling in the well at the base of my neck. I lean forward to get my bearings and throw back a sip of whiskey.

  Glancing at Zimmerman I see something like a sparkle in his eyes. I wonder if he knows he's identified my weakness, and if that recognition has restored his confidence. He resumes his story.

  "Gig says 'you looking for someone, Alice?', but Wylie scans the room and says 'he ain't here, let's try the Flora Dora.' Then he tips his hat and tells Gig he'll be back in an hour. He takes Alice by the hand and they walk toward the door. Gig and I sit down as the music stops and the couples start moving toward the bar, and I ask him who they was.

  "He says he met Wylie at Miles Canyon, and the two of 'em was mining partners at Circle, then they come up to Dawson together over the ice. He says they worked as hired hands on 48 Eldorado and dug their own claims on Skookum Gulch. They sold Skookum, the Swedes sold Eldorado, and Gig and Wylie moved down to Lousetown a year ago. They missed out on the stampede to the benches in the spring, and once them hillsides was all claimed, there wasn't no ground left in the Klondike or Indian districts worth staking. So they was going to wait for the next big strike in a new district and be ready to move when it happened.