"But during '98, Gig says, he and Wylie been going in different directions. Gig was set on making an honest living in Dawson, dealing cards and tending bar. But Wylie was drifting toward the edges of the law, and sooner or later that was going to lead to trouble. Gig said Dawson wasn't like Skagway. With Sam Steele and his Mounties garrisoned in the middle of town, sidearms wasn't allowed, and there wasn't no tolerance for con-men or thieves."
"Was Wylie a thief?"
"Depends how you look at it," Zimmerman says. "Wylie found the marks, set 'em up, and got 'em drunk. But it was Alice that done the thieving."
Chapter 40
Zimmerman relates what Gig told him about Alice Maine. He says she was from Vancouver, no older than twenty, and set out for Dawson with a friend named Hazel in the spring of '98. They were chasing gold that had already been liberated from the ground, so they proclaimed themselves actresses and assembled outfits that consisted entirely of clothing, food, and a few essentials for cooking and camping.
Alice and Hazel landed in Dyea with a hazy understanding of the Yukon Trail, but they were lucky to catch the eye of a man named Barrington, who had just come up from Juneau with four young women he'd recruited to sing and dance. Barrington was in business with 'Arkansas Jim' Hall, who made his fortune on 17 Eldorado. Now Hall was building the Palace Grand Theater in Dawson, and he and Barrington needed starlets to lure the sourdoughs.
One of Barrington's recruits had taken ill on the ship and decided to return to Juneau. So Barrington talked both Alice and Hazel into replacing her. He'd already outfitted the group and arranged packing to Bennett and passage across the lakes and downriver on a series of ferries and steamers.
It seems strange to me that Zimmerman rattles off this recollection shortly after neglecting to mention seeing steamers on the upper Yukon during his own descent from the lakes to Dawson.
He says that Alice, Kate, and the rest of Barrington's ensemble left Sheep Camp in early June and reached Dawson in late July, at the height of the rousing summer of '98. It never occurred to Barrington to ask how well Alice and Hazel could sing.
"At the Palace, Hazel and the other girls might make twenty or thirty dollars on a good night, singing on stage and lining up a dozen fellers to dance with. But Alice quit when she met Wylie. She started making much more just taking one feller home every night. She had a crib at the end of Paradise Alley, where it was easy to come and go. You could get to Front Street or Princess Street in just a few steps, so you wasn't going to be caught in the middle of the alley when a constable come through. But Sam Steele knowed that most of the men in Dawson was starved for female company, so that first year the Mounties just let Paradise Alley be."
"Are you saying Wylie made Alice a prostitute?"
"The Klondike made her a prostitute," Zimmerman says, "just like everyone else. You could get rich in a hurry, but you got to give up your old life and sell whatever you got to sell. Alice done that, same as the miners burning shafts out on the creeks."
"You just said she was a thief."
"I said she done the thieving. It was Alice's hands, but Wylie was pulling the strings."
"What do you mean?"
"There was plenty of girls turning tricks in Dawson. Streetwalkers would take a feller back to their tent and screw for three dollars. On Paradise Alley the girls got four ounces of dust – that's sixty-four dollars. And most of 'em rigged their scales to get more than that.
"Wylie seen that Alice made them other girls looks like barmaids. He told her he could introduce her to the high rollers in Dawson, the ones that could afford to treat her like a queen. So that's what he done, and almost every night he set up a rich feller to meet her at one of the best places in town. Fairview, the Orpheum, Palace, Monte Carlo, Flora Dora, never the same place as the night before.
"He would leave Alice with the mark around midnight, and after a couple of drinks and dances they'd be off to her crib for a rum-and-ginger cocktail. That was something Wylie showed her how to make, and he gave it a special ingredient he brung downriver in his medicine kit."
"Ether?"
"Morphine. It don't take much, and you can't taste it under the ginger. Maybe if the feller was lucky, Alice would show off her charms before the cocktail done its job. Sometimes they'd lie down together and he'd fall asleep before he got his pants off.
"Then Alice knocks on the window and Wylie slips in the front door. They empty the feller's poke onto a plate and take half the gold. Weigh out the same amount of black sand and gravel and dump it in the bottom of the poke, then cover it with what's left of the gold. If the mark was carrying two pounds of dust, Alice and Wylie would split a pound. That's a hundred and thirty dollars for a night's work.
"Then Wylie loads him onto a horse cart and takes him back to his hotel or cabin. When the feller wakes up, Wylie says the lady felt ill and sent a neighbor to fetch him. If the mark's still sleeping, Wylie props him against his door."
***
Zimmerman says he was packing his first load of lumber for Max Endleman within a week. He could make the trip in a long day, after which he'd rest his horses for a day at Grand Forks. Then back down to Dawson to set up for another load. Max didn't need his roofing materials right away, so Henry asked around in Grand Forks and found a couple of miners who needed logs pulled down from the hillside above their Bonanza claim, and that work brought him his first taste of Klondike gold dust. Word spread, and by the time Henry finished packing for Endleman, he'd found customers on Bonanza and Eldorado and negotiated a two-day trip out to Independence Creek.
When he was between jobs, Henry would hole up with Gig and Wylie in Lousetown. A Yukon stove burnt coal and wood all day and most of the night to keep the tent's spacious interior warm. It was during these interim hours that he and Garrett exchanged stories about their travels since leaving Cabin John.
"The old bridge over the Klondike got washed away in the spring of '98," Zimmerman says. "So they built a better one that summer, and the newspapers said 'stroll the Eighth Avenue Bridge across the river to Klondike City.' But all the oldtimers still called it Lousetown.
"I was sipping whiskey with Gig one night outside the tent, sometime in January. It was cold and clear, but the wind was down and we had a fire going. There's a berm around the pit and we was sitting with our backs to it, stretching our legs to the fire. The northern lights come dancing around midnight, so we leaned back and rested our heads on the berm to watch. Gig was saying it won't be long before someone finds the next Klondike. He said all the sourdoughs wanted the strike to be somewhere across the border, maybe a couple hundred miles past Circle, where the Tanana River come into the Yukon. Not many white men been up that river, and it drains the wildest and steepest part of Alaska. I ain't even started prospecting in the Klondike district, but it sounded like Gig was already done with it and thinking about what come next. Too many cheechakos wandering around Dawson and the rich ground was already staked.
"After he said that we heared someone running. We looked up and Wylie turned off the path and come down the slope to our tent. He dropped into the fire pit and sat back against the berm with us, breathing too heavy to talk right away. Took off his hat and fanned himself with cold air.
"'What's going on?' Gig says and Wylie says 'I seen her again!' When he catches his breath he says it was the Indian girl – the one he knowed was trying to kill him. He says she was waiting for him across the street from Alice Maine's crib, and when he come out the door she started walking toward him, holding out the necklace with the wolf tooth and the rabbit ear. Wylie says it spooked him half to death, so he turned and run. Six blocks down to Eighth Avenue, then south and over the bridge. Coming up along the waterfront through Lousetown he knowed she wasn't following, but he kept running all the way back to the tent.
"That was the first time I heared his story about the girl. He told me how she flipped his boat in Miles Canyon and drownded his partner Timmons. And how he seen her for the first time when he was ford
ing the Dyea River, and then again when he and Gig was sledding up from Circle. He says she held him down when he fell into Quartz Creek, and that was worse than riding a flipped boat through the rapids in the canyon.
"Then he told me about his dream, where he's out on the Yukon ice and there's open water on both sides and his ice floe sinks until the river closes over his head. He looks up toward the surface and she's staring down at him, glowing like the sky we seen above the Yukon that night.
"Wylie is telling me this like there ain't nothing strange about it. Like it's as true as saying there's fish in the rivers and bears in the woods. And Gig ain't arguing. I reckoned he heared it all before. Or maybe he believed what Wylie said."
"Or maybe he saw the girl himself," I add.
Zimmerman looks at me but doesn't reply, and his pale eyes seem focused on something far beyond the confines of the scow.
Chapter 41
Zimmerman says he found steady packing work through the winter, but whatever dust he earned slipped through his fingers as he fed and shod his team and bought grub for himself. Dawson might be a good place to get rich, but it was an unforgiving place to be poor.
"Gig and Wylie still had some money from selling their Skookum Gulch claims, and Gig was dealing faro and whiskey, bringing home bacon and beans. Don't know how much Wylie made with Alice, but it must of been more than that.
"It seemed like they was trying to save enough so they could work a claim, next time they got a chance. Buy wood and tools and sluice-boxes, then hire men for wages, the way the Klondike Kings was doing it. Just from hauling out to the creeks I started seeing what it took, and I knowed that four pack horses wasn't going to bring me that kind of money. It seemed like the easiest way was to catch the next stampede. Stake a claim on some new creek and let other fellers dig their shafts. If the prospects was rich, you could sell out for twenty or thirty thousand. Maybe five times that, if you got another Eldorado on your hands."
Zimmerman says he ran into Rafferty in Dawson in late January, and he was building cabinets with his son for one of the new hotels. They were still living in their tent at the foot of the mountain on the north side of town. Orrie had gone up the Klondike valley to Hunker Creek to work as a hired hand on one of Alex McDonald's many claims. Like most of the greenhorns who reached Dawson in '98, Rafferty and Orrie were both keeping their ears open for word of strikes on new creeks.
"In late February," Zimmerman says, "I packed lumber to a high claim on Gold Bottom Creek, and got caught in a snow storm on my way back. Spent the night trying to build a fire and stay warm, so I was ready to put my feet up in Dawson for a day or two. Have a soak somewhere and rest my team. It was getting dark when I made it back to the tent, and Gig was out, but he showed up when I was brushing down my horses.
"He says Wylie is gone. Two Mounties come by the tent the day before looking for him, but Gig told 'em Wylie ain't been around for a couple of days, and it looks like he took a bag of clothes and gear with him. Gig asks the Mounties what they want with Wylie, and they said it was about a young woman who was attacked in her cabin. They wouldn't tell him who she was, but they said the cabin was on Paradise Alley, so Gig knowed it was Alice Maine.
"Gig asked 'em how bad was she hurt and they said she was in the infirmary but she wasn't going to die. She got sore ribs and a bump on her head, but she was awake now and pulled her wits together. Her throat took the worst of it, so eating was hard and she could barely whisper. Alice told the Mounties she don't know what man tried to strangle her, but whoever he was let go and run off when her elbow caught him in the groin. And one of her neighbors said she seen Wylie stumbling out of Alice's crib that night.
"The Mounties said if Wylie come back, Gig should tell him to go to the Superintendent's office to answer questions. If he don't show up in a day or two, they was going to put out a warrant for him."
"So was it Wylie who attacked her? Why would he try to strangle the golden goose?"
Zimmerman shakes his head. "I never knowed the truth about that, and Gig wouldn't say what he thought. But he told me the next day that Wylie was gone for good. Some spare tent canvas and a stove box was missing. And Gig said he heared from a bartender at the Palace that Wylie bought a sled and five dogs from a trader in Dawson, on that same morning the Mounties come looking for him in Lousetown. Wylie probably drove his dogs straight to the ACC warehouse and loaded up his sled with dried fish."
"Where was he going in the middle of winter?"
Zimmerman twists on his stool and leans back against the wall. "I don't know. I never seen him again after that night."
"So the Mounties didn't pursue him? They let him go?"
"They put a notice in the Nugget and the Midnight Sun saying he was wanted for questioning. But they didn't send nobody out looking. Alice started getting better, and her voice come back in a week or so. Then she told the Mounties it wasn't Wylie that strangled her. Said she didn't see the man, but when he talked it was someone else's voice."
"Maybe one of the men Alice and Wylie robbed? If she never saw him, then it couldn't have been someone she was bringing home. She must have been alone, with the attacker hiding inside and waiting for her. Then maybe Wylie came up to the window, heard something happening, and ran away, and the neighbor saw him running. If so, Wylie was a gutless weasel."
Zimmerman inhales through his teeth. "I still think Wylie done it."
"That would explain why he fled. But why would he try to strangle her? And why wouldn't Alice accuse him?"
Zimmerman looks at me like I'm dim-witted, and I realize that as a gold-thieving prostitute in law-abiding Dawson, Alice probably had little to gain and much to lose by going to the mounted police to tell her story about Wylie. Even if he ran off with all her gold.
"Did Gig ever see Wylie again?"
"That come later. After we left Dawson."
"You said you and Gig left the Klondike together."
He nods. "July of '99. By then I knowed it was time to try somewhere else."
"So you never even staked a claim in the Klondike?"
"That ain't what I said." He reaches for his cup and finishes what's left. "There was a stampede in early May. I was talking to some fellers outside the post office when the word got out about a strike on Ensley Creek. That creek come into the Yukon from the east, between the Klondike and the Indian. No one that prospected it got lucky before, but this time someone found sixty cents to the pan. You can get to the mouth of Ensley by working fifteen miles up the east bank of the Yukon, or you can find the headwaters by following Bonanza up to Adams Gulch, then climbing over the hill and down into the drainage. That last way is how I done it. Went straight back to Lousetown and rigged a pack, tied on my pan and shovel, and started walking. Left the horses behind 'cause I moved faster uphill without 'em."
Zimmerman says about seventy men and women reached Ensley Creek before him, so he staked in the mid-thirties above Discovery.
"I panned out colors from an eddy. Took a few pans from rim-rock and the best was ten cents. But I liked the look of that creek, and maybe the pay-streak was rich, so I walked off my five hundred feet, cut stakes, and carved my name on 'em. Until you done that, you ain't really had your chance to roll the dice. When I got back to Dawson I went straight to the Gold Commissioner's office. Paid my recording fee and watched the clerk write my name in the ledger. That was when I felt like I finally got what I been working for, three years after I left home."
"You staked in May and you left the Klondike in July. It doesn't sound like you bothered to work your claim."
Zimmerman holds out his cup and cocks it side to side to show me it's empty. Having demonstrated his motive, he stands up, plucks my cup from the table, and shuffles to the cask. I hold the Colt in my lap with my left hand and cover the knife on the table with my right while he's up. When he sits down and pushes my half-filled cup toward me from across the table, the cabin feels uncomfortably warm. I unfasten the shirt button just above my sternum and f
an myself briefly with my hand.
"I never worked it," he says. "Like most of them that staked, I was waiting for someone to dig to bedrock and find the pay-streak. If the prospects was good there was going to be plenty of work on Ensley Creek. The trail over the ridge from the top of Bonanza would get tramped down enough for horses, and the miners was going to need grub and lumber and tools. I figured I could start laying in supplies on my claim while I was running pack trips for others.
"But the only claim that got worked on Ensley that summer was Discovery, and the two fellers digging got into a dispute before they got down to bedrock. One of 'em left and the other went back to Dawson to look for an investor. So it was halfway into July and nobody knowed for sure what the prospects was on that creek. And by the end of that month, nobody would of cared."
"Why not? Did someone find the next Eldorado?"
"Nobody found another creek like Eldorado or Bonanza," he says. "Not to this day. But they found something as big as the whole Klondike, and you didn't have to tramp through niggerhead swamps and burn shafts into frozen muck to get to it. The best part was that it was across the border, in Alaska. By late July thousands was leaving Dawson on steamers and heading downriver."
Having dangled the hook, Zimmerman waits for me to take the bait. I watch him knock back a sip and wipe his mouth. His eyes water as he cracks a lopsided smile.
"Where were they going?"
"Out through the Yukon delta," he says, "and a hundred miles north on the Bering Sea. To the mouth of the Snake River on Cape Nome. You can walk the beach for twenty miles in either direction, and all the sand you're kicking is mixed with gold."
BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) Page 25