BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2)

by Edward A. Stabler

  Chapter 42

  "Word about Nome was on the rise in Dawson that summer. We already heared about the strike on Anvil Creek in the fall of '98, but when the news come in about the beach sands, that got people's blood flowing. Fellers with no prospects in the Klondike started to think about getting a jump in a new district. I was hoping Ensley Creek would prove out and Gig was still dealing at the hotel, so we wasn't talking much about Nome. Wylie been gone for months.

  "Ten days into July, I was in Lousetown between trips, cleaning pots and stacking wood outside the tent. It was about eight in the morning, but you can't really tell that time of year, 'cause it barely never gets dark. Gig already been gone a couple hours, up the Klondike to a fishing hole with one of my horses.

  "Three men come up the path and stop nearby, looking back and forth at the tent and my horses tied to the hitching rail. One feller had a drooping mustache and hair like a beaver pelt, running gray at the temples. He was smiling like someone just invited him over for breakfast. The second was young and thin, with wavy hair and blue eyes, and when I got closer I seen a faded scar running from the bottom of his ear down across his neck. Both of 'em was tall and weather-beaten, like they been on a trail for a few weeks.

  "The third feller was shorter, with a bald head and dark circles under his eyes. When I turned toward the path, he seemed surprised to see me and said something to the pelt-haired feller. Then he come over my way with bow-legged steps, holds out his hand, and says his name is Sam Piper.

  "I say I'm Henry Zimmerman and we shake hands. His grip feels like it could crush a stone. He says 'these two fellers are looking for an old friend of theirs. I don't know the man, but I thought I could lead 'em to the right place.' He backs away and the pelt-haired feller steps forward and tips his hat. Says his name is Percy Johnson and the young feller is Bill Jones, and I shake hands with both of 'em.

  "Percy must of figured out by now that I ain't serving him breakfast, but he still got a smile and a glint in his eye. Says he and Bill just come into Dawson yesterday, and they was trying to find their old friend Gig Garrett, who they knowed from Colorado City. Percy and Bill wanted to share a bottle with Gig and hear what he thought about prospects in the Klondike and down the Yukon.

  "From the moment I seen 'em, something didn't look right to me. Percy and Bill was wearing old boots and faded hats and looked like they spent most of their nights outside. They didn't have miners' hands, but that wasn't bothering me. Sam looked more like the sourdoughs you seen in the Klondike camps, and that was all right too. Separate there was nothing special about 'em, but the three of 'em together didn't add up.

  "Percy asked me if Gig Garrett lived here, and I guessed they might already know that. If I said no, someone in the next tent might say yes. So I pointed to the hitching rail and said Gig took one of the horses and rode out to Grand Forks for the night. From there he was going up Eldorado and over the divide, then down into the Indian River district. He was thinking about buying into a claim on Ophir Creek and wanted to take a look. After he done that, he was visiting another claim on Nine-Mile Creek. I said he left yesterday afternoon and should be back in four or five days.

  "Sam screwed up his face a little but didn't say nothing. Percy nodded and said 'Much obliged. We don't know our schedule just yet, but please tell Gig that Percy and Bill look forward to visiting with him.' Guess he wanted to leave me thinking they was all great friends.

  "I gave 'em fifteen minutes headstart, then saddled up my roan mare and rode down the path toward Dawson. Ain't seen 'em when I passed the shortcut to the Grand Forks trail, so I was hoping they turned onto it. I was trying to keep 'em away from the Klondike.

  "Gig wasn't at the fishing hole near Bonanza, so I kept going and found him three miles further up, at the hole near the mouth of Bear Creek. He had a couple of grayling in his bag and was after another. I told him about the three fellers, and his jaw tightened when I said the name of the bow-legged one was Sam Piper.

  "'Like hell it is,' Gig said. 'If he's Sam Piper, I'm Injun Joe.' Gig said he didn't know any Percy Johnson or Bill Jones from Colorado, but he was dead sure the bald feller was Sam Nokes. He put away his fishing pole and we sat down on rocks in the shade and thought about it.

  "'That's the first time I heared Nokes was in Dawson,' Gig says. 'Ain't much left in Circle, so I figured he'd be coming here sooner or later. And then he was going to track me down or go bellyaching to Sam Steele.' Gig said he wasn't scared of Nokes on his own, especially in Dawson, where sidearms wasn't allowed. And Nokes going to the Mounties didn't signify – their dispute was in Alaska and the Mounties got no sway over it. But he didn't know what to make of them other two fellers. They was lying about being friends with Gig, so it seemed like nothing good would come from meeting 'em. And there was no telling when they might show up at the tent again.

  "Gig decided to go an hour upriver to Hunker Creek, so I rode back to Lousetown and packed some grub for him and a bag of horse-feed. Loaded it on my pony and led it back out to the fishing hole. There was a little hotel in Hunker with some cabins around it, smaller than Grand Forks, but he could stay there until we knowed what Nokes was up to.

  "Gig told me to go find a bartender friend of his in Dawson named Sullivan. Sullivan was a Mountie before Sam Steele fired him, but he still got friends on the force. We figured if Nokes was going to try something, he better clear it with Steele first, so Sullivan could ask if there was any word going around the barracks.

  "I found Sullivan working at the Regina, and he shook his head and looked grim when I told him about Nokes and the other men. 'Bounty hunters,' he said, and I thought he was going to spit. 'They need to show papers, so I should be able to find out.'"

  "Sure enough, when I come back the next night Sullivan pulls me down to the end of the bar so we're out of earshot. He says he was right, and that Nokes come into Steele's office a week ago with an order from a magistrate in Skagway. It says Gig got to appear in court on charges of stealing money and dogs in December '96 in Circle. So Steele told Nokes he could take Gig back to Skagway, as long as he brung him by the Superintendent's office first to show he got the right man. Sullivan says all he knowed about the two tall fellers was that they was working for Nokes and probably come on the trail with him from Skagway. And their real names wasn't Percy and Bill."

  "Why did it take Nokes more than two years to come after Garrett?"

  Zimmerman smiles. "That's what I was asking Gig, when I rode out to Hunker Creek to tell him what Sullivan told me. And he couldn't figure it hisself. Gig said he thought Nokes would come up to Dawson in the spring of '97 when he heared how rich the Klondike was. If he done that, Gig said he was ready to work out a deal with him. There was still discoveries being made in the Klondike that summer. Then '98 come and gone, with ten thousand cheechakos in Dawson and all the rich ground staked, and Gig figured Nokes missed his chance.

  "I heared the rest of the story at the Northern Saloon," Zimmerman says, "a few months after I got to Nome. I sat next to a hotel builder who made money in Circle and gambled it away in Dawson. Now he was trying to start over. I asked if he knowed Sam Nokes and he said sure, Nokes had a paying claim on Mammoth Creek. He said Nokes and his partner went bust when a hired hand ran off with their money and dogs. They used up all their grub and firewood and had to come back into town. Bought what they could on credit. Everybody who could find a dog was already stampeding for the Klondike. Nokes and his partner finished the winter in Circle waiting for the ice to go out. They sold their claim for less than a thousand dollars, and Nokes bought passage to San Francisco in the spring."

  Zimmerman says Nokes owned half of a boarding-house in Leadville, Colorado, and he went back there to sell his share. He also convinced a rich retired miner to grubstake his next trip Inside, persuading him that the Klondike was only the first of many gold-rich districts that would soon be found on the Yukon.

  And Zimmerman says the Klondike stampede had simplified the Yukon trail. The
White Pass railroad wasn't running yet, but thousands of workers had carved its grade up through the gorges, across the pass, and down along the lakes to the Whitehorse rapids, and that grade was accessible to pack animals. A village had sprung up at Whitehorse, along with steamer connections all the way down the Yukon. So by the spring of '99, the trail over Chilkoot Pass was defunct, and the journey from Skagway to Dawson was measured in weeks, not months. But Nokes hadn't told his investor that he intended to settle a score with Gig Garrett before he went prospecting for the next Klondike.

  Chapter 43

  "Before I gone out to Hunker Creek, I stopped by the Palace Hotel to tell the owner Gig was in the Indian River district for a week. A friend broke his leg and Gig was helping him manage his claim. Then I waited until a bartender I knowed come in for his shift, and I asked him if he seen a couple of tall fellers that was looking for Gig.

  "He lit right up and said 'you mean Percy and Bill?' He said they was friends with Gig from Colorado City and been coming in at different times almost every day. They usually sat at the bar for an hour or so. It was too bad Gig wasn't around, 'cause Percy been telling stories about some of the crooks in the Colorado camps. He said a couple of men in Soapy Smith's gang pulled a gun on him in Creede and he had to talk 'em out of shooting him. And Bill got a scar from a knife-fight with a claim-jumper in Cripple Creek.

  "So when I heared that," Zimmerman says, "I knowed them bounty hunters was watching the Palace and the tent all the time, just waiting for Gig to show up in Dawson or Lousetown."

  "But they never caught him, did they?"

  Zimmerman shakes his head. "I told the bartender at the Palace I was packing out to Grand Forks the next day, on my way up to Eldorado. I figured Percy and Bill would see the horses was gone and might ask him where I was. Then I went back to the tent and packed up our clothes and blankets and pots and grub in the darkest part of the night. I left the tent up and the stovepipe smoking. Loaded the bags on my three horses and left, down to the Klondike and upriver on the trail to Hunker Creek. Kept looking over my shoulder until I was sure no one was following me. I was halfway there before the birds started chirping."

  Zimmerman says he told Gig a magistrate in Skagway had issued a summons for him, and Percy and Bill were bounty hunters hired by Nokes. Sam Steele had granted permission for Nokes and his men to apprehend Gig peacefully and escort him across the border en route to Skagway.

  "It seemed like Gig wanted to set a trap and shoot the three of 'em," Zimmerman says, "but we just got two rifles, and I told him I wasn't shooting nobody. And even if Gig killed 'em all, Dawson wasn't like the mining camps in Alaska. The Mounties would of tracked him down and he'd go to jail for sure, probably hang. So Gig and me decided we could slide in with the crowds that was leaving Dawson for Nome."

  A half-formed thought that has been gnawing at me resolves into a troubling possibility. Maybe when Drew and I set out to arrest Gig Garrett on that night in 1902, we were another pair of bounty hunters in his eyes. Led to his cabin by Henry Zimmerman, who this time had agreed to set the trap. Did Henry tell Gig we were coming? His story tonight shows he was still on Gig's side in the summer of '99. And maybe by 1902, Garrett was done with fleeing and ready to fight.

  Zimmerman says he took three horses into Dawson early Saturday morning and unloaded all the bags on the pier. Then he bought passage to St. Michael for himself and Gig on the afternoon downriver boat. With half a dozen new lines operating, there were boats leaving Dawson almost every day. At St. Michael they could transfer to an ocean steamer for the northward crossing to Nome.

  Zimmerman's next visit was to a Dawson horse trader, where he accepted half what his team was worth to close an immediate sale. He turned over his three horses and told the trader the fourth would be tied to a rail near the steamship pier that afternoon. Then he went back to the waterfront, where a stack of cargo crates provided an inconspicuous perch with a view of Front Street and the pier.

  "The boat come in around noon and was leaving at two. At one-thirty they was loading, so I went down and showed my ticket and stowed our bags on board. Still no sign of Gig at ten minutes to two, and I was standing out on Front Street starting to sweat. Then I seen him coming in slow on horseback from the quiet end of the street, and I knowed he would make it. He been cutting across the north edge of town with his hat down to his eyes, and he rode up at the last minute.

  "I took the horse to the rail while he slung his bags, and we was the last of fifty-some passengers on board. When the boat pulled away I was looking for Nokes and Percy and Bill to come running up and spot us on the deck, but there was no sign of 'em. Just folks I didn't know standing on the pier and waving goodbye."

  When I ask for a brief description of the boat, Zimmerman tells me it was a stern-wheeler named Polly, and like all the other Yukon steamers she wasn't much more than a floating box a hundred feet long, with modest curves and a pilot house on her flat roof. Her upper deck held numerous small state-rooms separated by curtains, and was surrounded by a four-foot-wide walkway protected by a railing and the overhanging roof. The lower deck housed the boiler, wood bin, machine shop, and cargo bays. Its v-shaped bow was exposed to the elements and held a staircase to the walkway. Passengers were welcome to stand, sit, or curl up under a blanket anywhere they could find room. Zimmerman says he and Garrett sat on the walkway near the stern, with their backs to the wall and feet through the railing, watching the scenery drift by.

  "Coming down the Yukon in the middle of July," Zimmerman says, "on a boat that ain't getting swamped by rapids or crushed by ice – there's worse ways to travel. If the engine don't break down and you stay in the current, you're moving fast enough to keep the mosquitoes away. The sun is on you close to twenty hours a day, but the cold rising from the water keeps it tolerable. When the sun goes behind the hills, it cools off and gets damp for a few hours 'cause the frozen ground under the moss chills the air."

  He ticks off the landmarks that he etched in the table earlier tonight.

  "Fort Reliance, ten miles below Dawson. That was the zero-mile mark for naming the rivers." He points to an etched line that runs into the Yukon from the west, his side of the table. "Fortymile River and the mining camp, or what was left of it. We stopped but only a couple fellers got on and no one got off."

  He gestures toward the carved Yukon between Fortymile and the chip-mark on the table that designates Circle City. "On that part of the river you still got hills and trees and granite bluffs coming down to the water. But it's a hundred and seventy miles to Circle, and before you get there the trees disappear and the hills flatten into sand and grass. The river splits into pieces and laces through more islands than you can count, all of 'em covered with driftwood and gravel and bogs. The channels come and go, so if you're piloting a steamboat, all you can do is look for deep water and try to power your way across the sand bars when you hit 'em. It's a lot easier going downstream than up. That's the Yukon flats.

  "We stopped at Circle and a few miners got off with tools and grub they brung from Dawson. Some of the claims up on Mammoth and Mastodon was being worked again, now that all the Klondike creeks was staked."

  Zimmerman points to the apex of his carved Yukon, equidistant from the two of us near the free end of the table and a foot or two beyond his reach.

  "You get up to Fort Yukon and the river turns southwest, after you been running northwest all the way from the lakes. That's where the Porcupine River come in from the east."

  "Porcupine? You never carved that one."

  Zimmerman leans over the table with his hand extended palm up, but I won't give him the knife. Instead I take it and stretch toward the etched river's inflection point, then stab the table at Fort Yukon and drag the knife tip east toward my edge.

  "It's more northeast, but that's the spot," he says. "The Porcupine drains a big country running back a couple hundred miles. You might think all that water coming in could stitch the Yukon back together, but you still got a hundred mo
re miles of the flats."

  Zimmerman says the Yukon finally gathers itself into a single channel framed by legitimate banks. Stretches of straight water emerge, no two in the same direction, but the connecting curves keep the general direction southwest. Tundra gives way to grass-covered hills before granite reappears, solidifying the banks and rising away from the river. The drainages that split the hills and descend to the Yukon resemble the valleys five hundred miles upstream – the ones that carry gold-bearing creeks.

  "They call that stretch the Lower Ramparts, and there was a town growing up at the mouth of Minook Creek. Back in '96," Zimmerman says, "before word about the Klondike spread downriver, a Russian miner named Minook was drifting through and some Siwashes told him there was gold on the upper parts of that creek. So he gone prospecting back in the hills and found it, on that main creek and some of its pups. Minook Creek wasn't no Bonanza or Eldorado, but it was richer than the creeks at Fortymile and Circle. And the gold was the best anyone seen on the Yukon, with less silver and tellurium mixed in. So it paid eighteen dollars an ounce when Klondike gold brung sixteen or seventeen.

  "Them hills was wilder and steeper than the ones upriver, and less cut by Injun trails, so tramping up into the gulches was rough work. When the sourdoughs got down to bedrock on tributaries like Little Minook and Hunter Creek, they was finding four dollars to the pan and some ten and twelve-dollar nuggets. There would of been a stampede to Rampart, if word got out and the Klondike never happened. In the summer of '97, boats from St. Michael was stopping at Rampart City to drop supplies, and when some of the tenderfeet heading for the Dawson heared about Minook Creek, they got off the boat to go prospecting. Others going to the Klondike got iced in, so they went up into the hills to stake. By the time Gig and I got there in July of '99, Rampart City was over a thousand people in tents and cabins on a dirt shelf above the Yukon, and there was a hundred claims being worked back on the creeks."