The Floor of Heaven

by Howard Blum

  Fortunately for Soapy, he wasn’t recklessly spending money at the faro tables every night. On Blake Street, Chase, who had a keen sense of what people craved, had used some of the profits from his gambling parlor to build a large red brick building for the Palace Theater. The Palace had 750 seats, and most nights they were filled. There were comics and vaudeville acts, but the real draw was the parade of young women who opened each show in frilly skirts short enough to expose their knees. When they kicked their legs up high in unison, many of the men in the crowd sighed as if they were catching their breath. When they weren’t performing, the ladies were required to mingle with the audience; and if the mood and the gratuity were agreeable, there were heavily curtained boxes flanking the stage where the mingling could run its course in private. The West was a lonely place for the men who had come in droves from somewhere else to create new lives and find their fortunes; unattached women were in short supply. In Denver, the frolicking pretty ladies of the Palace caused quite a sensation.

  Suitors flocked to the stage door, and fellows with dash, wit, money, or simply luck would often find an evening’s company. Sometimes, though, the attractions would run deep, and marriages would ensue. No less a longtime womanizer than Ed Chase would marry Frances Minerva Barbour, one of the glamorous Barbour sisters, after first listening to her sing at his theater. Bat Masterson—the very man who years earlier had hurled a beer mug at Charlie Siringo’s skull—had followed the money to Denver and wound up marrying Emma Walters, a long-limbed Palace dancer.

  Soapy’s affections, however, never moved in such a direction. He was content simply to pursue his fancies. And unlike his fortunes at the faro tables, here his luck ran strong. Then one night he was standing, as was his sly practice, in the wings off the Palace stage when he witnessed an event that caused his temper to rise. A gambler he knew from the Arcade backhanded one of the singers as she was heading backstage. It wasn’t a hard blow, just a mean, quick slap. But Soapy didn’t like men who mistreated women. On instinct, he rushed over and, with a single punch, knocked the gambler down. The man scrambled to his feet, but the wild, resolute look on Soapy’s face discouraged him from pursuing the matter. He simply turned and walked away.

  That night Soapy accompanied the grateful singer to the boardinghouse where she was staying. Her stage name was Allie, but she told him that her friends called by her real name, Mary. Mary Noonan had long blond hair, which she wore wrapped in a high bun, and a face that was friendly and reassuring rather than beautiful. Yet while many of the pretty dancers and singers Soapy had courted from the Palace were seemingly uncomplicated women, frank about their hopes to the point of brazenness, Mary was a different sort. She was reserved, even a bit standoffish. She behaved as if she had no time for or interest in Soapy. She didn’t respond to his attentions with the immediate intensity of feelings that Mamie had so freely offered to Charlie Siringo. Then again, Mamie had been a sheltered fifteen-year-old without either experience or guile; Mary had met enough of the West’s lonely men to be guarded. Besides, a showgirl learns not to put too much trust in romance.

  Mary made it clear that she wanted nothing from Soapy and that, in fact, she would find the offer of a “present” insulting. Perhaps those rebuffs were what attracted Soapy and first set his mind spinning. Whatever the reason, he intensified his pursuit. And in time Soapy came to realize that she had taken hold of his heart in a way no other woman ever had.

  They were married in February 1886. Within a year, their first child, a son, was born. Soapy’s life, he understood, had changed dramatically. Yet he attempted to navigate through the responsibilities of love and fatherhood as he did the rest of his tangled enterprises: He played a complicated con. He settled with his bride and baby in a house on Curtis Street in one of Denver’s new residential neighborhoods, but he still spent his days and nights working the downtown streets with his crew. There was, as a consequence, an aspect to his life that was seeped in larceny, corruption, and, when necessary, a casual but effective violence. And there was another filled with family happiness, a place that was comforting and where he was comforted. In the end, though, this was one con that was too difficult for even Soapy to play for very long.

  YEARS LATER, Soapy, ranting with bitter thunder, would still put all the blame for his comeuppance on Colonel John Arkins. And it is true that Arkins possessed several qualities that made him a relentless and effective adversary.

  First, he was motivated by a “vision,” to use the colonel’s own ardent, deliberately ecclesiastical word, of what Denver could grow to become. He’d realized that the Wild West was rapidly becoming a memory, a reckless and violent era that would live on only in the pages of dime novels. If Denver were to grab its place as the premier city in the new West, it needed to become a destination where newcomers could go about without being harassed, where working men did not need to fear that they would be preyed on by unscrupulous gangs, where families would not have their peace disturbed by louts and villains.

  Second, the colonel was a dedicated newspaperman, an editor who, he’d boast with pride, might just as well as have been born with printer’s ink running through his veins. After serving in the Civil War as a corporal—“Colonel” was only an honorific title—Arkins had traveled around the Midwest working as a printer. Following the prospectors to Leadville, he’d established the Evening Chronicle. By 1880, however, he had realized that the boomtown’s time had come and gone. He sold the Chronicle and used the proceeds to buy a piece of the Rocky Mountain News, Denver’s oldest newspaper. The News had started out in a rickety log cabin, but it was now housed in a substantial brick building downtown on Patterson Street and had distinguished itself as a crusading civic voice. Yet the colonel had still larger ambitions for his paper, and he saw in Soapy a way to help realize this success. Bandits, he appreciated, were never boring, and front-page stories reporting the exploits of the Soap Gang and its kingpin were a surefire way to sell copies. The nearly daily articles boosted the News’ circulation, and in the process they made Soapy a larger-than-life villain.

  Finally, and not least, the colonel was fearless. When, for example, an argument at Joey’s barroom on Curtis Street turned heated and his adversary drew a nickel-plated revolver, Arkins did not hesitate. He stepped forward and, quick and decisive, knocked the man’s silk top hat off with a dismissive wave of his hand. Intimidated, the man backed off. The colonel explained with a smirk, “Any man who carries a nickel-plated revolver will not fire it at anybody.”

  And so the pages of the News beat a loud and insistent editorial drum: “Soapy, in the language of the fly-by-night fraternity ‘has’ Denver”; “The city is absolutely under the control of this prince of knaves”; “His skin games in town are flourishing, he gets his percentage from those to whom he furnishes protection”; “There is not a confidence man, a sneak thief, or any other parasite upon the public who does not pursue his avocation under license from the man”; and on and relentlessly on.

  But while there’s no getting around that the colonel had it in for him, in the end it was all largely Soapy’s own doing. Soapy had no one to blame but himself for the raw anger that overwhelmed his customary calculating and coolheaded demeanor. What happened was that Arkins, trying to keep his long-running story alive, came up with a new angle. He reported that Mrs. Mary Smith was summering with her three children in Idaho Springs under false pretenses. The families in this pleasant summer colony believed that the popular Mrs. Smith was the wife of a prosperous Denver businessman. However, the reality, Arkins gleefully revealed, was that she was married to the notorious Soapy Smith.

  As soon as he read the story, Soapy flew into a rage. He immediately rushed over to the newspaper and went directly to the colonel’s office. Without a word of explanation, he raised his walking stick and hammered it into the startled editor’s skull with so much force that the impact could be heard outside in the newsroom. A punishing fusillade of blows rained down before the astonished pressmen could hur
ry over and, with some trouble, drag off a wild Soapy. Arkins lay motionless and prostrate on the floor, blood streaming down his face. But he was not dead.

  Soapy was arrested and charged with attempted murder. After a little politicking, this was reduced to assault. He was freed on a $1,000 bond. As soon as he got out of jail, Soapy took Mary and the children to the Union Depot and bought them tickets to St. Louis. They would stay with her mother. As he watched the train pull away from the station, he realized with a resigned practicality that his carefully constructed life in Denver had collapsed all around him. He left the city the next day, not bothered at all about jumping bail.

  ON THE run, accompanied by members of his gang who still had faith in his resourcefulness, Soapy drifted through the smaller cow towns. They tried to get scams going in Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, and Ogden. But after Denver, the pickings seemed very small.

  Pocatello, Idaho, though, held out a bit of promise since it was a railroad company town and that meant workers would be flush with weekly wages. Yet as soon as the Soap Gang hit town and settled down in a Main Street saloon, the Rincon Kid and his crew came looking for them. Pocatello was his turf, and he had no intention of sharing it. Shots were fired, and two men were killed. In a letter to Mary, Soapy tried to laugh at the incident, joking that he nearly “got his moustache shot off.” “The smoke of the pistol blinded me for a moment, but I returned the fire and shot both my assailants. One through the thigh, and the other through the calf of the leg and the heel.”

  The next day the sheriff escorted the Soap Gang to the station. With a gambler’s doggish philosophy, Soapy boarded the first train without protest. Yet he was uncertain of where he was going. He silently longed for the opportunities he had found in Denver, and the comforts he had enjoyed there, too.

  SIX

  eorge Carmack, meanwhile, had already embarked on his own journey. It had been a rough fifteen-day voyage through choppy ocean waters, but unlike his fellow seasick marines on the USS Wachusett, George didn’t complain. Day after day he would lean against the rail on the rolling deck of the three-masted ship and look out over a whitecapped, gunmetal-gray sea toward the horizon. It was February, a season when the North Pacific was a heavy curtain of dense fog and pelting rain; nevertheless, George’s eyes strained against the darkness as if at any moment he would be rewarded with the first sighting of land. He was unsure about what he could expect once his platoon disembarked, but he could not help feeling a building excitement. He was on his way to Alaska.

  On orders of the secretary of war, George and the contingent of marines on board the sailing ship were being deployed on a peacekeeping mission to the coastal harbor town of Sitka, the commercial trading and shipping center of the Alaska Territory. Of course, the War Department did not seriously believe that a small garrison of young marines could effectively put down another Tlingit Indian uprising, rein in the rum and whiskey smugglers, enforce the laws protecting the extermination of walruses, whales, seals, and sea otters by marauding trading vessels, or even effectively police the muddy streets of Sitka. In the fifteen years since the United States Congress had reluctantly finalized its purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, the official policy toward the district had been one of neglect.

  At the time of the sale, feelings had run high in the House and the Senate that Secretary of State William Seward had engineered a frivolous and expensive deal simply to repay a cash-strapped Russia for its support of the North during the Civil War. The sale was loudly dismissed as “Seward’s Folly,” the half-million-square-mile wilderness mocked in congressional debate as “Seward’s Icebox” and “a polar bear garden.” The New York World compared the territory to “a sucked orange,” insisting “It contained nothing of value but furbearing animals, and these had been hunted until they were nearly extinct.” Horace Greeley, in the New York Tribune, grumbled that Alaska was a “burden … not worth taking as a gift.” Similarly, one congressman spoke for many prominent and influential national voices when, brimming with frustration, he ranted, “Why didn’t we give her [Russia] the seven million and tell her to keep her damned colony? It’ll never be of any use to us.” In 1877 the territory had been officially declared the Alaska Customs District, but this deliberately vague designation brought no formalized civil government to the area. There were, it was estimated, 33,000 people, largely Indians and Eskimos, spread throughout a wilderness that was nearly one-third the size of the entire continental United States at the time, and for all practical purposes they lived in a state of lawlessness. It was an unruly and untamed land, and the preoccupied lawmakers in Washington accepted this with a philosophical shrug of disinterest. After all, Alaska was undeniably a distant, frozen, and worthless place. The marines on board the Wachusett had been sent as a token force, and, it was openly acknowledged, they were a slight token at that.

  Yet it was Alaska’s very remoteness, the promise of a vast, virgin, and uncivilized country, that attracted a certain kind of individual. As the Wild West grew civilized, as the vanquished Indian tribes settled with dour resignation on government reservations, as the wheels of steam engines clicked and clacked against the metal tracks that stretched across plains where short generations ago herds of buffalo had thundered, and as homesteaders pounded sturdy fence posts and plowed the rich brown earth, stubborn men flocked to this newly acquired territory. Wanderers, trappers, Indian fighters, cowboys, and lawmen, the very men whose fierce, independent, courageous, and often violent ways had shaped the West, now moved on to another lonely and challenging American outpost. They had succeeded in taming one frontier, only to become victims of their own success. They were heroes who had outlived their usefulness. Their spirits found neither joy or comfort in the routine; and—a curse? a blessing?—they had grown accustomed to the sharp edge of uncertainty that shaped an active, dangerous, self-sufficient life. They wanted to grow old boldly, and in the company of new adventures. And so they packed their saddlebags and, as if driven by some natural instinct, began to migrate. They turned their backs on the towns they’d helped build, on the Main Streets where families now strolled, and journeyed north to the last American wilderness.

  Along with this legion of daring, restless men came the prospectors. These indomitable sorts had tried their luck in the California gold fields; then, hearing news of fresh strikes, they’d hurried off to the mountain mines in Colorado, Nevada, and Idaho; and now, still dreamers of the elusive golden dream, they arrived undaunted in a new big and promising country. Armed with picks, short-stemmed shovels, and gold pans, they believed their luck would at last change, and that they would finally make the strike that would enable them to purchase new lives. With a faith that was rooted beyond all reason, they knew that somewhere in the icy, desolate silence of this immense, unexplored land, perhaps in the bed of a frozen waterway, possibly in a rocky cave deep in the snowfields of a dark spruce forest, or in the core of some towering mountain capped by thick, glistening layers of snow and ice, lay what they had been searching for all their working lives. It would take a miracle to find their boodle; but, like all zealots, they knew in their hearts that they were individuals whose lives would in time be blessed by the miraculous. And when in 1880 hard rock gold was discovered near what quickly grew into the mining town of Juneau, there was a collective burst of feverish excitement among this resilient fraternity. This was not the mother lode, but, many were easily convinced, it was a providential sign. Their instincts and calculations had been correct. This last frontier held hidden treasure. Alaska was rich with gold.

  In California, George Carmack had heard the rumors of the fortune that was to be found in the harsh and distant north. When the Wachusett anchored amid the flotilla of tiny forested islands that dotted Sitka Harbor, George immediately stared out toward the gloomy thicket of mountains with their armor of dark ice that rose high behind the small coastal settlement like the walls of an impregnable fortress. He tried to imagine what lay beyond, out in the wild. He had arrived in Alask
a in a marine’s blue uniform, but his mind and spirit were seeking another, more heartfelt occupation. Beyond Sitka, in the unexplored snowbound high north county, an empire of unknown dangers and challenges, he would at last fulfill the hopeful destiny his father had passed on to him. George Washington Carmack would strike it rich.

  SHOULD I make a run for it?

  From the moment of his arrival in Sitka, George began thinking about his escape. His daily life, the U.S. Navy made certain, was rigidly prescribed. Each morning in the numbing cold, his breath nearly freezing in the dawn air, he would turn out with his platoon for inspection. Afternoons would be spent with his fellow marines perfecting endless marching drills on the parade ground across from Sitka’s crescent-shaped beach, the late-winter wind too often howling off the Pacific like a discordant military band. And at the end of each exhausting day, tiredness clinging to his bones, he would wrap himself in scratchy U.S. Navy–issued wool blankets and lay in his cot among the rows of beds in the drafty three-story barracks and fall quickly asleep.

  Yet even while a busy marine, George remained tightly locked in his own private world. The shepherd’s lonely life had taught him how to take shelter in a castle built out of ruminations, and this discipline was once more serving him well. In his active mind, George was so deeply immersed in explorations beyond Sitka’s ring of granite mountains that it was as if he’d already fled. The prospect was very sweet.

  It would be, he told himself, so easy. Leave his uniform on his cot, walk out of the barracks, and disappear into the seamless pitch-black curtain that fell on a starless subartic night. And yet he hesitated.