The Floor of Heaven

by Howard Blum

  Charlie was on the trail of a counterfeiter who’d etched an ingenious steel plate for manufacturing twenty-dollar bills when, as was his habit, he checked in at a telegraph office. In Salt Lake City there was a telegram waiting for him. It was from McParland: Return soonest. Mamie sick.

  Charlie got back to Denver in time. He was holding Mamie upright by an open window, supporting her as she tried to swallow a taste of fresh air, when the struggle proved too much for her. Mamie died in his arms.

  The next week there was much to keep Charlie busy, what with people to notify, then the funeral, and always little Viola to watch after. He was able to pretend to himself that this was one more rough storm he’d simply have to ride through. After the funeral, when Mamie’s aunt, Mrs. Will Read, pleaded that she be allowed to take the child back with her to Shelbyville, Illinois, Charlie resisted. But in the end, he realized the wisdom of this plan. Mrs. Read was a noble woman and she had no children of her own to raise; certainly Viola would be better off with her than in the care of a cowboy detective ready to hit the trail with the announcement of his next case. As soon as Viola left, however, Charlie had no choice but stare into the eye of this storm. And he understood: There’d be no riding this one out.

  The next year passed in a blur. One day he got the notion to ride down to New Mexico; he’d always been partial to the weather in those parts. But after he arrived, he let his horse rest for a day and then started the long trip back to Denver. And all the time he was drinking, draining bottle after bottle, a sea of whiskey that, he’d confess without an iota of guilt, “would have made the angels weep.”

  Superintendent James McParland, the head of the Denver Pinkerton office, had also noticed the change that had taken hold of his star operative. McParland was not insensitive; he appreciated the pain the loss of a young, beloved spouse could inflict. But McParland was also a practical man. He decided that something had to be done to lift Siringo out of his doldrums, or else the agency had better find someone to take the fellow’s place. And so when none other than Mr. Robert Pinkerton himself came to him with a case that had left the Portland office perplexed, McParland realized this was the perfect opportunity to get his cowboy detective back in the saddle. He summoned Siringo to his office.

  The agency had signed on to investigate a robbery, McParland began. Quite a puzzling case.

  Before the superintendent could get any further, Charlie cut him off. I’m not interested, he said. He didn’t want to work. He didn’t want to do anything, except sit in his room and drain another bottle of whiskey.

  McParland was both cross and exasperated. It was impossible to run a detective agency when one of the operatives—his best man, to boot!—kept refusing assignments. He was of a mind to wash his hands of the whole matter. But he genuinely liked Siringo; the fellow had previously shown a lot of grit. And there were operational reasons to consider, too: This would be a dangerous, unpredictable case. The operative would need to work for weeks, or perhaps even longer, in an isolated and lawless frontier. He would be at great risk; and the odds of his succeeding were, as the Portland office had discovered, small if not nil. Siringo, he judged, was the only Pinkerton detective who might prove resourceful enough to make his way through such demanding circumstances. As much as Siringo needed to move on from his deep bereavement, McParland also found himself conceding that he, no less emphatically, needed Siringo to take the case.

  But it wasn’t McParland’s way to beg; and besides, he knew it would prove to be a futile tactic. Instead, McParland shrewdly played his best card: He revealed where the robbery had occurred.

  Alaska? interrupted Charlie. Why, that’s all the ways up at the ends of the earth.

  It’s a ways, agreed McParland. Now that the seed had been planted, he offered Siringo one final chance. Why don’t you take a day to think about things. Come back tomorrow, and if you still don’t want the job, I’ll assign someone else. But McParland’s crisp tone made clear what went unsaid: You can also be certain I’ll never contact you again.

  Over the years, Charlie had come to appreciate that McParland was not an arbitrary man; and he was affected by his boss’s concern. He agreed to give the matter some consideration.

  That night Charlie thought it all through: Up in the high north, a man might find that he’d outrun all his past troubles.

  “Alaska it is then,” agreed Charlie the next morning in McParland’s office. He reached out and shook the superintendent’s hand to seal the deal.

  TROUBLES, TOO, plagued Soapy on his return to Denver. He’d been correct in his prediction that the furor over his attack on Colonel Arkins would’ve died down. It cost him a tidy sum, but Soapy succeeded in getting the charge reduced from attempted murder to assault. And then the courts showed no inclination to bring such a trivial matter to trial. Unfortunately, Soapy’s instincts about the West’s becoming a less hospitable place for old-time gamblers like himself was also proving accurate. Too many people didn’t want him in Denver anymore.

  Defiant, Soapy opened the Tivoli Club, on the corner of Seventeenth and Market streets. He advertised it as a “headquarters for gentlemen, offering first class goods and first class attention” and “serving wines, liquors, and cigars.” Upstairs, hidden from the scrutiny of passing policemen, were roulette, faro, and card tables—all of them braced. Soapy, in fact, as much as conceded that the games were rigged. Above the stairs that led to the gambling parlor, he’d posted a cautionary notice: CAVEAT EMPTOR. Let the buyer beware.

  It was a sly wisdom, and an ineffective one. The tables were always jammed. Yet after a disastrous night, some gamblers would turn indignant and complain that the odds had been stacked against them. Then they would stomp off to the police and demand that Soapy be arrested. On one such occasion, Soapy was charged with swindling $1,500 from two men at his tables and taken before the Fire and Police Commission. He served as his own attorney, and his defense had wit. Brimming with a bracing confidence, he began:

  “As a matter of fact, gentleman, I wish to assure you that we should not be classed as gamblers. We do not conduct a gambling establishment. We are reformers in the true sense of the word.”

  Now that he had the court’s attention, he shared a rascal’s winking logic:

  “At the Tivoli I am running an educational institution. The famous Keely institute provides a cure for the drinking habit. At the Tivoli I have a cure for the gambling habit.… Why should we tell him it is useless to buck our tables? Let him learn for himself from actual experience.… He has, of course, no chance of winning a cent because in my games the player cannot win. When he leaves … he is disappointed naturally, but he has had experience of the greatest value. In fact, gentlemen, I should be recognized as a public benefactor!”

  It was an impertinent argument, and it helped fuel people’s anger. Reformers organized into the Law and Order League with the goal of the closing the city’s saloons and gambling houses. Merchants circulated petitions demanding the arrest of the parade of confidence men and bunco steerers working Seventeenth Street. Police raids on the Tivoli became more frequent, and Soapy’s men were hurled into jail on a variety of petty charges. Day after day, the harassment continued.

  Soapy tried to fight back. He organized the city’s gamblers, men like Big Ed Chase and Bat Masterson, into a political organization of their own. They agreed to provide money and muscle to whatever political party would protect their interests. But it was too late to stem the swelling tide of reform. In 1892, Davis Waite was elected governor of Colorado.

  Waite was a revolutionist, a man with a strong sense of mission who, more significantly, didn’t mind a good tussle. During the campaign, he had vowed to “fight iniquity until the blood runs as deep as the cavalry’s bridles.” After his election, he set out to demonstrate that this had not been idle talk.

  One of his first acts was to order the resignation of the Denver Fire and Police Commission. It was well known that the commissioners were on the gamblers’ payroll; it
was high time, Waite declared, that they be replaced. The commissioners, however, were an autocratic group. They’d enjoyed their power and their boodle for too long to give it up. They refused to step down. Instead, they barricaded themselves in city hall. Waite, fierce and vengeful, called out the militia. And so the confrontation that would become famous as the “City Hall War” played out on March 15, 1894.

  The commissioners reviewed their situation and after some discussion decided to appoint Soapy as their “general.” They appreciated that he had as much reason to fight as they did. If the reformers were to succeed, he would be run out of town, too. Also, he had an army, a confederation of bunco men, thieves, gamblers, hard cases, and dickered policemen and deputy sheriffs.

  With two .45s in holsters strapped around his waist and carrying two kegs of dynamite in his hands, Soapy marched a heavily armed force of about 150 men to city hall. Giving quick orders, he shrewdly deployed his troops: Men with shotguns and rifles were placed at every entrance and in the corridors of every floor; a newly christened “bomb brigade” prepared missiles fashioned out of dynamite, powder, fuses, and caps on the third floor; and on the top floor and in the tower were the sharpshooters, crack shots with a pistol or Winchester.

  Commanded by Brigadier General E. J. Brooks, the militia proudly marched up Larimer Street and formed an offensive line on Fourteenth Street across from city hall. It was nearly 200 strong, both infantrymen and a cavalry brigade. “I got a dozen men who can shoot,” promised a saber-waving Captain Barlett, chief of the army sharpshooters, to a reporter. “I can depend on them to pick the heads out of those windows.”

  As the troops fell into position, a battering ram mounted on an express wagon was moved to the front of their line. It looked rickety and, regardless of its condition, would seem to have no practical purpose in a firefight. The troops pushing the contraption would surely be cut down before they could reach the front door. Soapy’s men stood at the windows laughing and taunting as it was dragged into position.

  But the jesting came to an end when the First Regiment pulled its light artillery up to the front line. It was an intimidating display: two twelve-pound Napoleon cannons and two Gatling guns. “We can tumble that building on their heads with a dozen shots,” an artillery officer warned.

  Soapy, fearful that his men might be wavering, seized the initiative. With a stick of dynamite in his hand, he leaned out the window and shouted to the soldiers, “I’ve got enough of the stuff to send us all to Hell, and as I am nearer to Heaven than any of you, I’ll not be the first to die.” His men cheered, reaffirming their support. They were again united under Soapy’s leadership.

  It was a standoff. All that seemed certain was that once the first shot was fired, dozens—perhaps hundreds—would die.

  “If you say fire, we’ll fire,” General Brooke wrote in a note he had delivered to Governor Waite at his mansion, only a few blocks from city hall. It was five P.M. and the skies were turning dark. Inside the residence, the governor was meeting with a committee of citizens from the chamber of commerce. They were pleading with him to let the state supreme court decide on the ousting of the Fire and Police Commission. If he didn’t reconsider, the loss of life would be catastrophic. Waite was adamant. “I shall order the militia to fire,” he insisted. “The people may assassinate me if they will, but I propose to have it my way.”

  Nonetheless, the governor did not respond to the general’s note. Instead, he sent a telegram to Brigadier General Cook of the regular U.S. Army. “Property of the United States … now in serious jeopardy,” he reported. Within an hour, five companies from Fort Logan with one hundred rounds of ammunition per man and rations for twenty-four hours were dispatched by special train.

  In the darkness of the cold Denver night, city hall remained illuminated, the building blazing with lights. There were armed men at every window, sharpshooters at the ready in the tower. The dynamite bombs had been assembled; all that was required was the order to ignite the fuses. Soapy had pulled his army together in short order, and they had embraced him. It was a force that shared a unifying self-awareness: They were fighting for their futures. No one was prepared to back down.

  But at eight forty-five that evening Soapy looked out from his third-floor window and was startled. He watched with a stern concentration as the companies of U.S. Army troops moved into the front line. At once, he realized his bluff had been called. With a gambler’s long-practiced practicality, he folded his hand. Move out, he ordered his men.

  Not a shot had been fired. The only casualty was a spectator who had fallen from his perch on a storm door and cracked his head on the pavement. But in the weeks that followed, the courts reiterated the governor’s order that the commissioners resign, the Waite administration continued to put pressure on what the papers were now calling the “fly-by-night fraternity,” and Soapy realized he’d better leave Denver before he wound up in jail.

  The Denver Times reported on his travel plans:

  Jeff. R. Smith, the Reverend Bowers, and Doctor W. H. Jackson have announced their intention to go to Japan.… They announce their object is a pleasure and sightseeing trip, but judging from the props they were seen carrying, they intend to be prepared for emergencies.

  Fourteen packs of new cards, a dice box, a set of “ivories,” full sets of poker chips, a small square frame covered with canvas, half shells of English walnuts, and quart bottles of good whiskey along with several boxes of fine cigars.

  The article correctly reported the items Soapy had packed for his travels. But the reporter had been misled as to his destination. He’d never had any intention to sail to Japan. Soapy was going to Alaska. “This is my last opportunity to make a big haul,” he told his gang as he supervised the packing at the Tivoli Club. “Alaska is the last West.”

  THERE WERE three strong toots from the ship’s whistle as the Idaho puffed down the Tlingit fishing ground of Gastineau Channel and headed into Juneau’s harbor on a thickly gray, wet April day. George Carmack stood on deck and looked past a narrow, sandy beach and toward the handful of ramshackle log cabins and wood-frame buildings that made up the small gold-mining camp. In the distance, high mountains formed a steep natural barrier. The mountains were snowcapped, but the rain and fog had painted them gray, too, like the sky. It was an uninviting vista.

  He waited impatiently as sailors tied the steamboat up to the wharf. Then, hauling his heavy pack onto his back, George walked down the slippery gangplank and into Alaska.

  TWELVE

  n their separate ways up to Alaska, the three men encountered many others heading to the north country to leave their old lives behind. Times had been hard back home. The sudden Panic of 1893 had grown into a full-blown economic depression, and two years later it continued to hold the nation in its tight grip. All across the country banks had failed, railroads had gone into receivership, farms had been foreclosed, and jobs had disappeared. The Gay Nineties had turned angry and combative. Sullen mobs roamed city streets searching for food. Fistfights broke out on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as companies went bust and fortunes turned to dust. Strikes erupted into bloody battles, the forces of labor and capital charging at one another without mercy. Coxey’s army, as the resolute thousands who rallied around Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey were known, marched on Washington to demand jobs. Throughout the country there was the feeling that something fundamental had gone wrong. Despair had become a national malaise. Desperate, eager to leave all their disappointments behind, a new wave of pioneers began the journey to the far north. They wanted to believe that in Alaska there would be opportunities to change their luck and, if they were resourceful, to forge new lives.

  What had brought America to its knees? Congress certainly deserved a large share of the blame. These legislators had, in their reckless wisdom, created an opportunity to buy dollars at nearly half price. When Soapy set up his keister, he, too, would excite crowds with the come-on that for fifty cents they could buy a bar of soap that’
d be worth at least a dollar. But his generosity was just an enticement; he was way too sly to engage in a transaction where there might be a chance that he could take a loss. Congress, though, was more cavalier. It had a sporting attitude toward the nation’s treasury. In 1890 it had passed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which obligated the government to buy 4.5 million ounces of silver each month—and to pay for these purchases at a set price with an equal amount of notes backed by either silver or gold. Gold had a market value of nearly twice that of silver, so it didn’t take considerable financial acumen to prefer a payout in gold dollars. And for once a deal that seemed too good to be true really was true—at least for a while. A silver dollar worth only 58 cents could be exchanged for a dollar certificate backed by gold worth a full 100 cents. But greed being what it is, and human nature, too, it soon transpired that the western mines produced—and then avidly sold to the government—more silver than Congress had ever anticipated. As a result, the U.S. Treasury began running through its gold supplies. When a despairing secretary of the Treasury confessed that the nation’s gold reserves had plunged below the traditionally acceptable level of $100 million, he might just as well have been a punter at the Orleans Club who, nearly wiped out, at last realized the faro box had been gaffed.

  With the secretary’s revelation that the Republic’s nest egg was in jeopardy, panic spread. It galloped pell-mell through the national marketplace, destroying illusions, toppling empires, and jamming the machinery that operated everyday life. The forebodings of disaster had become prophecy. Yet even as the country was sent reeling, there remained one economic certainty: gold. Its value was sacrosanct. Its worth held steady. It was the one true thing. So governments demanded it. Investors hoarded it. And prospectors went to great lengths to discover it.