BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (11 page)

He glances my way and presses his lips into a
cynical smile.

"And the pamphlets was wrong on something
else – there's nothing to graze in that country unless you're a
reindeer that eats moss. So thousands of horses on the pack trails
starved to death or got shot.

"Hundreds of men, women too, built their
boats in Edmonton because the water route was supposed to be
easier, never mind that it was twice as long. After you'd floated
down two rivers and sailed a hundred miles on the Great Slave Lake,
you got a thousand miles left on the Mackenzie River. Then you had
to pull your boat up a steep tributary and cross the mountains, or
climb onto the headwaters of the Porcupine River up near the Arctic
Sea. When you finally got to the Yukon, you was two hundred miles
downriver from Dawson, with no easy way back up.

"Almost everyone who made it to the Klondike
came over the passes on the trails from Dyea or Skagway. Those
trails meet at Bennett Lake, but some of the men who got that far
couldn't build decent boats, and they was wrecked and lost all
their gear on the lakes. Some who got past the lakes drownded in
Miles Canyon, in freezing rapids twenty feet deep that could smash
a boat to pieces, swallow a man in seconds. And some who made it
partway down the Yukon froze to death on the banks, just a few days
or weeks from Dawson when winter iced 'em in."

Zimmerman stops to swirl his whiskey and take
a sip, and I find myself doing the same, too easily persuaded. He
puts his cup back on the table and turns his head toward me.

"Them that made it all the way to Dawson –
they found out the truth. There's no gold waiting at the mouth of
the Klondike. You can pole your boat up that shallow river for
miles and see pretty stones in the water, fat salmon in the summer.
You can pull ashore and follow the creeks up through the willows
and niggerhead swamps, then climb the pup streams through the trees
and up into the gulches. The gold is under your feet, but you never
see it, because the pay-streak is buried ten feet deep. Sometimes
thirty feet deep. When you try to reach it, you learn that
everything below the first foot of moss and muck is frozen solid.
Even in the summer, a pick and shovel will bounce right off.

"A couple hundred stampeders reached Dawson
in October of '97, before the Yukon froze, and then thousands more
got there in June '98, coming downriver after the ice cleared. But
any of them cheechakos that was willing to spend months digging for
pay-dirt was too late, because the rich ground was already claimed.
All the Klondike gold was on the tributaries and their pups, and
old-timers from the mining camps along the Yukon had staked every
foot of them creeks by the time the stampeders arrived.

"Cheechakos that wanted their own claims had
to find new creeks forty or fifty miles upstream and into the
hills, or cross the ridge and go just as far up the Indian River.
That's because miners on the Inside started rushing to the Klondike
– mostly from the Forty Mile and Circle City camps – in September
'96, almost a year before anyone on the Outside ever heared that
word."

"What's a cheechako?"

"That's a Siwash word, means someone new to
Alaska. It's what old-time miners call the tenderfoots, who don't
know what it takes to get into the Yukon, wash out gold worth more
than it cost you, and carry it back Outside. A miner that has paid
his dues and knows how to survive is a sourdough. A cheechako is
the opposite. But that didn't stop 'em from coming.

"In August of '96 when George Carmack found
gold on rim-rock at Rabbit Creek, the mouth of the Klondike was
just a place where Indians strung their fishing nets. The
downstream bank on the Yukon was a big mud flat with a few Siwash
huts on it and salmon drying on poles. By the end of the year, a
thousand miners that was already Inside heared about Carmack's
strike and came into the Klondike valley. Joe Ladue moved his
sawmill at Sixty Mile River down to that mud flat, staked out a
town site and called it Dawson.

"By the end of '97, all the creeks on the
Klondike and the Indian River and most of their pups was staked.
And Dawson was four thousand people, most without enough food for
the winter.

"In summer '98, Dawson was the fastest
growing city in the world. Maybe a hundred steamers made it upriver
from St. Michael that year with thousands of people and all the
grub you can imagine. You could have champagne for breakfast, then
walk down Front Street and buy a silk hat or a telescope or a
horse. At night you could order a lobster dinner before you went to
the Opera House.

"And by the end of '99 it was almost over.
Thousands of people – cheechakos, sourdoughs, dance-hall girls,
gamblers, men who got rich without ever touching a shovel or a pan
– left Dawson for good. A couple of Swedish prospectors that was
stuck near the Yukon delta found gold in the beach sand on the
Bering Sea, and the stampede moved on to Nome."

Chapter 11

The air in the scow's cramped cabin seems
warmer now, so I unfasten the top button on my shirt and lean back
against the wall, keeping my distance from the orange coals burning
in the stove. Zimmerman raises his cup, lowers his nose to the
vapors, then tilts back a quick sip. His reflections on the
Klondike stampede have pushed my thoughts off track, so I try to
recover my line of inquiry.

"When we realized Gig Garrett had come back
from Alaska to live on Cabin John Creek, you and Drew agreed that
he should submit his fingerprints to the sheriff, to see if they
could find a match on Jessie's locket. That was in the summer of
1902. At that point you probably suspected Garrett was responsible
for Jessie's death. But five years earlier you followed him out to
the Yukon. So when you left you must have believed he didn't kill
Jessie. Either that or you didn't care. Which was it?"

"When I went out to Alaska, I didn't think
Gig killed her."

"Then what changed your mind?"

"It wasn't any one thing. Just a sense I got
after being around him for a while. He never told me he done it,
and I still don't know for sure."

I remind myself that the real reason I'm here
is to decide whether Zimmerman is telling the truth about what
happened the night Garrett and Drew killed each other. Had he
really been planning to help Drew apprehend Garrett? Or was he
helping Garrett settle a score? To understand Zimmerman's attitude
on that night, it seems important to find out what happened during
their days in the Yukon.

"Well, so far all I know is that you rushed
to the Klondike as part of the stampede. But you didn't freeze in a
snowbank or get bled to death by mosquitoes – you made it to
Dawson. And when you didn't find nuggets waiting to be scooped up,
you turned around and came home. Maybe Gig dug out some gold dust
before he came home too, or maybe he stole it. There must be more
to it than that."

Zimmerman doesn't answer right away, and I
turn toward him just as he opens his eyes. "There's more," he says
softly. "And it's true I got caught up in the stampede, but that
ain't why I went. I was already in Juneau when the word got
Outside."

Juneau? I backpedal along the timeline in my
mind. The Klondike stampede was decades ago, so maybe I've confused
the dates.

"And it's also true Gig convinced me to come
out to Alaska. He guessed bigger strikes was coming, though nobody
expected what happened. When word got out that them Klondike creeks
– Bonanza, Eldorado, Hunker, Dominion, Bear, all of 'em – was ten
times richer than any ground that was worked at Forty Mile, Circle
City, or anywhere else on the Yukon, everything changed. It
happened so fast that I got caught by the stampede before I could
get an outfit together and hump it over the pass. By the time I did
I was just one of thousands heading for Dawson.

"But Gig got into the Yukon before the
Canadian government put customs up at the passes. Before the
Mounties was stopping anyone who didn't have tools, a tent, and a
thousand pounds of grub. They said you had to have food and
supplies for a year, and that meant forty trips up to the pass with
fifty pounds on your back. That was toward the end of '97, and Gig
already been Inside for over a year."

I ask whether Inside means Alaska or the
Canadian stretch of the Yukon or both.

"Both. Or neither. Inside means across the
mountains. You can start in Alaska and cross into Canada, or stay
in one or the other. You could be panning bars on the Pelly or the
Stewart or the Klondike, and them rivers start and end in Canada.
Or you could head five hundred miles up the Tanana River from its
mouth on the lower Yukon and never leave Alaska. Once you're Inside
it don't really matter what flag you're under... you're still cut
off from the Outside. Any news you hear is most of a year old.
Whatever grub don't get carried in by miners comes thirteen hundred
miles upriver by steamer from St. Michael on the Bering Sea, when
the Yukon's clear of ice. And it's frozen seven months a year.
There ain't no easy way to get Inside, and once you're in there's
no easy way out."

"So Gig disappeared when Jessie died in
September '94, and you're saying he made it Inside – over the
mountains and down onto the Yukon – sometime in '96, more than a
year before the Klondike stampede. That's a long way to run from
Cabin John, even if he killed Jessie. What made him go that
far?"

Zimmerman squints at me as if the answer
should be obvious.

"Gold," he says. "You hang around mining
camps and talk to miners, that's what you hear about. A rancher is
stringing fence along a creek up in the woods and his dog run off
on a scent, don't come back right away. The feller follows the dog
up along the bank until a dead tree comes loose when he grabs it –
and there's a nugget the size of his thumb where the roots tore
out.

"Or a miner finds colors in the water on a
lazy stream that's been crossed a thousand times. He works the
banks and follows a trail of flour gold to a dry pup and up into a
gulch. The gulch ends in a granite overhang with a vein of quartz,
and that vein is the mother lode.

"Gig and I was working on and off at the Big
Pool railroad yard since '92. That was when the Western Maryland
Railroad ran a line across the Potomac to Virginia, then into the
B&O yard at Cherry Run. When that line opened, Western Maryland
started carrying B&O freight, and things got busier. At least
until hard times come in '93.

"So by '94, Gig and me, we knowed our way
around freight yards and trains. Didn't surprise me he was able to
hop a B&O train west and get hired as a brakeman. For a good
part of the year that's a decent job, riding a fair breeze through
open country, even if the train shakes and screeches and you're
mostly on your own. Jumping between the cars can get your mind
focused when it's wet, 'cause everyone knows someone who fell and
got killed or lost a leg.

"But what drives fellers off that job sooner
or later is the cold. A light rain that don't normally bother you
might start freezing as you climb a long hill or night comes on.
Then the brake wheel ices up and gets hard to turn. The foothold
you brace against gets icy too – it ain't much use when you got to
twist your whole body against the wheel. Then the rain changes to
snow so you turn your back, but the snow drives into gaps around
your neck while the wind cuts against your ears. A few long nights
in the snow and some close scrapes will get a brakeman thinking
about finding something else to do.

"After Gig made it out to St. Louis, he
switched onto the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe and worked hisself
into Colorado by springtime. By then he wanted his feet on steady
ground. He started washing glasses and sweeping floors at Turner's
Saloon in Colorado City, which got miners coming and going from
Cripple Creek. The silver mines in Leadville and Creede was all
shut down during the Panic of '93, but hard-rock mining in Cripple
Creek was booming – they was getting three hundred dollars in gold
from a ton of ore. The saloon-keeper started trusting Gig to pour
whiskey, so he got to hear stories from miners at the bar. Like how
Winfield Stratton turned his grubstake at Cripple Creek into
millions when he staked ground on Battle Mountain, dug a chute,
found the Independence lode.

"Other miners was sure the next Independence
was somewhere in the hills south of Pike's Peak, and after a couple
months of tales and rumors Gig was ready to start prospecting
hisself. He convinced Jeremy Turner to grubstake him for six
months, for half of whatever rich ground he come into. Teamed up
with a miner named Olson he met at the bar. Olson was heading back
to the Cripple Creek District to work a claim. He hired Gig to work
alongside him for wages, so Gig could learn the ropes.

"Olson and Gig dug out a few tons of ore from
his claim but it never assayed over three dollars a ton, so they
gave up after a while. But Gig got familiar with a pick and
shovel... learned a little about colors and veins. So he set off
exploring the hills east of Victor, but his wages and outfit was
burned up before he ever found ground worth staking. When it got
cold he headed back to Colorado City, and Jeremy Turner hired him
back at the saloon. I guess he aimed to recover his investment by
teaching Gig to run a card game. And Turner was probably right
about that – Gig did have some natural ability with cards.

"Faro was the biggest game in them
mining-town saloons, but with five or six sets of eyes watching
every card the dealer turns, it's hard to cheat. So even though the
house wins most of the time, there's more money to be made in a
crooked game of poker or blackjack.

"Better yet, three-card monte. Gig met a
couple of fellers who worked a monte game at a dance hall down the
street, and they hired him to come by and shill sometimes after his
shift ended. In monte, you want the mark to be part of the crowd
watching the shill play a game. When the cards stop moving the mark
knows for sure that the card on the left is the red queen. So he
can't believe it when the shill picks the center card. And when the
dealer flips the cards, the shill loses – the queen was on the
left.