BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (33 page)

"'A man don't have to set out for anywhere at
all,' he says. 'But if you're coming to a place like the Klondike,
you best get there before everyone knows its name. You let ten
thousand cheechakos beat a path for you and by the time you make it
to Dawson pouring whiskey might sound like a tolerable idea.'"

"Then his face cracks into a smile and my
eyes get watery and we're grabbing each other by the shoulders
across the bar, and he says 'I sent you that book almost three
years ago. I guess I was giving them mail carriers too much
credit.'

"He finishes pouring my whiskey and fills up
another glass for himself, then leaves the bottles on the bar and
comes around to sit next to me, tells two fellers at a table to
serve themselves. For the first hour I'm telling him about leaving
home and how I got to Alaska, then about working in Skagway and
packing on the Dyea Trail. Joining up with Rafferty and Orrie and
building a boat at Lindeman. Then Gig's shift ends and another
feller comes in to work the bar, so we move over to the restaurant
and order poached eggs and bacon and wine.

"When I want to hear his story, Gig don't
focus on how he got to Dawson. He wants to talk about what happened
there in the last year. So he loads his fork and holds it up and
says 'this egg tells the story of the Klondike stampede.' He says
when he first come through on his way to Circle in summer of '96,
Dawson was nothing but a mud flat where the Siwashes dried their
fish, and probably none of 'em ever seen a chicken egg.

"Late summer of '97 you got sourdoughs
stampeding into Dawson from up and down the Yukon, and them fellers
might buy an egg at Fortymile or Circle, if they was on a spree,
and if the steamboats from St. Michael just come through to restock
the camps.

"This past May, after the ice gone out of the
Yukon, a couple of canoes got down to Dawson from the Stewart
River, ahead of the fleet that was getting ready to launch from the
lakes. They brought a case of eggs and sold 'em for eighteen
dollars a dozen. That's how starved the Klondike miners was for
something different to eat.

"The ice was still holding at Laberge, but
when it gone out all them boats pushed downriver, and they started
landing here the first week of June. The ones that brung eggs sold
'em for ten dollars a dozen. Two weeks later there's a thousand
boats tied up in Dawson, some carrying twenty tons and some no
bigger than canoes. And eggs was selling for three dollars a
dozen.

"By the end of June, Gig says, Dawson was the
biggest mining camp anyone ever seen. There was stands on Front
Street selling vegetables and fruit, and miners was pouring dust
out of their pokes to buy apples, oranges, and lemons at a dollar a
piece. Cans of milk and tinned mutton was a dollar or two each.
'That first year', Gig says, 'a restaurant in Dawson was a slab
table and a tin plate with beans or canned meat or flapjacks. But
after the boats come in, it was full menus and five-course meals...
linen tablecloths and china plates.'"

I study Zimmerman's face and can tell he's
watching his internal movie again. He must be replaying his reunion
with Garrett, but it almost seems like he's reliving Dawson's
halcyon summer – the one he didn't actually witness himself. He
tells the story Garrett told him. In the spring of '98, even before
the lower Yukon opened up, all manner of cargo was assembled in
west-coast ports and loaded on ocean-going steamers that would
carry it out to the Aleutians and then north to St. Michael on the
Bering Sea. Hats and horses, pianos and printing presses,
watermelon juice and whiskey, whatever the enterprising newcomers
thought they needed to tap into the stream of the gold dust that
coursed through Dawson's veins.

And dozens of river steamboats of all
different sizes were shipped to St. Michael in pieces from those
same ports. Klondike Kings like Pat Galvin and Alex McDonald
launched their own steamboats on the Yukon that summer, as did
others who wanted a piece of the transport business that Harper and
McQuesten's ACC and Healey's NAT had shared for years. Some of
those boats were winched up past the Rink and Five-Finger Rapids.
By August, small steamers above the rapids at Whitehorse and Miles
Canyon began working in concert with each other and the downriver
boats, and for ninety-five dollars you could book passage from
Dawson all the way up to Bennett Lake.

And Zimmerman says Garrett told him at least
one small steamboat was launched at the Yukon's headwaters. Its
parts were hauled over the Chilkoot Pass and assembled at Bennett
Lake, and it ran the Whitehorse Rapids intact.

As Zimmerman describes the trickle of small
steamers into the upper Yukon, that imagery conflicts with the
vision I've formed of his own trip downriver on
Abigail
.
Something seems wrong with his story.

"So Gig told you that there were steamboats
running on the upper Yukon that summer. You said you pushed off
from Lindeman in the first week of September, and it didn't take
you more than a week to get down past the rapids. Why didn't you
see any of them?"

Zimmerman looks at me as if he doesn't
understand the question. "I never said we didn't see none."

"Then why didn't you mention them earlier? If
you knew there were boats running, you could have flagged one down
and told the captain about the three dead bodies in Bennett
Lake."

"We seen one later, when we come back from
prospecting up the Pelly River."

"Heading upriver or downriver?"

Zimmerman pauses momentarily, as if he's
weighing the ramifications of each.

"Downriver. Passed us by while we was still
getting
Abigail
squared away. We pushed off downstream a
half-hour later but never caught up or seen it again. After that it
was too late for steamers to make it back up through the ice."

I decide not to challenge his answer. It
could be the truth. But my eyes find the east-west scratch on the
scarred table that Zimmerman carved for the Pelly River. Near its
confluence with the scratch representing the Yukon, there's a nick
in the wooden surface, and I stare at it for a few seconds to burn
the association into my mind. The absence of steamers upriver from
Dawson in the late summer of '98 is a nick in Zimmerman's
narrative.

If he's telling the truth about what Garrett
told him, then he should have seen steamers between and above the
rapids, or even on the lakes, and seeing them would have colored
the impressions and expectations of
Abigail
's crew. The
steamers would have been part of the story. So maybe Zimmerman is
incorrectly remembering what he heard from Garrett. Or maybe he's
fabricating the reunion for my benefit, and he got the details
wrong.

I let him go on, and he says that Garrett
told him British law prohibited the celebration of American
holidays on Canadian soil. Since Dawson was overwhelmingly
populated by Americans, the Mounties saw trouble looming as July
first and Dominion Day approached. The authorities solved the
problem by announcing that Dominion Day would be celebrated three
days late. And when Dawson's clocks ticked into the fourth of July,
celebratory gunfire rang out across town and along the Klondike
valley, echoing off the hillsides in the dim light of midnight.

The fusillade persisted throughout the day,
escalated occasionally by louder blasts of black powder struck on
anvils. By afternoon Dawson's dogs had reached their breaking
point, and hundreds leapt into the Yukon River and swam a thousand
feet to its western bank to escape the frightful noise.

"Gig said most of 'em come back on their own
when the shooting died down," Zimmerman says. "But about a hundred
stayed over there and turned wild. No one knowed if they found dead
meat to get through the winter or got rounded up by the Siwashes or
mixed in with the wolves and learned to hunt. But on nights when
the dogs in Dawson was quiet, sometimes you could hear 'em howling
on the other side."

Chapter 39

I ask Zimmerman if Garrett's description of
the summer of '98 made him think he'd arrived in Dawson too late.
He shakes his head.

"There was tens of thousands of men and women
stampeding from all over the world. Like me they went month after
month as fast as they could, trying to get to the Klondike before
everybody else. After a while it was about making it there, more
than it was about the gold. When they finally got to Dawson, they
found out no one was in a hurry, and there wasn't no fields of
gold. So thousands took a river boat down to St. Michael before the
Yukon iced over, then a ocean boat back to Seattle or San
Francisco. The main thing was they made it to the Klondike, not
that they was going back empty-handed.

"But for every feller that left Dawson, there
was another that stayed, and some of 'em learned how to get rich
without picking up a shovel."

As Zimmerman continues painting a picture of
Dawson in the fall of '98, it's hard to know whether he's
describing it through Garrett's eyes or his own.

"Dawson was a outdoor market all day and a
carnival all night. If you was putting up telephone poles in town
or helping build a hotel, maybe you knock off at four and get a
massage at a stand on Front Street. When you was done you could sit
on the dock and read the Klondike News or the Nugget while across
the street one feller is preaching, another is reading palms, and a
third is selling mammoth tusks he got by trading with the Siwashes.
Gig told me that a cheechako that come downriver in August pulled
out a Seattle newspaper from June, and a hundred men paid a dollar
each to hear a auctioneer read it cover to cover from a outdoor
staircase.

"At night the pianos and organs and fiddles
started up in all the dance halls, and they kept going until six in
the morning. Plenty of men was busted, so all they could do was
watch, but miners that come down from the creeks with full pokes
was paying a dollar a dance, and the girls would go a dozen dances
without a break. When the music stopped they steered their feller
to the bar so he could buy 'em wine or champagne and the bartender
could give the lady her chip.

"Didn't matter what you was selling, you got
to have a scale for gold dust, 'cause that's what kept things
running, even after a couple of banks opened up in Dawson and
started swapping their own notes for gold. Bank notes was for the
fellers that got tired of watching the man behind the scale spill a
little dust onto a trap-mat every time they handed him their poke.
But pretty soon the dance halls and restaurants was taking either
bank notes or gold."

I try to steer Zimmerman back toward
Garrett.

"So if you and Gig are eating eggs and
drinking wine at the Fairview, it sounds like he found a way to tap
into that flow of gold dust and notes."

"There ain't many miners that can stay holed
up back on the creeks all winter, burning shafts and hauling dirt
when it's dark most of the day, without coming into town once in a
while to put their feet up and raise a glass with their fellow man.
The saloons bring in the miners, the miners got the gold, and the
gold pulls in the gamblers and dance-hall girls. It don't matter if
you're a sourdough or a sled-maker, everybody carries a poke, and
you don't keep it tied up in your pocket. You got to spend whatever
dust is in it, the faster the better. When you run out, go shovel
more out of the ground, or do whatever you done to fill it up the
first time. There wasn't no use in Dawson for a feller afraid to
spend his money. When Gig was dealing faro or blackjack, there was
dust and nuggets changing hands in every direction, and he was
right in the middle of it."

Zimmerman says that most of the saloons
scattered sawdust on the floor to soak up whiskey and trap spilled
dust. Sometime after daybreak when the bar closed down and the last
patron staggered home, a broom-wielding boy would emerge from a
back room to sweep up the sawdust and pan out the gold, finding
twenty or thirty dollars worth each morning.

"We finished our eggs and Gig told me where
to get a bath and a haircut and shave. Said I should come over to
the Monte Carlo that night. He was dealing from eight to midnight,
and there was a couple fellers there I should meet."

"Was one of them Wylie?"

"Wylie come later. The first feller I met was
Max Endleman, an old sourdough from Juneau who come into the Yukon
in '96. He was building a saloon in Circle when the Klondike hit,
so he dropped his plans and sledded up over the ice to Dawson that
first winter, like Gig. When he seen what was happening out on the
creeks, he wanted to build close to where the gold was, so that's
what he done. Next summer he opened the Gold Hill Hotel where
Eldorado drops into Bonanza. A couple dozen cabins was there
already and Belinda Mulrooney started a saloon that brung in
fellers like Dick Lowe and Antone Stander – some of the Klondike
Kings. By the time I got to Dawson everyone called it Grand
Forks."

"It seems like we keep coming back to that
place," I say. "Isn't that where Gig took a shot at the bear, and
Nokes said he'd trade both valleys for a few bullets?"

Zimmerman's eye twitches as if a blade has
nicked the skin beneath it, but he ignores my question and
continues. "Times was good out at Grand Forks and Max was looking
to put a second story on his hotel before the snow got too bad. So
he was in town to buy lumber and hire a couple fellers that knowed
framing and roofing. Max had a twitchy nose and a white beard and
yellow teeth. He sounded like a crow and called everybody
'chief'."

"Gig tells Max we growed up together working
on the canal, and says maybe Max got a job for me building up his
hotel. Max puts his hand on my shoulder and says 'Chief, I wouldn't
of guessed it until this minute, but you're exactly the man I need
right now. With luck like yours, I suggest you sit in on a few card
games tonight! Just not when this feller is dealing,' he says
winking at Gig.