BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (18 page)

"They picked their way along the creek and
the Swedes washed out a couple of worthless pans while Gig and
Nokes was scouting stands of willow. Seven or eight miles up, they
still ain't spotted a moose, and the Swedes seen about enough of
Rabbit Creek. They sat on boulders and ate dried fruit where the
main valley turns east and a pup that's almost as big as Rabbit
Creek come in straight ahead from the south, down a wooded gulch
that's steeper and narrower. Lindfors pointed at the pup and said
that it almost looked like a gold stream, and maybe they should
climb up to the first pool and wash out a pan.

"As the four of 'em was studying the gulch,
they seen a brown shape moving a couple hundred paces up, just
inside the first patch of trees. When it stopped and lifted its
nose toward 'em, they could see it was a bear. Not one of them
brown giants with silver-tipped fur that picks a fight out of sheer
orneriness, just a plain old black bear.

"Gig raised the rifle but Nokes put his arm
on the barrel and pushed it down. 'He ain't worth it,' Nokes said.
'No salmon running yet, too early for berries, and he probably just
woke up this week, hungrier than all of us put together. If you
shoot him, we can cut him up and drag the hams down the valley on
poles, but you'll bust your jaw trying to chew that meat. He ain't
fat enough. Probably on his way down to the Klondike to fish for
trout.'

"Gig pulled the gun loose, aimed, and fired,
but the bear already decided he wanted no part of them fellers and
started humping back into the trees, so the shot wasn't close.

"'Well that's a waste,' Nokes said. 'Next
time we spot a herd of caribou, we'll want that bullet back.'

"Then Nokes looks out at the Rabbit Creek
valley rising gentle to the east. He swings an arm from that
direction toward the pasture they been climbing the last few miles.
'Down to the bottom,' he says, 'this whole damn valley ain't worth
the fish you could pull out of the Klondike in an afternoon.' He
jerks his thumb toward the gulch and says, 'and I'd trade that pup
for a few bullets and a decent shot at a deer.'

"When I met him in Dawson two years later,
Gig remembered them exact words. By then the place where he fired
at the bear was called Grand Forks. Rabbit Creek got renamed
Bonanza Creek by Lying George Carmack, who filled a shotgun
cartridge with coarse gold he found on rim-rock just a mile below
the Forks. When George showed that gold to a few oldtimers, they
realized he wasn't lying this time and followed him up Bonanza for
a look. The word spread fast and all of Bonanza got staked in a
month.

"Then some fellers climbed that pup and
washed out fifty cents to the pan, and Knut Halstead named it
Eldorado. At the Fortymile and Circle camps there was still plenty
of sourdoughs who swore the Klondike was a joke and Lying George
was up to his old tricks. But after Carmack and Antone Stander and
Clarence Berry started sluicing summer diggings, anyone who tramped
up to their claims could fill a pan and wash out coarse gold and
nuggets hisself.

"Pretty soon the camps at Fortymile and
Circle emptied out, and Joe Ladue's sawmill was running round the
clock at a new townsite called Dawson, next to the mouth of the
Klondike.

"By the end of the year, a dozen more
Klondike creeks was staked end to end, and miners on a hundred
claims was digging shafts toward bedrock every day and burning
fires in their shafts at night. And every man Inside knowed
something Nokes never would of believed that day. Bonanza and
Eldorado was the two richest creeks in the world."

Chapter 20

"Show me the Klondike again," I tell
Zimmerman, sliding him the knife. He leans toward the table and
jabs the eastward scratch furthest from the wall, about two-thirds
of the way from Juneau to Circle City. Then he sticks the knife
into the table where the Klondike intersects the Yukon and leaves
it upright.

"And that's Dawson," he says. "Starting three
months after Gig and Nokes paddled up the Klondike."

"You said Nokes never believed there was gold
on the Klondike."

"Or the Indian. He was wrong on both."

"Why?"

Zimmerman squints at me as if he doesn't
understand.

"Why was them creeks rich?"

"The Swedes were panning all the way up
Bonanza Creek. If the ground was so rich, why didn't they find
gold?"

"They wasn't the first. Lots of fellers
prospected on the Klondike and didn't find gold. Joe Ladue didn't
find it. Arthur Harper didn't find it. By '96, the oldtimers was
pretty sure they knew what a gold stream looked like, and them
Klondike creeks wasn't it."

"Then how did Carmack find it?"

"Two ways," Zimmerman says. "First, he ran
into Robbie Henderson after Henderson crossed the divide between
the Indian River and the Klondike, then took gold out of the
headwaters near the dome, on the creek he named Gold Bottom. When
Henderson was sure that creek had good prospects, he started down
to the district office in Fortymile to record his claim. Ran into
Lying George fishing with his Siwash friends at the mouth of the
Klondike and told him about Gold Bottom Creek. Told him where it
was and that he should stake a claim.

"Henderson and Carmack was old friends from
the Fortymile camp, and that's the way miners work. Whatever man
strikes it will stake his claim and then tell every miner he runs
into exactly where it is. Don't matter who you are, you only get
one claim per district. A creek claim is five hundred feet long,
and the width is rim to rim. If you're the first, you get a
thousand feet instead. Then the claims get numbered up and down
from Discovery claim.

"So Robbie Henderson told Carmack to climb
the ridge and follow it around toward the dome between the Klondike
and the Indian. Told him where to find three men he brought over
the divide from the Indian to dig on Gold Bottom.

"Carmack wasn't keen on it, but he went up
anyway with two Siwashes. Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie. They
found Henderson's men and saw what they was getting to the pan, but
they wasn't excited enough to stake. When they was heading back to
their camp on the Klondike, they come down the Rabbit Creek
drainage instead of climbing down the far side of the ridge to the
Yukon. They took a few pans along the way, since Carmack reckoned
the headwaters of Gold Bottom and Rabbit Creek was both on the same
divide, and not too far apart. If Gold Bottom had prospects, so
should Rabbit Creek."

I stop Zimmerman there. "You said there were
two reasons Carmack found gold that Gig and Nokes and the others
missed, and that the first reason was running into Robbie
Henderson. What was the second?"

"Luck," he says.

"What kind of luck?"

"Skookum Jim shoveled out some dirt at
rim-rock," Zimmerman says. "Probably 'cause he saw colors or part
of an exposed nugget. Rim-rock ain't the creek itself," he
explains. "It's where the valley floor changes and gets steeper.
Could be a hundred feet or more from the creek. Then Jim put the
dirt in the pan and washed it out in the creek and got fifty cents.
Took a few more shovels from under the same birch tree and got up
to a dollar on every pan. That was better than Gold Bottom, so all
three men staked there. It wasn't proper for a Siwash to stake
Discovery, so Carmack took that, and Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie
took claims one above and one below."

"So you're saying Skookum Jim was lucky to
spot an exposed nugget at rim-rock?"

Zimmerman nods. "They was lucky. Most of the
gold on them Klondike creeks is in the pay-streak, and that's a
vein of gravel and gold at bedrock. Between the pay-streak and the
creek, you got ten to thirty feet of frozen muck. So you won't find
nuggets or coarse gold by dipping your pan in a slow-moving
creek.

"Skookum Jim and Lying George didn't know it
then – nobody knowed it for two more years – but the rest of the
Klondike gold is on the hillsides, maybe two hundred feet above the
creeks. They call that ground the benches, and the gold there come
from a stream that dried up or got buried a thousand years ago.
Maybe ten thousand years ago. The gold you find at rim-rock come
from the benches, when the dirt slides down to where the slope of
the hill levels off. So that was bench gold that Skookum Jim found
at rim-rock on Rabbit Creek. And the three of 'em found enough in a
couple hours to convince 'em to stake. Then Lying George collected
the gold in a shotgun cartridge and started spreading the
word."

Something seems inconsistent in Zimmerman's
account. If Carmack started the Klondike stampede by showing off
his shotgun shell full of coarse gold, but he and his Indian
friends had been lucky to find the gold at rim-rock, did all the
miners who followed him up Bonanza Creek get lucky too? If not – if
they washed out nothing, like Gig and Nokes and the Swedes – why
didn't they dismiss Carmack's gold-filled shell as another prank
from Lying George?

Some oldtimers did, Zimmerman says. But they
couldn't explain two things. First, if Carmack didn't find the gold
on Bonanza, how did he get it? Second, why didn't it look like gold
from the other mining districts? The gold from each area had a
unique combination of traits – color, texture, shape – and the
oldtimers saw that Carmack's coarse gold didn't resemble anything
from the Fortymile or Circle or Cassiar Mountains districts.

And the miners who decided to investigate
Bonanza for themselves would have gone first to Carmack's Discovery
claim and the two adjacent claims staked by Skookum Jim and Tagish
Charley. They would have seen Carmack and the Siwashes, digging
from rim-rock both sideways and toward the creek, and finding more
gold that had slid from the benches. Every man would measure off
his five-hundred foot claim from the last claim staked, then cut a
wooden post, carve his name and the date on it, and plant it at the
edge of his claim. So if the Indians had one above and one below
Discovery, the next man could stake either two above or two below.
Then three above or three below. Carmack staked Discovery in
mid-August. By the end of September, Zimmerman says, Bonanza was
staked into the 70s, both above and below.

Then he explains summer diggings. Even with a
pick and a shovel, you could only dig out a foot of dirt before you
hit frozen ground and got stopped dead. But the sun could thaw a
few inches of newly exposed frozen earth each day, so in the summer
you dug wide instead of deep, then carried your diggings to the
creek and dumped it on a pile for sluicing.

For that, you needed to dam the creek above
your claim, then divert part of the flow into the narrow sluice
boxes, which fit together end to end for at least fifty or sixty
feet. Shovel the diggings into the top of the last box, and the
dirt and sand washes out the bottom as tailings. The gold is heavy,
so most of it sinks and gets trapped by a plank of riffles that
lines the bottom of the box. Then you turn off the water, lift out
the riffles, throw away the pebbles, and clean up the gold. When
you're done, you re-sluice the tailings in case any gold was
lost.

Having Zimmerman describe how the Klondike
gold was harvested doesn't provide any additional insight into my
brother's killer, but I give in to my desire to understand the
process – if only because of the obvious contrast with my own
excavations at the Pecos pueblo.

Summers are short in the Yukon, Zimmerman
says, so two men working a single claim can't reach bedrock during
a season of summer diggings. The fastest way to hit the pay-streak
at bedrock was to dig a shaft, and the only time you could do that
was in the winter. In the summer, surface water from the creek-bed
would fill the bottom of your shaft.

But in winter the surface is frozen hard, and
you could clear the snow and build a log fire to burn all night. In
the morning, you shovel aside the embers and dig out half a foot of
thawed ground, four foot square. Light another fire that night and
dig deeper the next day. When the shaft is shoulder deep, you build
a cribwork of logs around the opening and mount a windlass on it,
then use a bucket every day to bring up the diggings, which get
dumped around the cribwork and gradually grow into a cone of earth
around the shaft.

When you get down to bedrock, maybe you
intersect the pay-streak just above it, which might be three or
four feet thick, gold dust and nuggets mixed with gravel and sand.
If you miss it, you dig sideways for thirty feet and try to find
it. After that you give up and dig another shaft, halfway toward
the creek or halfway toward the rim. Sometimes it takes several
shafts to find the pay-streak.

Visualizing the shaft is easy for me, I tell
Zimmerman. I got an intimate look at one when I was eight years
old. At Rock Run, on the day we first met.

He squints at me and his mouth draws tight,
as if he's trying to remember.

"You and Jessie pulled me out," I remind him,
reflexively glancing at his severed ring finger. "After you lowered
Drew into the shaft and he put me on his shoulders."

His nod reminds me of a pistol hammer drawing
back halfway, and he seems to withdraw into a space behind his
eyes.

"Rock Run," he finally says, easing the
hammer down. "We never found five cents to the pan on that damn
creek."

Chapter 21

"Six miles below the Klondike you get to Fort
Reliance, and that's mile zero. So you know you come sixty miles
from Joe Ladue's post at Sixtymile, and you got forty miles
downriver to Fortymile. Fort Reliance was one of the first posts on
the river, back when the Yukon trade was mostly fur. But after
prospectors come Inside and started staking the gold creeks, nobody
had much use for it, so Gig and Nokes and the Swedes drifted right
by.

"By mid-June, the sun barely dips below the
hills and you can read the labels on your bags of grub at midnight.
Or read whatever you ain't already memorized. Miners at the camps
was always starved for news from the Outside, so most men coming in
try to bring a newspaper or magazine or two, but there's always a
cold, wet night when you care more about lighting a fire than
saving old news.