BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (24 page)

"But Skookum Gulch was like most creeks on
the Klondike – some fellers didn't believe in it. There was miners
that struck the pay like Taylor, and other sourdoughs that didn't
find much. By July, Taylor and his men cleaned up forty thousand.
They sold out for more than that, based on what everyone reckoned
was still in the ground.

"That made Gig and Wylie want to dig faster.
In the summer you can't sink a dry shaft, so you work a cut from
rim to rim. It stays warm 'cause the sun don't really go down. You
shovel off the top few inches of moss and mud, then let the warm
air melt what’s frozen underneath. Go as wide as you can, then
scrape off another layer the next day. Keep that up until you have
a pile of summer diggings you can sluice.

"And that just means letting the water run
down your line of boxes and shoveling the dumps into the top of the
last box. The dirt and sand and gravel wash out the bottom into the
tailings pile while the gold gets trapped by the riffles. At the
end of the day you turn off the water, pull out the riffles, and
clean up the gold.

"Gig and Wylie started working a cut, but
they was only down a foot or two by July when Taylor sold out. Some
of the other claims on Skookum Gulch was abandoned. If you ain't
found pay-dirt yet, it can make you wonder how much you want to
spend on your claim.

"A man named Coxey was buying into claims
when he thought the price was right. He owned a lumber-yard in
Juneau. Was thinking about setting up a mill in Circle and was on
his way down the Yukon when the Klondike hit. Coxey come up to
Skookum Gulch in late July when Gig and Wylie was working on 19,
and he asked 'em how things was going. By that time Gig knowed the
ropes and he pointed at the ground to show where the pay-streak ran
and where they was going to sink and drift that winter. Coxey
offered 'em seven thousand for both claims, and a few hours later
they shook hands on it."

"So Gig and Wylie settled for the bird in
hand? I thought Gig wanted to get rich."

Zimmerman gives me a dismissive look. "They
was two men with a pick and a shovel, and the only thing stopping
'em from cleaning up all that gold was a million cubic feet of
frozen dirt." He fingers his cup and tosses back a shot. "They was
right to take the money. Seven thousand dollars buys a year's
outfit for two men. And enough supplies to work another claim the
right way, with some left over for a spree in Dawson."

The spree was a mining-camp tradition,
Zimmerman explains. After cleaning up a season's worth of work on a
backwoods creek, a miner hungry for camaraderie and cheer would
tramp back into Fortymile or Circle or Fort Yukon with a saddlebag
full of nuggets and dust, ready to celebrate. Anyone present at the
first saloon he entered would hear him cry, "drink up boys, the
next one is on me." After calling out two or three rounds of
whiskey for the house, he would toss his poke on the bar, watch the
bartender weigh out the price, and then wave his hand to lead the
gathering out the door and down to the next saloon, where the scene
would be repeated. A good spree would last hours and disperse
hundreds of dollars worth of dust.

"Of course what they called whiskey on the
Yukon in them days was bottom of the barrel to start with, and no
telling what the saloon-keeper would mix into his bottles to water
it down. Sometimes a clear-colored hootch they made from sourdough
and brown sugar. Cooked it in a still made of coal-oil cans and
pieces of rubber boots, heated up over a stove.

"Gig and Wylie went to the gold
commissioner's office to record the sales on Skookum Gulch, then
walked around Dawson, where there was houses and hotels already
popping up that summer. They watched the builders work and had a
two-man spree... wandered from one saloon to another. Saloons don't
close until Sunday, so they slept a few hours on one of the floors.
They had breakfast at a hotel the next morning and was coming out
when they noticed a couple of men loading up a pack team in the
street.

"Gig asks 'em was they stampeding somewhere
and they say Skookum Gulch. Gig tells 'em it was staked end-to-end
in April and he just sold his claim, but they say the stampede
ain't to the creek claims. It's to the benches above the creek.
Some greenhorn flipped over a boulder two-hundred feet up the
hillside and saw gold nuggets poking out of the mud.

"No one can reckon why it's up there, but it
ain't buried deep. And it's nuggets and coarse gold, heavier than
what they been digging out down at the creek. Ogilvie said he would
record claims that was square and a hundred foot a side, and they
was going fast.

"That was the start of the bench claims,"
Zimmerman says, "but all the miners on Bonanza and Eldorado thought
it was a joke. Some said the discovery claim was salted. Ed
Peterson and Caribou Billy, the men who found it on Skookum Gulch,
was new on the Yukon, and the fellers who stampeded to the benches
was the ones who missed out on the main creeks. Miners was working
the Skookum benches all winter, but even by spring of '98 there was
no ground staked above Eldorado until Caribou Billy went
prospecting up the west hillside with the Staley brothers. They
took three pans out of a four-foot hole, carried the dirt down to
the creek, and washed out two hundred dollars.

"After that everything got named and staked.
Gold Hill, French Hill, Cheechako Hill. Some fellers said the
pay-streak up on the benches is older than the one at bedrock. They
figured the creek was up there before the glaciers carved the
mountains down."

"So did Gig and Wylie join the stampede back
up to Skookum Gulch and try to stake a bench claim? They should
have been eligible, right?"

"They knowed exactly what ground the
stampeders was talking about," Zimmerman says. "It was right above
the trail to their claims, and they walked past it a couple dozen
times by then. But Gig been Inside for more than a year, and he cut
his teeth in Cripple Creek before that. He was thinking like a
sourdough, and when the stampeders started talking about gold two
hundred feet up the hill from the creek, he didn't believe it."

Zimmerman works his closed lips back and
forth a few times, then turns his head toward the corner of the
cabin and spits. "Probably spent too much time listening to Sam
Nokes."

Chapter 28

"I guess Gig and Nokes had something in
common," I say, to see if I'll get a rise out of Zimmerman. "They
both missed chances to stake rich ground. And Wylie sounds like he
always deferred to Gig. So the only winners in this group were the
Swedes."

He doesn't take the bait. "The Swedes was
still building sluice-boxes up on Eldorado in the summer of '97,
while Clarence Berry, Tom Lippy, and Joe Ladue was riding the
steamboat down to St. Michael and sitting on piles of fifty-pound
sacks of gold. All them Klondike Kings made Seattle and San
Francisco by mid-July, and that's what started the stampede from
Outside.

"Every man coming into Dawson that first year
knowed there was going to be more rich creeks discovered. Maybe on
the Klondike, maybe somewhere else. There was rivers that no white
man explored yet. You could put a million prospectors in the Yukon
and give every man his own creek. Spread 'em out far enough they
could die of loneliness.

"Most of the sourdoughs from Circle didn't
like prospecting on Canadian ground. They was hoping the next big
strike would be down the Yukon in Alaska so they wouldn't have to
pay the royalty. It was Americans that done most of the work
finding gold, and it burned 'em to give ten percent to the Gold
Commissioner.

"The Klondike run into the Yukon from the
east, and the gold creeks run into the Klondike from the south, off
a ridge that's bare granite and rises up to what they call King
Solomon's Dome. That ridge is the divide between the Klondike and
the Indian River basin, and creeks come down from the dome like
spokes on a wheel.

"One of 'em is Gold Bottom, where Robbie
Henderson staked after climbing up to the divide from the Indian
side, before he told George Carmack about it on his way to
Fortymile. Then there's Hunker, Bonanza, Eldorado, Independence,
Last Chance. All them creeks is on the Klondike side.

"But there's just as many on the Indian River
side, and they all got headwaters up on the same ridge. So it makes
sense that fellers who missed out on the Klondike creeks would go
up and over the divide. That was the next stampede, in August, and
Gig and Wylie was in on that one too."

"So they didn't go back to Eldorado to work
for the Swedes?"

"They went back, but the Swedes didn't need
'em so much anymore. When Gig and Wylie was going off to Skookum
Gulch every couple of weeks, Lindfors started looking for other men
to fill in. By August the Swedes got their summer cut down to the
pay-streak, so they was taking out enough gold they could pay wages
every night. Fellers that needed to put some dust in their pokes
would stop by to work for a few days. When one of 'em headed down
to Dawson or out on a tramp, another man shows up to take his
place.

"Gig and Wylie both had three thousand left
from selling the Skookum claims, so they didn't have much use for
digging out someone else's gold at fifteen dollars a day. But
Skookum gave 'em a taste for staking new ground, and that's what
they wanted to do. Find something like Eldorado and they could put
their money to work on it, then start pulling out a few hundred a
day. Maybe more. If it cost too much to dig to pay-dirt, they could
wait for the right time to sell.

"They was up on 48 and 49 Eldorado with the
Swedes when the stampede to Sulfur Creek got going. That was about
the middle of August, and it was a big one, over five hundred men
climbing over the divide. What made it so big was going into the
Indian River district. So even if you already staked in the
Klondike, you can stake again in the Indian. And Sulfur come into
Dominion Creek the same way Eldorado run into Bonanza, so that made
fellers excited.

"Dominion was staked a couple months before
Sulfur, when the first stampede went out to the Indian River. Just
like with Bonanza in '96, you had some sourdoughs who panned, found
nothing, and walked away. Others staked and swore Dominion was as
good as the Klondike creeks. Most fellers wasn't sure but staked
anyway.

"Three fellers that was too late on Dominion
started tramping west through the hills above the Indian River,
heading back toward the Yukon. They come upon the middle part of
Sulfur Creek in late June, washed out good colors, and decided to
work the site. Only a few feet down they was getting five-dollar
pans, so they staked and headed back to Dawson to record. They
didn't tell no one, maybe 'cause they was waiting for friends to
get there, but word leaked out in August, and that's when Gig and
Wylie heared about it.

"They throwed some grub and blankets and
cheesecloth for the mosquitoes into their packs, strapped on pans
and a shovel, and headed up toward the ridge. They was pretty close
already, 'cause the top of Eldorado is only about twelve miles from
the top of Sulfur. But there's slopes of loose rock on both sides
of the divide and thick spruce in the gulches, so you ain't usually
going in a straight line. Sometimes you got to pick your way down
half a mile to get past a cliff, then climb back up to clear a
ravine. In the woods you got deadfall trees crossing every which
way, and it's like walking through a maze.

"After they come over the divide and down a
scree field, Gig and Wylie was following a pup stream into a
shallow drainage. The pup runs southeast, and they figured that was
the right direction to run into Sulfur Creek. Where the pup come
into a bigger creek, they turned downstream, thinking they was
heading toward the discovery claim. They followed that creek for a
while and didn't see no other miners or claim-stakes, and then it
started dropping faster. Gig and Wylie was still sticking close to
the side, but now the banks was getting steeper and rockier, and up
ahead the creek drops away, like it's coming into a gorge. When you
hear the water roaring ahead of you, it makes you stop and
think.

"That's when they reckoned it wasn't Sulfur
Creek. They was on Quartz Creek, and it got prospected and named a
few weeks later by miners coming up from the Indian River. Quartz
Creek turned out to be one of the best in the district. Gig and
Wylie knowed they had to follow it back up to the pup, but the way
this creek was crashing down made it look like a gold stream.

"Wylie took off his pack and pointed to a
shallow pool on the far side of the creek, on a bend below a
waterfall. That's the kind of spot you look for, and Wylie said he
was going to go pan for colors. There was a downed tree with its
roots tipped up on their side of the creek, and the trunk was
angling upstream and across. You could use it as a bridge but you
had to be careful 'cause it was sloping uphill. Maybe three feet
above the water on the near side and five or six feet up on the
other side, where it landed on top of a boulder. And slippery, even
when you can't see the moss.

"Wylie takes his pan and starts walking
across the log. He's about to step onto the boulder on the other
side when a rotted part breaks off under his foot. He loses his
balance and waves his arms and falls sideways into the pool. Only
this part of the pool is deep, closer to the waterfall. Even in
summer that water is freezing, and when your chest and face go
under the shock drives the air right out of you. Wylie sinks in and
his legs push out downstream and he's trying to get a hold with his
feet or hands to stand or pull himself back up. And Gig is
watching, but Wylie don't come up right away. Gig starts picking
his way down to the bank, and it's hard to see Wylie 'cause the
surface of the water is moving, but it looks like he's twisting
around underwater like a snake.