BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (27 page)

"What happens next, Henry?" I lay the knife
flat and push his cup across the table. "It's your story now."

***

Zimmerman swirls the whiskey in his glass and
stares into the vapors before fixing his washed out eyes on mine.
"I wasn't in Dyea when the Swedes come out," he says. "I was
working in Skagway, a few miles down the Lynn Canal. Patching the
trail up to White Pass. They was using pack horses and they needed
men that knowed a diamond hitch."

He fills in the missing time.

"Gig sent me Veazie Wilson's book in February
of '96.
Guide to the Yukon Gold Fields
. Wrote on the title
page that he was going to Circle City, and there was more big
discoveries coming on the Yukon. Told me to head out to Juneau and
get an outfit, then sail up to Dyea and take the trail Inside.
After I got through the first chapter, I was ready to go."

Zimmerman says he left Williamsport in May of
'96 with seventy-five dollars in his pocket and rode freight trains
west until he reached San Francisco in July. That was around the
time Gig and Nokes and the Swedes were paddling into Circle City.
Carrying a short note of introduction written by two longshoremen
he met in a Sacramento rail yard, he sought out a man named Beasley
and was offered work sweeping the San Francisco docks. Within two
months he was a longshoreman, and by November he'd saved enough for
passage north and the rudiments of an outfit. His plan was to work
in Juneau until he could afford everything he needed. While doing
that, he hoped to join another party of miners heading Inside.

Ten days before he planned to leave, Henry
developed a nagging cough. He kept working, but a raw week on the
waterfront led to a fever and night sweats. Soon he was confined to
a YMCA infirmary bed, too weak to travel or work. It was February
before he was ready to return to the docks, and then it took a few
more months to restore his finances. He finally set sail for Juneau
in mid-June of '97, from the same San Francisco wharf that welcomed
the ACC's Excelsior and its Klondike Kings home from the Bering Sea
a month later.

And when Henry reached Juneau, stories about
fabulous strikes on the Yukon had already seeped out. Any miner at
Treadwell or Silver Bow who wasn't tied down by circumstance was
making plans for the Klondike or had left already. There were
vacated jobs to be filled, but Henry couldn't imagine being left
behind in Juneau as the stampede got underway.

He visited one of the well-known outfitters
and bought cheese-cloth netting, gum boots, and a rabbit-fur robe,
six by eight feet and lined with an Indian blanket. When the
outfitter scribbled a list of what he would need for a year-long
trip to the Yukon, Henry was stunned, both at the scope of the
outfit and its estimated price. It would have taken him another six
months of work in San Francisco, and in Juneau he had no idea how
to amass that kind of sum.

"That outfitter," Zimmerman says, "must have
knowed what would happen when the Klondike news got down to the
states. He asked me what kind of work I done, and I said
longshoreman work. Before that three years in a railyard, and I
growed up boating on the C&O Canal. He told me I was all right.
Said to buy a tent and a stove and a few weeks of bacon and beans,
then catch a boat up to Dyea.

"Said he guessed there would be plenty of
steamers coming along behind me, with cargo to move and horses to
pack. And he told me that after a week or two in Alaska, some of
them greenhorns would be ready to hop the next boat back to
civilization and leave their Yukon outfits behind for a dime on the
dollar."

Chapter 32

"The boat dropped us off in Dyea on the
fourth of July," Zimmerman says. "You could see the place was just
a tidal shelf where the Dyea River run into the head of the Lynn
Canal. Across the meadow at the edge of the trees there was a few
log buildings and tents, and some fellers back there was already
lighting charges or shooting guns in the air to celebrate, even
though it was still the middle of the afternoon. Maybe the Siwashes
was celebrating too, 'cause none of 'em come up to meet the boat
that day. Didn't matter. I didn't have much to carry and I didn't
need help."

Zimmerman says four young women got off in
Dyea as well, and they had plenty to carry. They'd been planning to
follow the Yukon trail to the dance halls in Circle City, but like
everyone else had now recast their sights on Dawson. Three miners
from Treadwell, a priest from Victoria, and a Western Union
engineer were also on board, and Zimmerman joined them in helping
the ladies haul their bags away from the beach.

John J. Healy's North American Transportation
and Trading Company had set up a post amongst the Indian huts in
Dyea a decade earlier, and the trail to Chilkoot Pass led past that
log building and through the trees flanking the Dyea River. When
Zimmerman started down the trail, there may have been twice as many
tents pitched alongside it as Gig saw eighteen months earlier. In
another month there would be ten times as many.

The dance-hall girls stopped at the NAT post
to inquire after their guide, a Yukon veteran named Parsons who
would lead them over the pass and hire Chilkoot Indians to pack
their goods to Bennett Lake. Parsons had assured them he would hire
a boatman to ferry them all the way from Bennett to Dawson.

The Treadwell miners were going to rent a
narrow dory and tow their outfit nineteen miles up the river to the
head of canoe navigation. From that point, Sheep Camp was only
five-hundred vertical feet and a couple of miles up the trail.

"I never figured out what that telegraph
engineer was doing in Dyea," Zimmerman says. "Maybe Jeff Smith sent
him ahead to look things over."

The NAT manager told Zimmerman the Dyea trail
was busier than it had been in previous summers, with travelers
similar to the ones he'd always seen. Sourdoughs from the
California mining camps. Inveterate wanderers looking for the next
frontier. Businessmen convinced they could be the first to bring a
vital product or service to the growing Yukon mining camps. But
like the outfitter in Juneau, the NAT manager wondered if the
Klondike news might finally establish Dyea as the gateway to the
Yukon in the minds of greenhorns back in the states.

"He told me there was a man down at Skagway
Bay who been saying the same thing for nine years, only he thought
it was going to be Skagway instead of Dyea. It's three miles back
toward the mouth of the Lynn Canal and the same kind of place.
Skagway River come down through a valley and across a big tidal
flat into the bay. But you can follow that valley up into the
hills, climb a few ridges, and then cross White Pass and come down
to the lakes.

"That man was Captain William Moore, and he
fought in Mexico in '48. Then he stampeded for gold for fifty
years, California to Peru to the Cassiar Mountains. He come up to
Alaska with his sons in '88, and when he heared about White Pass,
he staked out a townsite on Skagway Bay and started telling people
that was the way to get Inside."

Zimmerman explains Moore's reasoning. The
Dyea Trail over Chilkoot Pass to Bennett Lake is thirty-one miles.
The Skagway Trail is fourteen miles longer, but its White Pass is
almost a thousand feet lower than Chilkoot Pass, and the climb to
the pass is less steep. So the Skagway Trail is suitable for pack
animals.

"The NAT man told me people was coming up and
down the Dyea Trail, and there was always some feller with too much
of something and not enough of another. Others would change their
minds or take sick. He said I could buy or trade my way into an
outfit if I had money and time. I told him I had more time than
money, so he said maybe I should go down to Skagway. Said Captain
Moore was sure a stampede from the states was coming, and he was
hiring fellers to work on the trail."

Zimmerman says he spent a few days getting
his bearings in Dyea. He cached his goods and walked fourteen miles
up the trail to Sheep Camp, where he asked other miners about the
lakes and rapids and got his first view of the shining white
summits guarding Chilkoot Pass. Then back in Dyea he paid an Indian
boatman to row him and his two bags back up the Lynn Canal to
Skagway. The following day he walked the first four miles of the
Skagway Trail with Captain Moore.

"The Skagway River got its headwaters near
White Pass," Zimmerman says, "and drops twenty miles down to the
bay. The trail follows the river up the valley, and them first few
miles you could ride a horse and pull a wagon. You wish it would
stay like that but it don't.

"You get to Devil's Hill and the river climbs
into a gorge, and you can't follow it no more. So the trail cuts
back and forth up the hillside until you're five hundred feet above
the water. From the top you come right back down to the river on
the other side. Captain Moore put me to work on low ground between
Devil's Hill and Porcupine Ridge. A Metis feller and his
full-growed son was building a corduroy bridge over a pup stream
running into the river, and that takes three sets of hands.
Climbing over Devil's Hill for the first time, even before hundreds
of men and horses got there, I knowed trouble was coming.

"There's places where you squeeze past one
boulder and step up onto another. The tops ain't level and there's
loose rock and deep cracks with scrub bushes growing out of 'em.
Take a bad step one way and you fall ten feet into a pit between
the rocks. Slip the other way and it's five hundred straight down
to the water. Most places the trail ain't more than two feet wide,
so you got to back up and find a spot to pass someone coming the
other way.

"Porcupine Ridge was even worse – steeper
than Devil's Hill, with boulders waist-high and muddy ground
between 'em. And sloping rocks you got to cross sideways. Lose your
balance and you're falling off a cliff.

"After we finished that first corduroy
bridge, we climbed over the ridge to put one across a pup on the
other side. Them bridges is a lot of work, but when you build 'em
right they hold up, and they don't spook the horses 'cause the
footing is good. You use split logs with the flat side down for the
planks, and stringers nailed top and bottom for the rails.

"When we finished a bridge, we'd go back to
Skagway and Captain Moore's cook would feed us for two nights, pack
a few days of grub on our backs, and send us back out to build the
next one. Must of put five or six between Devil's Hill and the last
pitch on Summit Hill. And when we was done, the best parts of that
trail looked good enough. But that was before the first boat
unloaded at Skagway."

Zimmerman tells me that Captain Moore had
been prescient, and that steamers from the west-coast ports began
arriving in the last week of July '97. All were full of greenhorns
who had assembled their outfits and booked passage for Alaska
within days after the Klondike Kings disembarked in San Francisco
and Seattle in mid-July. Some stampeders brought lumber to build a
boat, some brought photographic plates and tins of film, and some
brought wheeled contraptions of their own design that they hoped to
pull up the trails.

Word of the Skagway Trail's moderate grade
had spread south to the states, so most of the greenhorns also
brought their own pack horses, along with tons of hay and oats. For
the hundred and fifty stampeders on a typical steamer, there might
be five or six hundred horses on a lower deck, packed shoulder to
shoulder in stalls too narrow for them to lie down or turn
around.

Until Captain Moore and his crew finished
building a long wharf across the tidal flat to deeper water in the
fall, Skagway Harbor operated like a hastily-designed machine.
Steamboat captains were only willing to approach the tidal flat at
high tide, and passengers were responsible for handling and
off-loading all of their baggage and animals.

So the passengers organized themselves, and
some were assigned to bring goods up out of the ship's hold. Others
helped load the ship's dinghies, which had been lowered to the
water. The dinghies then ferried the bags and crates as close to
dry sand as the tide allowed, where they were transferred to
horse-drawn carts and carried a quarter-mile up the beach to higher
ground near the trees. Finally the goods were separated into a
different pile for each owner. And at every step along the way, an
overseer was designated to guard against theft. Unloading a hundred
tons of baggage and supplies took most of a day.

"We brung the passengers off in rowboats,
twenty-five cents a head," Zimmerman says. "Maybe a dozen Siwashes
in canoes doing the same. Didn't move the horses until everything
else was off the boat. Then we walked 'em down a ramp onto a scow,
a dozen at a time, and towed 'em in with rowboats. Dropped 'em in
shallow water and let 'em wade ashore. Even with two scows working,
getting the horses off took most of a day. Sometimes longer, if you
got two steamers unloading at the same time.

"So then there's a few hundred tenderfeet,
most of 'em in groups of two or three but some on their own, all
moving their outfits back from the beach into the woods, cutting
down trees, lighting fires, and putting up tents. Soon you got
tents for half a mile along the trail. When you watch 'em start
packing, you figure this might be the first horse they ever
saddled. And they probably bought a used-up horse that nobody
wanted no more, 'cause that's what the outfitters was bringing to
the docks in Seattle and Victoria.

"You need a frame and a diamond hitch to keep
a load on a horse's back, and if you try something else the load
will slide off and you might as well use saddle-bags. One time when
I was rowing passengers ashore I seen two fellers up the beach
dressed in riding gear, with three horses tied to a downed tree and
a fourth they was trying to load. The first time I noticed 'em they
got a hundred pounds on its back. The next time I rowed out they
got two hundred up. The third time the whole load was off and they
was arguing about something. The next time I seen the horse shake
off two fifty-pound bags. I rowed out and back for three hours and
they never got that horse packed."