The Floor of Heaven Read online

  ALSO BY HOWARD BLUM

  Nonfiction

  AMERICAN LIGHTNING

  THE EVE OF DESTRUCTION

  THE BRIGADE

  THE GOLD OF EXODUS

  GANGLAND

  OUT THERE

  I PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE

  The True Story of the Walkers: An American Spy Family

  WANTED!

  The Search for Nazis in America

  Fiction

  WISHFUL THINKING

  Copyright © 2011 by Howard Blum

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Blum, Howard.

  The floor of heaven : a true tale of the last frontier and the Yukon gold rush / Howard Blum.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Yukon River Valley (Yukon and Alaska)—Gold discoveries. 2. West (U.S.)—History—1860–1890. 3. Gold mines and mining—Yukon River Valley (Yukon and Alaska)—History—19th century. 4. Siringo, Charles A., 1855–1928. 5. Smith, Jefferson Randolph, 1860–1898. 6. Carmack, George W. (George Washington), 1860–1922. 7. Yukon River Valley (Yukon and Alaska)—Biography. 8. West (U.S.)—Biography. I. Title.

  F912.Y9B58 2010

  978′.02—dc22 2010038230

  eISBN: 978-0-307-46174-2

  MAP BY JOE LEMONNIER

  JACKET DESIGN BY W. G. COOKMAN

  JACKET PHOTOGRAPH BY GETTY IMAGES/AURORA CREATIVE

  v3.1

  For my sister Marcy,

  who has a heart of gold

  Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music

  Creep in our ears: soft stillness, and the night,

  Becomes the touches of sweet harmony.

  Sit, Jessica: look, how the floor of heaven

  Is thick inlaid with patterns of bright gold.

  —William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

  They were a rough bunch, rough in dress, rough in speech and rough handed, but just as great hearted and manly as they were rough. Real men, every one of them, with muscles and sinews like iron bands, developed by continuous and arduous exercise. There was no real adventure too strenuous or dangerous for them to undertake. They possessed the kind of power and strength that make men invincible, with characters broadened and strengthened by the hardships and privations they had been forced to endure, in their unequal struggle with the mighty forces of Nature in the unknown and desolate wilds.

  —George Carmack, My Experiences in the Yukon

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  A Note to the Reader

  Prologue: Up the Yukon River

  Part I: Premonitions

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part II: Gold!

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Photo Insert

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Part III: Skagway

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  A Note on Sources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  A Note to the Reader

  his is a true story. It is a history of the last years of the Old West and of the Yukon gold rush. It is also a narrative that recounts the lives of three unique men—Charles Siringo, the cowboy detective; Jefferson “Soapy” Smith, the gambler who built an underworld empire; and George Carmack, the prospector whose discovery set off the stampede to the Yukon. In the telling of their interweaving tales, I have benefited from several firsthand accounts. Without these invaluable tools, I would not have been able to portray these men and what they were doing, saying, and even thinking with either accuracy or vividness.

  Therefore, the reader should know that I am greatly indebted to the following sources: Charlie Siringo wrote four first-person accounts of his life. These are remarkable documents—folksy, witty, suspenseful, and perceptive. Soapy Smith was shot down before he could fulfill his often-made promise—or threat, considering the secrets he knew—to record his life story. Jeff Smith, his great-grandson, however, has taken Soapy’s letters, correspondence from other family members, diary entries, legal records, as well as the albums of newspaper clippings Soapy collected, and written a smart and exhaustive biography that was published by Klondike Research, in Juneau, Alaska. It was James Albert Johnson who in 1957 discovered an apple crate in a secondhand Seattle bookstore filled with the George Carmack papers. No one was certain how the collection had made its way to the Shorey Book Store, but there was no doubt it was a treasure trove: decades of letters from George to his sister, Rose; handwritten descriptions of his prospecting days; pages of his own romantic poetry; and family photographs. Johnson bought the contents of the apple crate for $500, and he willed the papers to the University of Washington. I am grateful to the university and its Special Collections Division for sharing this invaluable resource with me.

  A chapter-by-chapter note on sources appears at the conclusion of this book.

  s the millionaire’s steamboat chugged north against the current, up the Yukon River, and sidled past the distant Mackenzie Mountains that late-summer day in 1882, the river remained smooth and wide, easy to navigate, but the water had suddenly turned gray and opaque. It was as if the blades—buckets, the builder had called them—of the New Racket’s paddle wheel were pushing through a fog. The sun shined high in a big dome of blue sky; nevertheless, Edward Schieffelin stood on the deck staring out at a long stretch of water that held the color of a storm cloud. It was a puzzlement. But as Schieffelin sorted it out in his mind, he came to believe—and not for the first time on his long expedition into the Alaskan wilderness—that he’d stumbled onto a clue. When he was finally convinced, he gave the order to pull the New Racket close to shore and drop anchor. Gold, he predicted with an absolute certainty to his team, lay in this dark channel.

  Schieffelin’s instincts had served him well before. Six years earlier he’d been a penniless Indian scout at Camp Huachuca in the Arizona Territory when on a similar hunch he’d ventured deep into Apache country. The soldiers had tried to warn him off; Geronimo’s renegade braves still roamed the cracked, treeless flatlands surrounding the Dragoon Mountains. “The only rock
you’ll find out there,” he was told, “will be your own tombstone.” But Schieffelin paid them no mind.

  He’d always been a willful, independent sort. Odd, too, if you asked some of the soldiers. His thick black hair and beard fell in a tangle past his shoulders, he was thin as a scarecrow, and his getup was homespun. Day after day, he wore the same slouch hat decorated with squirrel fur, its brim pulled straight back as though blown by a sudden gust of wind, and the same pair of deerskin trousers, which he’d patched over the years with scraps of flannel and corduroy. It was his eyes, though, that made folks jumpy. Schieffelin didn’t look so much as stare; his soft gray eyes always seemed to be focused on some distant place that he alone could see. Now that he’d gotten it into his mind that there was a “big strike” waiting to be found in the San Pedro Valley, he wasn’t about to let the threat of marauding Apaches scare him off. He went off into this rough country—and found a mountain loaded with silver ore. He also enjoyed a mischievous last laugh on the people who’d tried to discourage him: He named the town built on the mesa adjacent to his treasure-trove mine Tombstone. And by the time Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday had their shoot-out with the Clanton brothers in the town’s O.K. Corral, Schieffelin had shrewdly sold out to a group of Philadelphia investors for well over $1 million.

  The money, however, didn’t change the nature of Schieffelin’s dreams. It stoked them. Visions of a new, distant treasure had taken hold of his imagination, and now he had the bankroll to pursue it. It had been his prospector’s habit to study maps, and this practice had led to a theory. A mineral belt, he’d deduced from just a smattering of evidence, circled the globe from Cape Horn to the far reaches of Asia, a highway through the core of the earth paved with gold and silver that crossed North America near the Continental Divide and went on down to the Andes. According to this theory, Alaska’s Yukon Valley stretched directly across its glittering path.

  The maps he consulted were primitive. Much of the world, after all, was still waiting to be explored. And many geographers were insisting that the Yukon River flowed north into the Arctic Ocean, not west into the Bering Sea. But with his customary confidence, Schieffelin had no doubts that a fortune, a colossal golden windfall many times the size of his Tombstone discovery, had lain hidden for millions of years in the long Yukon River Valley. It was Nature’s gift, waiting to be claimed by the prospector with the requisite courage, daring, and knowledge. Edward Schieffelin decided it would be his.

  Dressed in his slouch hat and deerskins but with the newly acquired authority that great wealth imparts, Schieffelin walked into a San Francisco shipyard in the winter of 1881 and commissioned a steamboat. As the 175-foot, three-decked New Racket was being built, he recruited a team to accompany him to Alaska. Two of the men had sweated alongside him in his Tombstone mine, his brother Effingham and Jack Young. The fourth, Charles Farciot, was a Swiss-born Civil War veteran who’d been traveling around the Arizona Territory for years, taking photographs of soldiers, miners, settlers, and Indians. Schieffelin presumed posterity would want a photographic record of his momentous expedition, too.

  In the first days of the spring of 1882, a schooner dragged the New Racket by a stout towline from San Francisco up the Pacific to St. Michael, a port the Russians had established on the Bering Sea. After their supplies were loaded, the prospectors did not want to waste any time. Schieffelin and his team boarded the little boat and quickly went to work feeding cords of wood and shovelfuls of coal into the boilers, and before long an explosion of fresh, hot steam was roiling. Suddenly, a deep, guttural rumble shook the ship’s hold, but then the engines settled into their steady, noisy grind and the two paddle wheels at the stern of the boat started turning in monotonous circles as they sliced through the water. With a great plume of dark smoke rising from its two tall smokestacks into the perfect blue sky, the New Racket began its journey across Norton Sound, heading toward the uncharted meandering labyrinth of the vast Yukon River and into the heart of Alaska.

  IT WAS a voyage where every moment seemed a discovery. All was new to their eyes; and, in fact, few if any white men had ever gone here before. The sun remained high in the sky day and night, illuminating a majestic wilderness that seemed as mysterious and exciting to the team of prospectors as a fantasy kingdom in a children’s storybook. They kept a fascinated watch as their boat chugged up the twisting river past ramparts of brawny snow-capped mountains, dense green-iced glaciers glowing in the strong light, forests of tall spruce and formidable evergreens that stretched on thick and endless like secret worlds, then through deep green valleys sparkling with brier rose and bluebells, and on and still on past brackish primordial marshes, and a hundred, no, a thousand unexplored and unnamed brooding islands. Dangers, real and imagined, gathered on every shore. Intricately carved totems rose on the riverbanks to mark Indian graves, and there were occasions when the more sharp-eyed of the men saw figures, no doubt Indian braves, darting through the forests, keeping watch on them and perhaps, they feared, planning to attack the invaders. There were also the stories they’d heard in San Francisco of what roamed out there, tales of woolly man-eating prehistoric beasts as large as hills and giant ferocious bears with razor-sharp talons the length of pickaxes. As they looked out into this fresh strange land, a wild kingdom, all the large stories seemed eerily possible. And each new twist of the river brought new challenges and new decisions; you could give the order to head in one direction and you might very well disappear into a maze of countless channels, lost forever in the winding tentacles of the great and unpredictable river.

  Yet it wasn’t whim that was determining the course of their journey. Schieffelin had a plan. He was not a trained geologist, but he’d picked up a good deal of practical knowledge over the many years, both as a boy and a man, he’d hunted for gold. He knew what he was looking for in Alaska.

  Gold, he understood, was a very singular metal. It had been formed over the course of millions of years in the cauldron of the earth’s core and had then moved upward, toward the surface, into crevices and fissures, as the aging planet shifted about. You could get at it by mining, by sinking a deep shaft into the stony heart of the planet’s underground, shoring this tunnel with a backbone of timbers that would hopefully hold back a suffocating avalanche of dirt and rock; and then with judicious dynamiting and backbreaking shovel work in a dark, narrow, nearly airless hole, someday, if your luck held, the glimmer of a subterranean vein would be revealed. It was a grim, tedious, and dangerous enterprise. And success was as rare as an answered prayer. But there was also another more adventuresome way to find gold.

  Gold traveled. As the earth stretched and heaved over the eons of time, rocks containing veins of gold rose up to the surface in this volcanic turmoil. Winds and rains, sleets and snows, streams and rivers, the abrasion of five million active years ground these rocks, honing them, until the gold was set free. And the gold traveled. The light metal was carried along by torrents of water, by fast-moving streams and mighty rivers. It traveled to gorges cut into ancient valleys, to riverbeds and sandbars, across gravel beaches, and down churning streams and quiet creeks. Nature would determine where it was driven, and gravity would dictate where it settled. But it all eventually came to rest, golden specks as fine as sand and tawny nuggets as big as knuckles, a legacy accumulating since the beginning of time that lay like a bright yellow carpet across the planet’s floor.

  The prospectors called this, Schieffelin knew, placer gold. To get it, you panned. You stuck your tin pan into the water, gave the muck and gravel you brought up a careful, well-practiced shake followed by an earnest wash, and if you spotted colors, flecks of gold, or, even better, a nugget, you knew you were on to something. You had found your spot. All you had to do was dig down a bit past the bedrock, often just a foot or two, and a bonanza was yours for the taking.

  Of course, knowing where to pan was essential to success. A prospector’s instincts were part science and part pure wishful thinking. You had to follow moving water,
tracing in your mind the logical course of a bounty of fast-moving gold, and then decide where this millennium-old journey would’ve come to a halt. But since this pathway might very well have been altered over the ages, since a raging stream might once have raced through a now bone-dry valley or a placid creek might one million years ago have been a meandering river, guesswork was a large part of the process. You had to imagine how the earth once was; and in those reckonings, science could guide the prospector only so far. His hunches had to inform him.

  And so throughout that spring and summer, as the New Racket had moved up river, Schieffelin had been scouting for placer gold fields and playing his hunches. Time after time, Schieffelin, bursting with his usual confidence, had seen something that had sparked an unshakable prediction. He’d order the boat to drop anchor and then they’d spend an energetic day or two panning near a sandbar, poking around the mosses of a riverbank, or wading through a stream rushing with glistening, ice-cold water. Each of these forays had ended in disappointment. No colors had ever shined in his pan. After each excursion, all Schieffelin could do was to find the faith to swallow his frustration and give the order to hoist anchor and steam north.

  But now, staring at this dark stretch of river, he knew in his heart and in his mind that destiny had indeed been leading him all along. Nature had churned this channel, tossing dark sand and alluvial silt up from the depths, whirling it all about in a turmoil until the water was heavy with sediment and ash—and had turned color. Perhaps there had been a volcanic disturbance; the mountains in the distance, Schieffelin judged, certainly looked ominous. Or maybe it was the effects of a relentless, pounding rainstorm. Ultimately, Schieffelin did not care about the reasons; he would let other men dwell on the science. His attention focused on the result. With all the forceful heaving, with all the shifting about of the riverbed, he knew: Gold had been pried and loosened from its primeval resting places and had floated toward the surface. He had not an iota of doubt: This channel would be his bonanza.