The Floor of Heaven Read online

They panned for three days. It was orderly, meticulous work. Standing against the terraced bank, he’d submerge his pan into the dark water that ran along the river’s sandy floor; wash off the larger rocks and bits of moss with a gentle, well-practiced circular twist of his wrists, leveling the pan from time to time as he shook it; and then, just to be sure, he’d repeat the entire process before looking for a telltale golden color in the grist of dank sand. Hour after hour, day after day, he kept at it. His success in Arizona had taught him that perseverance was as crucial a tool as luck. He refused to move on. He knew this channel held his next big strike.

  On the third day, he found it. A yellow nugget as big as a Yankee dollar lay in his pan. Bursting with excitement, he took it out of the pan and held it up toward the sun. In the bright daylight, it glittered with promise. But common sense required that he give the rock a strong scratch or two with his thumb—and the bright color rubbed off. It was just another big, worthless rock. And with that realization, all his remaining hope might just as well have been squeezed out of him.

  Later that day, Schieffelin gave the order to up anchor. Under a fresh head of steam, the New Racket was soon once again puffing up the long, twisting river.

  SCHIEFFELIN HAD more hunches; and more disappointments. And when the sun was no longer so high on the horizon and a sharp chill was in the air, he realized they’d better find a place to settle in for winter.

  They had been steaming up the fast-moving Tanana River, a tributary of the Yukon, when they saw to their astonishment a trading post. It faced a mossy, high-grassed inlet that was a natural harbor, and when they rowed ashore a wizened trapper greeted them with the announcement that he was the proprietor as well as, for that matter, the king of all they surveyed. The Indians called the place Nuklayaket, the trapper said. Schieffelin looked around and decided it was as good a place as any to hunker down.

  He set the men to work building a cabin while each day he went off with his pan. He was not ready to quit. He knew gold was out there waiting for him. But measuring out his days in what had become an unremittingly frustrating exercise began to take its toll. Like the deep, darkening autumn sky that was swiftly beginning to hide the sun, doubts were starting to blot his confidence. Mistake, miscalculation, even folly—a vocabulary of defeat was taking form in his mind.

  Then winter came. It didn’t arrive so much as attack. The wind grabbed at you and the snow pummeled, but the cold was the truly vindictive adversary. Schieffelin would wrap his newly purchased polar bear skin over his parka and yet could still feel the frost taking him in its death grip. His body shook as much from terror as from the chill; and all he could do in self-defense was to recall the dry, heavy heat of the Arizona desert. But the cold was never out of his mind for long. The trapper had rigged up a thermometer of sorts: four bottles, each one containing a different fluid. The bottle that held mercury would freeze at forty degrees below zero Fahrenheit, the coal oil at fifty below, and the jamaica ginger extract at sixty below; the Perry Davis’ Painkiller didn’t turn solid until it hit seventy-five below. There were many brutal nights when Schieffelin looked at the Perry Davis bottle and saw a dark mass.

  Another sort of cruelty was the trapper’s constant taunting. He said Schieffelin had embarked on a fool’s mission: There was no gold up in the high north country. Sure, hard rock gold had been discovered a few years back in the Alaska Panhandle, near Juneau. But that was ore buried deep beneath the earth. Mining engineers had to dynamite their way near to China to get at it. Anyways, Juneau was near the coast, over a thousand miles from this inland river valley. And, Schiefflin learned to his surprise, he was not the first prospector to roam about the Yukon Valley. The trapper told him in that back in 1873 Arthur Harper had done a fair share of prospecting along the river, and five years later George Holt had crossed over the Chilkoot Pass to look for placer gold. Both men had come up empty-handed. And so would Schieffelin, the trapper assured him. Can’t find what isn’t there, he said flatly.

  SPRING AT last came. A thin ray of light pierced the southern sky, and finally the sun itself rose on the horizon. With the new, fresh season, Schieffelin once more found his will. He made up his mind to set out again.

  The New Racket steamed upriver. Fortified by this renewed confidence, Schieffelin found encouraging signs. Days were spent panning. Yet the results were always the same: nothing. It was dispiriting; the expedition had turned into a grim exercise. And a second winter would be worse than the first. Schieffelin now knew what to expect, and the prospect was more torment than any sane man could endure.

  He gave each of the men $200 as a gratuity for their loyal service, and before the summer was over he arranged for the sale of the steamboat. The Oregon Territory, he’d come around to thinking, was a surefire treasure field.

  I was wrong, Schieffelin announced to his team with a weary resignation on the day he departed Alaska for Portland. My theory, my instincts—all were ill-conceived ditherings, foolish mistakes. There is no gold to be panned in this godforsaken frozen wasteland. There’s not a single nugget to be found in the entire Yukon River Valley.

  ONE

  fter a good deal of thought, Charlie Siringo decided to hang his sign on the new iron bridge spanning Bluff Creek. It would take a bit of doing; he’d need to link chains to the top of the bridge’s battlement and then run ’em through a couple of holes he’d punch in the corners of the painted board that, to his great delight, had turned out “as pretty as a picture.” Sure, Kansas, he’d come to realize, had more than its fair share of weather; on a gusty day the oval-shaped sign would be flaying about. Nevertheless, Charlie was certain. This was the perfect spot.

  He remembered that two years earlier—two years? It might as well have been in another lifetime—when he’d led the LX outfit and eight hundred fat steers up the Chisholm Trail, the sight of muddy Bluff Creek had filled the worn-out cowboys with excitement and anticipation. It had been a long, slow drive up from the Texas Panhandle during the uncommonly hot summer of 1882, day after day as dry as the piles of bleached chalk-white buffalo bones they saw scattered across the flat plains. Nights took their time coming, but the thin, cool evening whistling through the scrubland was a blessing—for a while. Once they crossed the Red River, the darkness brought new concerns. They were in Indian Territory. Most of the old chiefs had made their peace, but there was always the fear of half-starved Kiowa or Cherokee renegades swooping in from out of the thickening shadows to pick off cattle from the herd, or some ponies from the remuda, and, for good measure, lift a few fresh scalps. But Bluff Creek was the landmark that told the cowboys their ordeal was over. They were coming out of Indian Territory and heading up the end of the trail. Sporting girls, whiskey, and the railroad were only a short, hard ride away in Caldwell.

  The Santa Fe Railroad had come to Caldwell, Kansas, in 1880, and now that there was a shipping point to the eastern markets days closer to the Texas ranches than either Wichita or Dodge City, Caldwell quickly became a hurrah cow town. The “Queen City of the Border” the cowboys called it. And once the LX outfit got near Bluff Creek, it was as if whoring and drinking and gambling was all anyone could think about. Around the campfire, there was a lot of hot talk about the rattling good time the boys were looking forward to at Mag Wood’s celebrated Red Light Saloon.

  Charlie, too, had every intention of finding himself a bottle of whiskey and a sweetheart to share it. The way he saw it, after more than two dusty months driving a herd, a cowboy had earned himself a howling night. But he was also the trail boss; a leader had a duty to his men to impart a few words of commonsense restraint. Besides, at twenty-seven he was older and more experienced than most of the outfit. He had seen the trouble a fellow could ride into when coming off the range. So as they were heading up on Bluff Creek and the talk was getting pretty feverish, Charlie decided it’d be a good time to tell the hands about the scrape he had gotten into in Dodge City.

  IT HAD been a few years back, the day before Independence Day 1
877, and Charlie, a twenty-two-year-old cowpuncher, had completed a long drive up the Chisholm Trail with the Littlefield herd. Sitting with his chum Wess Adams, he’d been happily drinking the night and his pay away in the Lone Star dance hall. The place was rollicking, crowded with buffalo hunters, cowboys, and flirting ladies hoping to take some money off them. Bat Masterson, who usually could be found at one of the poker tables, was working that night as the barkeeper.

  By around eleven P.M., though, things started getting strained; buffalo hunters and cowboys had a tendency to taunt one another, and the liquor helped to erode any inclinations toward indulgence. Wess, particularly, had grown vexed by the disrespectful words. He told Charlie that Jim White needed to be taught some manners, and he wanted to know if Charlie would stand by him in a fight. White was a long-haired, greasy hard case of a buffalo hunter, and about the size of a mountain to boot. Yet Charlie wasn’t one to quit on a fellow cowboy. “Start the ball rolling,” he agreed.

  Wess threw the first punch, and in an instant cowboys and buffalo hunters were going at it. But it was Bat Masterson who drew first blood.

  From behind the bar, Masterson hurled one heavy beer mug after another at Charlie. A mug slammed hard into his head, another cracked against a mirror, and suddenly shards of flying glass cut into Charlie’s face. With blood streaming down his cheek, Charlie watched as Masterson charged into the fracas armed with an ice mallet. As if he were hammering a fence post into the ground, Masterson pounded away at the face of a big Dutch cowboy. With each solid blow, blood spurted from the Dutchman’s face. Charlie wanted to go to the cowboy’s aid, but he was too busy trading punches, trying to keep on his feet; if a buffalo hunter took you down, his friends were certain to pile on, and then all would be lost.

  Jim White was soon lying on the floor, blood oozing from his head, dying, and the Dutchman’s face was raw meat. Then Charlie saw a buffalo hunter plunge a knife into Wess’s back, driving the blade in up to the handle and giving it a mean, punishing twist. At once his friend collapsed to his knees. Dodging a flying chair, Charlie hurried over and somehow managed to drag Wess out the saloon door. A deep horseshoe-shaped wound had soaked the back of Wess’s shirt red, but he had not lost consciousness. Charlie got Wess on his horse, and he’d just mounted Whiskey Pete, his cow pony, when the sheriff ran over and indignantly barked that they were under arrest. Without a word, Charlie drew his big silver-plated, pearl-handled Colt .45 and charged Whiskey Pete up the wooden steps right at the lawman. The sheriff turned and ran. So with Wess slumped in the saddle and Charlie letting loose a triumphant cowboy yell, the two men put spurs to their horses and galloped east out of Dodge.

  Telling the story to the LX hands, he said his point was “to illustrate what fools cowboys were after long drives up the trail.” “Had a shot been fired that night in the dance hall,” he lectured with an uncustomary earnestness, “the chances are several new mounds would have been added to Boot Hill,” Dodge City’s graveyard.

  Sure enough, Charlie’s warning worked. None of his men landed in any real trouble in Caldwell. Instead, to the amusement of the whole outfit, it was Charlie who stumbled; and it was a fall that even an experienced hand like Charlie himself would never have anticipated.

  AFTER THE cattle had been chuted onto stock cars and were on the rail to Chicago, Charlie passed a pleasant winter in Caldwell. Throughout the cold months he kept warm with festive nights and accommodating ladies. But in March Charlie received a letter from David Thomas Beals, the Boston-based owner of the sprawling LX Ranch. He was ordered to lead more than one hundred head of cow ponies and a crew of cowboys back down to the panhandle. As fate would have it, the same day the letter arrived he also received an invitation from Miss May Beals, the boss’s niece, to accompany her to church. And it was after the evening service, while they were standing on the church steps, that it happened.

  Miss Beals introduced Charlie to her new friend, Mamie Lloyd. Charlie would always insist that he could not remember a word that passed between them. No doubt there must’ve been some conversation about the impression the raucous “Queen City of the Border” had made on Miss Lloyd; along with her parents, she’d only recently moved to Caldwell from their home in sedate Shelbyville, Illinois. Still, all Charlie could remember with any certainty was the impression the fifteen-year-old black-eyed Mamie made on him. Though she was still a ruddy-cheeked teenager, he detected a precocious maturity, an impressive promise of authority and confidence. She charmed him, too. Mamie presented herself with a self-conscious shyness, but even in those few moments on the church steps this well-bred reticence would without warning give way to a magnificently mischievous smile. Their one brief, seemingly inconsequential conversation that March evening had an immediate effect on Charlie: “I was a sure-enough locoed cowboy—up to my ears in love.”

  It was a whirlwind courtship. Mamie’s father, H. Clay Lloyd, was, however, a bit of an impediment. The prospect of his only daughter taking up with a freewheeling Texas-born cowpuncher a dozen years her senior did not strike him as a promising match. But Charlie, as he would recall in his typically straightforward way, “wanted her and wanted her badly.” He went to work “with a brave heart and a face lined with brass.” Charlie pointed out to the old Yankee gent that while there was no denying that since his eleventh birthday he had spent a good deal of his days cowboying and living an adventuresome life on the range, he had managed to work his way up to being a top hand. You don’t achieve that position without earning respect, or becoming comfortable with responsibility. With no less diligence, he also convinced Mamie that his love was not simply impetuous but genuine.

  Three days after they met, Mamie and Charlie were engaged. Three days after the engagement, they were married. With both Charlie’s mother and Mamie’s parents attending, the wedding dinner was held in the Phillips Hotel in Wellington, Kansas, a town not much bigger than Caldwell but with a decidedly more respectable reputation. And three days after the ceremony, Charlie saddled up to lead an outfit of twenty-five men, one hundred horses, and six wagons back down to the LX ranch in the Texas Panhandle. He left his new “girl-wife,” as he affectionately liked to call young Mamie, behind with her parents.

  The abruptness of their separation—not even time for much of a honeymoon—did not sit too well with Charlie. He was torn. He needed a job, especially now that he was a married man. Staying in town, he’d have no way to make a living. Besides, David Beals was the best man he had ever worked for, an honest, broad-gauge cattle man. Mr. Beals was counting on him; it wouldn’t do to let him down. Resigned, Charlie rode off.

  He spent a hardworking spring down in the southeastern corner of the panhandle in charge of a roundup crew roping and branding some three thousand cows that had been grazing along the Pease River. When he could, he wrote to Mamie. Her letters were more frequent, but their arrival was always bittersweet, each crisp page lying in his hand as if it were a tangible piece of the unlived life he’d left behind. It was an anxious, unsettled time, and the thought increasingly crossed his mind that the cowboy life had lost its charm.

  Late in July, he started back to Caldwell with a new herd bound for the stockyards, and he had never ridden up the trail with such a sense of eagerness or anticipation. His reunion with Mamie that September was pure joy; she was even prettier than she had loomed in his campfire memories.

  But no sooner was he reunited with his bride than the order came from Mr. Beals to take the outfit back to the panhandle and get another drove. Charlie didn’t want to go. The pleasures of sharing a feather mattress with Mamie were a lot more appealing than the prospect of bunking down with a herd of foul-smelling big-horned steers. Still, Charlie decided he’d better obey.

  Brooding, his mood growing more and more keyed up, he went to town and supervised as the cook and a few hands loaded the wagon up with chuck. When it was done, he gave the order to move out, and men and horses started toward the territory line. It was a tense, largely silent departure.


  Yet it was only as the outfit approached Bluff Creek that Charlie fully realized the extent of his displeasure. He couldn’t go west. He couldn’t bring himself to lead his horse across the creek bed and out of Kansas. He felt no need to explain himself to anyone. He simply told Charlie Sprague, a good, responsible hand, that he was turning everything over to him. Then he gave the boys a farewell wave, circled his horse around, and galloped back to Mamie.

  CHARLIE DECIDED he’d become a merchant. First morning back, he woke up next to Mamie, and the comfortable warmth of her body curved around his made him realize he’d never return to his itinerant cowpunching life. Yet he knew he still had to earn a living. And then, before he had time even to worry too much about things, a thought popped into his head: Why not open a store? He mulled the possibility for only a few moments and, satisfied, judged that it offered as good a prospect as any job he’d get in town.

  After breakfast, as the rash plan took deeper hold, he strung together some wishful logic and shared it with his wife. Rough as Caldwell was, he explained, eager to convince himself as much as Mamie, there was no denying the town was growing rapidly. A storekeeper who didn’t mind a bit of hard work should be able to find himself plenty of customers.

  Full of confidence, he rented a vacant room on Main Street and only then began to set about trying to determine what he might sell. He was sitting in the empty space, puffing with a focused, pensive concentration on one of his adored brown cigars, when a flash of inspiration struck.

  Other than whiskey and women, what was the one thing you could always count on a cowboy’s having a taste for? The answer was, literally, right on his lips: cigars! What would a night of celebrating in a good-time cow town be without a cigar or two? And it wasn’t, he raced on with a building enthusiasm, just the cattlemen he could count on as customers. The army was a growing presence in Caldwell. Cavalry brigades had originally arrived to patrol the nearby Indian Territory; keeping the peace between the Texas ranchers who were leasing grazing land to fatten their steers before shipping them east and the renegades intent on poaching required a good deal of diligence. Now additional troops were arriving in Caldwell to turn back the wagons loaded down with homesteaders hoping to sneak over the border and stake their claims to farmland in the Oklahoma Territory. Charlie was certain both the soldiers and the “Oklahoma boomers” flocking to town would also have a hankering for a good cigar.