The Floor of Heaven Read online

  There was also—perhaps this, too, a product of his many years of youthful diligence—a practical side to this most optimistic of dreamers. George needed, he realized, to be prepared for what lay out there. If he were to make his solitary way through Alaska, he would need to know how to survive when the cold set in.

  He had arrived in Sitka in February, and a month later there were still storms raging, with pelting ice and driving snow so fierce that they shook the little collection of shacks that made up the marine base to their foundations. When storms erupted, the marines had no choice but to slam the shutters tight, stoke the wood fires, and remain inside, praying that the dark weather would pass before they were all blown into the Pacific. How could a man on his own make it through the full blast of a northern winter?

  Another anxious realization: As long as he was a marine, George never had to worry about where he’d get his next meal; it was more often than not salt pork and beans, but the cook doled it out regularly and with a generous ladle. In the wilderness, he’d need to make do with what nature offered—provided he had the skill to hunt in bleak or frozen country.

  George was shrewd enough to understand that he needed an education in a way of life that was foreign and, by instinct, even unnatural to him. And so while the other marines made it a point to steer clear of the Indians who lived outside Sitka in a compound set off by a high wicker gate, snarling rudely about their god-awful smell and poking fun at the scraggly wisps of mustaches many of the braves sported, George decided he wouldn’t be so finicky. He would seek out the Tlingits. He would go through the gate.

  IT WAS Aleksandr Baranov, a heavy-drinking, bulbous-nosed merchant and the first administrator of Russian America, who, back in the early 1800s, had originally ordered the construction of a sturdy cedar fence along the outskirts of what was then called New Archangel. “Russians inside the wall, Tlingits outside” was his official edict.

  There were three major Indian tribes in Alaska: the Athabascans, hunters who had settled in the harsh interior; the Haida, seafarers and whale hunters who inhabited the islands south of Juneau; and the Tlingits, who numbered about 12,000 and were spread in a variety of clans along the southern coast. The Tlingits were different from the other tribes. They were artists, skilled in carving masks and totems. By instinct they were competitive and ambitious. And as Baranov had discovered when he’d tried to take their land and claim their hilltop fortress, they were warriors.

  Swinging stone-headed hammers, the Indians had smashed open the heads of the invading Russian sailors as easily as if they were cracking summer melons. Three separate attacks on their fort had been quickly repulsed. Yet after the failure of the third charge, Baranov, with a cruel practicality, came up with another plan. He directed the captains of the four Russian naval ships in the harbor to fire their cannons at will. The cannonade was relentless and devastating. Booming barrage after barrage of heavy iron balls pounded into the fortress and its small log houses. They whistled through the air and landed with a thudding power that mocked the swing of a Tlingit hammer. The earth shook. Buildings broke apart. And bodies cracked in this thick hail of hard iron balls. Warriors, women, children—all were victims. There was no refuge, and there was no escape.

  It was after the Tlingits had surrendered, after Baranov had barked the order that the remains of their fort be burned to the ground, and after he’d begun building his own ample cottage, forever known as Baranov’s Castle, on the commanding site of the old Indian fortress, that he decided it would be prudent to keep the Tlingits outside the heart of the settlement. He was still scared. He feared that led by a new bold chief they would arm themselves with their stone hammers and try to reclaim all that had been taken from them. Yet except for a short-lived attack in 1836 and another rebellion following the rape of a squaw by some drunken marines in 1877, the Tlingits, once a tribe of legendary warriors, accepted their defeat with passive resignation.

  Each morning many of the Indians would walk past the guards at the fence’s wicker gate and enter the settlement. They would trade furs, sell dried salmon, or report to the servants jobs they had at the homes and offices of the white administrators. And by nightfall, they would trudge back to the other side of the fence. Indians on one side; white men on the other. The wicker gate would be solidly bolted. It was a routine that, with few deviations and certainly no debate, had been part of the daily rhythm of life in Sitka for more than seventy-five years.

  Only now George decided to break it. He went through the wicker gate, and walked into the Indian camp.

  THE FIRST thing that struck him was the smell. The air was thick with the acrid odor of smoke, cooking whale blubber, and dried salmon. His nostrils felt as if they were on fire. It was such a high, foul odor that for a moment he decided he’d made a colossal mistake. He did not belong on this side of the fence. But he reminded himself of what was at stake, of what he was trying to accomplish, and then he continued on into the heart of the camp.

  The Indians lived in small cabins made from cedar logs, and the homes seemed to have been placed about the camp on whim; he could not detect any logic or art in their arrangement. Some were almost touching each other; others were remote, as isolated as if they were foreign countries. As he got farther into the encampment, word must have spread about the stranger because Indians emerged from the cabins and began to surround him. They looked at him quizzically and, he realized, with suspicion.

  He was soon standing in the center of a haphazard circle. He stared back at their brown faces with their flat noses and deep-set dark eyes and did his best to offer up a reassuring smile. There was a long, tense moment when no one moved. The Tlingits studied the intruder. George, feeling more ridiculous than frightened, stood at rigid attention with a happy grin fixed on his face.

  At last, when he thought the moment was right, he reached into the pockets of his heavy blue marine coat. With each hand he extracted a bottle of whiskey. It was strictly forbidden to sell whiskey to the Indians; the punishment was a month in the stockade. And George had no idea what sentence would be doled out to the marine who, asking nothing in return, freely gave liquor to the Indians. He doubted, in fact, that his superiors had even contemplated such an unlikely situation. But with gestures and his nonsensical smile, George made it clear to the Indians that he was doing just that. Here was whiskey, yours for the taking.

  It took several moments before the Indians were convinced this was not a white man’s trick of some kind. But once the first brave took a long swig from the bottle and there were no unexpected consequences, they all stepped forward. Soon the bottles were drained dry.

  During that unexpectedly warm summer, George made many trips through the wicker gate and on into the Indian compound. He never appeared without a bottle or two. And in return, he began his education.

  It was a more difficult process than he’d previously imagined. Before he could acquire any valuable knowledge or learn the Tlingits’ ways, he realized, he had to learn their language. In this he was methodical. And, he discovered to his delight, he had a genuine gift. He would leave the compound and hurry back to the barracks to transcribe what he’d learned that day. His Chinook—as the white men offhandedly lumped together the many dialects spoken by the hundreds of Indian clans—kept growing.

  He was proud of this accomplishment, and he could not wait to share his newfound knowledge with the person who mattered most to him. In a letter to his sister, Rose, he was careful not to reveal his ultimate plan, but he did not hesitate to give her a feel of all that he was learning. In two neat columns on a single piece of white paper he created a practical dictionary:

  CHINOOK ENGLISH

  Nika sick tumtum nik tika nanitch mika. I am lonesome for I want to see you.

  Spoke nika iskum Nika illahee nanitch Mika. If some money I will go home to see you.

  Spose mika tika Cultus coolie klosh Mika chako kopa Juneau nanitch nika. I want to go on a pleasure trip you come to Juneau to see me.

  I
t was just a small glossary of phrases, but it was a revealing one. I am lonesome … a pleasure trip. In his dreams, George was already justifying his escape, already living his great adventure.

  IN THE fall, when herds of gigantic whales returned to plow through the ice-blue waters beyond Sitka Bay, George and his platoon boarded the Wachusett and sailed back to Mare Island. He’d decided not to stay in Alaska; he was wise enough to know that he was not ready for the wilderness.

  Yet he had not abandoned his plan. He had no doubt that before long he would be making another trip to Alaska. Or that he would return to the Tlingits. He’d grown accustomed to their ways. He felt comfortable in their company. He’d forced himself to swallow chunks of mottled, foul-smelling gray fish without grimacing. He could speak their language. He was becoming one of them.

  However, to survive in the wilderness, he would need money to buy supplies. To find gold, he would need to purchase mining tools. It would do him no good to go AWOL from the marines, to head off to Alaska as a wanted man with a federal warrant on his head.

  But George had not anticipated the letter that was waiting for him in early November, when his ship finally anchored off the marine base. It was from James Watson, his brother-in-law. His sister, Rose, was gravely ill with pneumonia.

  George went immediately to Commander Frederick Pearson, the Wachusett’s captain, and asked for shore leave to visit his sick sister. Commander Pearson summarily denied the marine’s request. Nevertheless, that afternoon George snuck onto a navy trawler that had delivered supplies and was now returning to the harbor. His days as a marine, George had decided, were over.

  SEVEN

  leeing, warrants issued in their names and, for all they knew, lawmen on their trails, Soapy Smith and George Carmack were on the run. And Charlie Siringo was ready to head off, too. He had made up his mind to flee from his days of wearing suspenders and waiting on customers, from a merchant’s life that had never truly fit. But there was more urging him on. His mood had changed. He had outgrown Caldwell, and cowpunching, too, for that matter. His previous lives had worn out, and he was itching for something new.

  But what next? He couldn’t just saddle up, as he’d done in the past, and head off to wherever Whiskey Pete, his old cow pony, would lead him. Now there was Mamie and little Viola to do right by. They’d need a bit of civilization. And that concern led his thoughts to an unexpected place: Since he no longer felt at home in town or on the trail, then perhaps he should try the big city. The more he mulled it over, the more an idea that had at first been surprising took hold. So in the spring of 1886, along with his wife and their baby daughter, he boarded a train bound for the bustling metropolis of Chicago.

  Always full of ambitious notions, Charlie went east with a plan he fully expected would make him rich. And this wasn’t some sudden scheme; it had been brewing for a while, all the way back to the winter of ’82. In those days he had been the boss of the Beals’ horse spread in Indian Territory just across the line from Caldwell, and to help pass the long nights during the Kansas winter the cowboys had decided to subscribe to the National Police Gazette. Some of the hands had never had any school learning, but they put a quarter in the pot, too. “We can read the pictures,” they said amicably. Charlie, however, could read the words, and a story in the Gazette had grabbed his imagination and stayed with him over the years. It was a report about a New York preacher named Potts who had written a successful novel that had earned him “several hundred thousand dollars” and who now was “turning Paris inside out.” The image of a writer hurrahing around gay Paree with a fortune in the bank kept building in Charlie’s envious mind all the years he was chucking oysters and selling cigars in Caldwell.

  Shortly after the birth of his daughter he had, as he put it, “hit upon the idea of writing a history of my own short, but rugged life.” He was a confident man, and diligent, too; he’d written hundreds of pages in his scraggly cursive (one day they would be published as A Texas Cow Boy). Now his plan was to arrive in Chicago toting his manuscript, enjoy the acclaim, and then settle into the well-paid writer’s life.

  It didn’t work out that way. There was no denying that Charlie’s sprightly sentences and keen eye made him a surefire storyteller, but despite these writerly gifts, neither money nor assignments came his way. Instead he found himself an outsider in a strange, often bewildering city, living in a single crammed room in a hectic Chicago boardinghouse with his wife and baby daughter. Meanwhile, his money was running low.

  Charlie needed a way out. And as he was reading the newspaper, he found one. That spring Chicago was a tense, frightened city. He’d arrived just days before a bomb had exploded near his boardinghouse in Haymarket Square; eight policemen assigned to control a labor rally would eventually die from the wounds caused by the explosion, and more than one hundred more, both officers and protesters, had been wounded in the shoot-out that followed. Fears spread that new terror plots were brewing, that Chicago had become a city of targets. A state of anxious vigilance gripped the local business owners, and private detectives were in sudden demand. To keep pace with the boom times, the Pinkerton Detective Agency ran notices in the Chicago papers asking prospective employees to apply.

  Charlie was intrigued. The restlessness that had persuaded him to pick up and leave Caldwell was still gnawing at him. Yet here was an opportunity to do something satisfying; a chance, he decided, “to see the world and learn human nature.” And joining the ranks of Pinkerton operatives? This would be like, he speculated as his excitement rose, “entering the greatest detective school on earth.” The agency was celebrated, christened in the pages of his beloved Police Gazette as “the American Scotland Yard.”

  Founded a decade before the Civil War by Allan Pinkerton, an immigrant from Glasgow who while working as a special agent of the U.S. Mail had received acclaim after going undercover to solve a case involving pilfered bank notes and money orders, the agency had grown into a nationwide operation. While local police, sheriffs, and marshals could not operate outside state lines and were often corrupt, the Pinkertons were a hired army that would travel anywhere to get their man. Tough, tenacious, and at times unscrupulous, they hunted down bank robbers, swindlers, and the gangs that targeted the railroads. An all-seeing eye was the agency’s symbol, and the popular newspapers eagerly played along, publishing stories of cases miraclulously solved.

  There also was, however, a dark, violent side to the agency’s operations. That Pinkerton men had often been employed as brutal, hard-nosed strikebreakers or as spies to infiltrate union meetings—these were complications that didn’t intrude on Charlie’s evaluation of the detective’s mission. He held to the cowboy’s harsh code, that right was right and wrong was wrong, and that sometimes a tight noose or a Colt fired in vengeful retribution was needed if law and order were to be enforced. The prospect of hunting down criminals—whether anarchist bomb throwers or rank bank robbers—restored something that seemed to have vanished from his dull life: a sense of purpose.

  ONCE HE made up his mind to apply for the job, Charlie was methodical in his preparation. He decided he’d need a letter of introduction, so his first stop was the local bank where he had a small (and rapidly dwindling) account. The cashier obliged him:

  June 29th, 1886 Gentlemen:

  The bearer, Mr. Chas. A. Siringo, we know to be a person of good character, and having been a cowboy and brought up on the plains, his services and ability are commendable to you.

  S. A. Kean & Co., Bankers

  That should do the trick, Charlie decided. But later on that warm morning, when Charlie entered the crowded downtown Pinkerton offices on the seventh floor of the Boyce Building and presented the envelope containing the typed letter to a heavyset man at a desk, it was simply deposited unopened on top of a high pile; and then the clerk, without even a grunt of acknowledgment, returned to whatever it was that was keeping him so busy.

  Charlie was not one to wait patiently, or to be ignored. He explained that
he’d like the letter delivered to “Billy” Pinkerton.

  Now the clerk looked up. You a friend of Mr. Pinkerton’s? he inquired carefully.

  There was a bite to the man’s tone that Charlie found rankling. He was of a mind to teach the fat man some respect. But he also realized his own mistake: While the head of the Chicago office might be called “Billy” in the pages of the Police Gazette, that didn’t mean he should’ve have taken the liberty. Still, Charlie wasn’t accustomed to apologizing; it struck him as not much better than groveling, and no man who possessed a backbone ever groveled. I’d appreciate you giving him the letter, Charlie said. He was frosty, but still straining to be polite.

  Charlie waited for nearly two hours, all the time getting sharp looks from the constant parade traipsing through the anteroom. People eyed him as though he had been carrying a ticking bomb rather than a banker’s introduction. His tiger blood, as he called it, was starting to boil, and he was pretty close to walking out and giving up the whole improbable idea of becoming a detective. But finally he was led into the office of a red-faced man called Captain Farley.

  The captain read the letter without comment and returned it to Charlie. After several questions about how Charlie had been earning his living in recent years, the captain decided he was satisfied. Let’s go see Mr. Pinkerton, he announced.

  William Pinkerton had taken over the Chicago office after the death of his famous father two years earlier. In that time he had made his own name for himself in the press as the indefatigable pursuer of murderers, bank robbers, and arsonists, once following a suspect to Europe and staying on his trail for six dogged months before bringing the culprit home in handcuffs. He was a big, strapping fellow with a bushy walrus mustache and a booming hail-fellow voice. Even seated behind a desk, he seemed bursting with energy, raring to go, the physical embodiment of the Pinkerton motto: “We never sleep.” Around the Chicago saloons, he had a well-earned reputation as a burly, bare-knuckled bruiser; after throwing back a whiskey or two, he’d shed his suit jacket, roll up his sleeves, and take on all challengers.