BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2)

by Edward A. Stabler

  "But after most of town cleared out, there wasn't much Nokes could do. Jack McQuesten was still at the ACC warehouse, and he was the type that would sell Nokes a full winter outfit on credit, to be paid back on clean-up in the spring, even if Gig just charged an outfit to Nokes a month ago.

  "Nokes and his partner was doing what you needed to do in the Yukon before the Klondike changed everything: they was taking dust out of the ground a little faster than they was spending it on supplies and grub. But losing the dogs and a few hundred dollars must have stung 'em hard, especially when Nokes was the one that helped Gig get Inside.

  "With no dogs, Nokes and his partner wasn't going to stampede two hundred and twenty miles over the ice to Dawson, even if they was interested, which they probably wasn't. But they still had to drag sleds and supplies a hundred miles back to Mammoth Creek in the coldest part of winter.

  "Nokes might of been wondering what they was missing on the Klondike, or he might of been figuring out how to replace the dogs and still work their claims. But I reckon he saved a little time to think about getting even with Gig."

  Chapter 25

  Before tonight I had an impression of Gig Garrett that served me well for twenty-two years. Deceitful, jealous, quick-tempered, dangerous. After hearing that as a boy he'd impaled Henry Zimmerman's hand with a frog gig, I added misanthropic to the list. And as Zimmerman unspools the story of Garrett's time in the Yukon, he's fleshing out my skeletal sketch in a way that validates its bones. We may be here until sunrise, but by time I leave I'll know my brother's killer far better than I did before, and his terminal act of violence may fit his life like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle pressed home.

  But exhuming Gig Garrett won't help me assess my own culpability for Drew's death, so that's not why I arranged tonight's meeting. To come to terms with my failure that night, I need to understand the man in front of me.

  If Zimmerman's version of his visit to the cabin is true – if he planned to help Drew bring Garrett to the sheriff's office for fingerprinting – then my absence was fatal, because three of us should have been able to subdue a man who wasn't expecting us.

  If Zimmerman is lying – if he led Drew into a trap – then my presence probably wouldn't have mattered. I'd have been shot along with Drew. And if that's what happened, then Zimmerman might as well have pulled the trigger himself, even if he left the cabin before the shooting started. Even if – as I think about it now – he fled before they reached the front door, or contrived some last-minute rationale to send Drew into Garrett's cabin alone.

  Zimmerman has turned quiet for a moment, as if he's watching a moving picture projected against the inner surfaces of his eyes, trying to see or remember what happens next. The light from the oil lamp across the room exaggerates the sagging contours of his face as he slumps back against the wall. I can sense his mental gears still spinning, but as Garrett's story rolls forward, Zimmerman himself seems to recede. He said he was in Juneau when word about the Klondike reached the Outside and the stampede began in earnest. So when does he join Garrett in Dawson, and when do the events that determine his stance toward Garrett begin?

  "That something you been thinking about for a while, Owen?" His internal projector has clicked off and Zimmerman turns to lock his eyes on mine.

  "Thinking about what?"

  "Getting even."

  Caught off-guard, I consider his last sentences and realize he's comparing Nokes and Garrett to the two of us.

  "Based on what you told me earlier, I don't have a score to settle. Drew sent you out from the cabin to find me, and then he and Garrett shot each other."

  "That's right," he says, managing a jaded half-grin. "But maybe that ain't what you want to hear." His eyes drift toward the knife that still stabs the table at Circle. "And everyone got a score to settle."

  I stretch deliberately toward the knife and extract it, then lay it flat next to the pistol to my right, out of his reach.

  "That may be," I say. "But you can't settle something you don't understand." And as I speak it occurs to me that even though Zimmerman hasn't appeared in his Yukon saga yet, I can still gain insight from the way he describes Garrett's attitudes and actions.

  "We left Gig and Wylie in a Dawson saloon. What happens next?"

  Zimmerman tilts his cup toward me so I can see it's empty. I use the Colt to wave him toward the cask on the front-wall shelf. He smiles enough to show his yellowed teeth, then swivels onto his feet and shuffles to the cask, both our cups in hand.

  When he sits down he waits until I've had a sip before resuming his story, and this time the whiskey burns my whole chest and makes my eyes water as a drop of sweat slides down my temple. My heart thumps hard enough to catch my attention.

  "Gig and Wylie knowed they was too late to stake on Bonanza or Eldorado," Zimmerman says. "So they went to the commissioner's office to check the claims on the newer creeks. Bear and Hunker was mostly staked too, and Gold Bottom, but some of the other Hunker pups was still open. Of course, that makes you wonder if them pups was worth anything. That's the way it is with stampedes... a creek can sit unstaked for months while miners walk past it every day, then some morning a feller washes out a fifty-cent pan and that creek gets located end to end by sunset.

  "In any Yukon district, you can buy or trade for as many claims as you want, but you can only stake one yourself, so Gig and Wylie wasn't sure what to do right away. Stake on some little pup and you might miss out on the next big strike. Or maybe when the surveyor got there, he'd release some fractions on Bonanza or Eldorado. You might see a hundred-foot piece come loose after a claim got cut down to regulation size, and only fellers that hadn't located yet could stake it. A hundred feet on Eldorado might be worth more than some entire creeks.

  "They was still flipping the register pages and thinking it through when they saw something that probably made Gig's hair stand up. The owners of 48 and 49 Eldorado was his old Swede friends Erik Lindfors and Arnold Ruud.

  "Gig and Wylie couldn't believe it at first, 'cause the last they knowed the Swedes was back at Circle, working their claims on a Mastodon Creek pup called Baker Gulch. It turns out the Swedes traded one of the Baker Gulch claims for ground on a Miller Creek pup they never laid eyes on yet. I can't remember the creek, but the feller that owned that claim showed up at Baker Gulch, and the Swedes talked to him and reckoned it made sense to spread their bets on different creeks, one at Circle and one at Fortymile.

  "So back in August, Lindfors took a steamer upriver to Fortymile to record the trade, then headed out to his new claim for a look. While he was back on that Miller Creek pup, George Carmack come into town talking about the Klondike and Bonanza Creek and showing off his shotgun-shell full of gold.

  "By the time Lindfors come in from the creeks, most of the men in Fortymile was off to the Klondike. Lindfors figured out that Bonanza was Rabbit Creek, and that he already walked most of it with Nokes. He wanted to know was Carmack lying, or where did he find the gold? So in September Lindfors caught the last upriver steamer of the year, and now that the Klondike news was spreading down the Yukon, that boat was stopping in Dawson.

  "Like them miners that left Fortymile ahead of him, Lindfors strapped a mining pan and some grub on his back and headed straight for Carmack's claim, only he followed the trail from town instead of paddling up the Klondike to the mouth of Bonanza. The trail goes up over a high ridge and back down to the creek, over loose rock and deadfall and swamp, and it makes you forget the gold and remember all the ways your body can hurt.

  "He come down to the valley and followed it up to Discovery, where Carmack and Skookum Jim and some Indians was working, other miners coming and going, all of 'em saying that Bonanza was the biggest thing they ever seen. Some claims was washing out five dollars to the pan on surface diggings, and who knows what when they got to bedrock. But Bonanza was already staked into the 90s above and the 70s below, so Lindfors got to wondering about the large pup he remembered from the summer. The one that
run into Bonanza where the valley swings east, where Gig took a shot at the bear and Nokes said both creeks was worthless.

  "That pup was just a half mile above Discovery, and when Lindfors got there someone told him it was called Eldorado, and it was staked into the 40s. There's no discovery claim on a pup – you just number up from the bottom. No one knowed how rich Eldorado was, but some fellers had cut their names off their Bonanza stakes so they could find out.

  "Lindfors turned his back on Bonanza and headed up the Eldorado trail to the last claim, then measured five hundred feet along the creek for himself and another five hundred for Arnold Ruud, cut boundary stakes and carved their names, and started back on the trail to Dawson.

  "You ain't supposed to locate or record a claim for someone else, but that's what happens when a new district is opening up and things ain't settled down yet. Plenty of fellers tried to stake for a friend and had those claims jumped when the friend didn't show up after a few weeks. And if you didn't start working your claim in sixty days, the law said it was abandoned and someone else could record it.

  "Lindfors sent a letter down to Ruud at Circle on that same steamer that brought him to Dawson, after it turned around at Stewart River and was headed back to St. Michael. Ruud left Baker Gulch and made it up to Dawson over the ice, about a month before Gig and Wylie got there."

  ***

  "When they seen the Swedes listed on the Eldorado register, Gig and Wylie knowed that was the place to start. Will Scouse and his brothers just reached bedrock on 14 Eldorado and they was taking out pans you couldn't believe. Two hundred dollars... some said five hundred dollars. Lindfors and Ruud was going to need help, and almost everyone coming in and out of Dawson was busy, either trying to stake new ground or lay in more supplies for the winter. Gig and Wylie still had a sled and a few weeks worth of grub. And even with prices rising, Gig had enough dust in his poke from selling the dogs to buy some canned meat and a few hundred pounds of beans and flour and coffee and oats. That would get them through the winter, and the Swedes could pay 'em when they started cleaning up the winter dumps.

  "So Gig and Wylie bunked in a tavern for the night, then pulled their sled a few miles on the Klondike ice and turned up into the Bonanza drainage. Made it up to 48 Eldorado by the end of the second day, and the Swedes was as surprised to see Gig as he was seeing their names in the register."

  "What kind of reception did they get?"

  "Gig told me Lindfors was cagey but Ruud was friendly."

  "So the Swedes hired them?" I ask.

  Zimmerman nods. "Gig and Wylie come to Eldorado at the right time, and they was bringing a winter outfit and ready to work. The Swedes didn't know how many shafts it would take to find the pay-streak... maybe one or two, maybe more. In the Yukon the creeks freeze in September, and whatever gold you ain't washed out of the diggings by then gets iced up for another nine months. So the Swedes needed help if they was going to work two claims."

  "I guess they hadn't heard what happened to Nokes."

  He cracks a smile. "Both of 'em left Circle before Gig and Wylie, so they didn't know nothing about the dogs, and I don't think Gig mentioned it."

  "Did they remember that Gig wanted to leave them behind at Sheep Camp when Ruud was snow-blind?"

  He wags his head dismissively. "Maybe there was some disagreeable times on that trip, but that happens to everyone heading Inside together. The main thing was they all made it from Juneau to Circle, like they planned."

  "Thanks to Nokes," I add.

  "Sam Nokes was a born loser," Zimmerman says with an edge to his voice. "He was standing at Grand Forks, where the two richest creeks in the world come together, and he says he'd trade 'em both for a couple of bullets and some fish."

  Chapter 26

  "Lindfors was up on Eldorado full-time by October and Ruud got there six or eight weeks later, but at first they was just cutting and stripping trees on the hillsides above their claim. You need big logs for a cabin, small logs for ten foot of crib-work under your windlass, and thirty cords of firewood to burn one shaft through the winter. So by the time Gig and Wylie showed up, the Swedes still ain't started digging.

  "Back on the creeks in January, it's fifty below zero and snowing most days, windy all the time. You got to melt ice for drinking water and to clean pots and pans, so that means a fire in the stove. But you can't start a fire unless you got dry kindling from the night before, and you end up chopping branches every day.

  "Things that might take you a few minutes to do in the summer ain't so easy when you got bear-skin mittens on your hands and heavy gum-boots on your feet. Take your mittens off for a few minutes and your fingers are like claws. Don't bother to shave and your beard turns into a block of ice. You're wearing seal-skin trousers and a buckskin shirt over two layers of wool, but your breath freezes into coats of ice on your clothes. That's one reason you got to wear a parka like the Indians – you can shake the snow and ice right off. Got sleeves and a hood and goes down to your knees... no buttons, just pull it over your head. The Siwash parkas is fur on the inside, but miners get by with fur trim on the hood.

  "While the Swedes was trading their claim at Baker Gulch and Wylie was down at Circle, Gig was helping Nokes and his partner burn shafts on Mammoth Creek, so he knowed as much as the rest about winter diggings. But none of 'em knowed for sure where to sink the first shaft.

  "There was only two dozen claims getting worked that winter, but some of the owners showed how to do it right. Alex McDonald owned half of 30 Eldorado. Bought it from a Russian for a bag of flour and a side of bacon, back in November when most miners still didn't believe what they was hearing about Eldorado and Bonanza. He offered a lay on part of it a few weeks later, and four laymen burned a shaft for thirty nights, then took out forty-thousand dollars in coarse gold. McDonald got half of that and used it to hire four men to work his own part of the claim. They sunk and drifted forty feet and pulled out almost a hundred thousand from a pay-streak two feet thick. McDonald spent that money buying pieces of ground on other Klondike creeks.

  "Big Alex was a schoolteacher from Wisconsin. Said he worked hard-rock mines on Douglas Island and placer mines in Colorado, but most of the sourdoughs in Dawson wasn't too sure about that. He tramped up the Stikine River Trail and floated down the Yukon on a raft just 'cause a dozen greenhorns he met in Juneau said he could come along. Then only two of 'em made it past the lakes.

  "McDonald was shaped like a moose – barrel chest, long legs, thick hair and moustache – but he never slung a pick or washed out a pan in the Klondike hisself. He spent his time borrowing and buying and trading his way into more claims and percentages than you could count. All his debts was secured by claims, and when one of 'em was coming due, he scrambled to clean up enough gold to pay it off, so he was usually one step away from going bust. But when all the diggings from that first year was washed out, Big Alex was the richest of the Klondike Kings.

  "Clarence Berry was the opposite – paid all his attention to one stretch of rich ground. He staked 6 Eldorado and traded half his claim on upper Bonanza to Antone Stander for half of 5 Eldorado. Stander probably guessed Eldorado was richer than Bonanza, but he swapped because the ACC store wouldn't sell him an outfit without someone to guarantee the debt, and Berry said he'd do it.

  "So Berry and Stander was working their Eldorado claims together and taking five-dollar pans from the first diggings, then using the money to hire men and sink more shafts. Maybe up to fifteen or twenty holes at one time, and every day they would add to the dumps and Berry's wife would wash out a few pans to pay the men. When they reached bedrock and the pans was worth one or two hundred each, Berry and Stander bought most of 4 Eldorado.

  "Plenty of ground on Eldorado and Bonanza was staked by greenhorns that couldn't figure out how much it was worth, so they would sell part of a claim for a few hundred dollars. Then six months later that piece would sell for five thousand. The next spring, fifty thousand, or maybe a hundred and fifty.


  "Lindfors and Ruud was at the other end of Eldorado from Berry and Stander, and they didn't find five-dollar pans near the surface. But while the Swedes and Gig and Wylie was still digging waist-deep, Berry and Frank Phiscator and Jamie MacLanie and a few others got down to bedrock. Word started spreading about Eldorado pay-streaks a hundred feet wide and four feet thick, with enough gold mixed into the gravel that you could see the colors by candle-light. By April the stories was about five-hundred-dollar pans and nuggets the size of walnuts."

  Zimmerman can't resist invoking other Klondike legends. Tom Lippy from Seattle walked away from his upper Eldorado claim when 16 Eldorado came open. It was easier to build a cabin on the lower part of the creek where the trees were more abundant, and after sharing Lippy's long journey down the Yukon, his wife didn't want to live in a tent. The couple eventually took over a million and a half in gold out of 16 Eldorado – the richest claim on the richest creek. It and 17 Eldorado had been vacated by four Scotsmen who staked 15 through 18, then decided to spread their bets across two Klondike creeks. The other creek proved worthless.

  Back at Fortymile, Charley Anderson had taken to drowning his sorrows after spending the last few years prospecting with little luck. When Carmack paraded through town, Anderson watched his colleagues flock to the Klondike, but dissolution or doubt left him parked on his stool at Kerry's Saloon. A month later Al Thayer and Winfield Oler came down to Fortymile from Dawson hoping to sell what they thought was a worthless Klondike claim, and the inebriated Anderson was a sitting duck. By the end of the night Anderson was out eight hundred dollars, and when he sobered up all he had to show for it was a signed deed to 29 Eldorado. He took it to Inspector Constantine and told a sad story, but Constantine said the sale was valid. Anderson hung his head and made his way upriver to 29 Eldorado, never guessing that his claim held over a million in gold. His peers in Dawson later christened him "the Lucky Swede."