So why didn't Garrett kill me on the scow when he had the chance? That's the question I can't answer. He was wounded and losing blood – maybe he wasn't strong enough. But he found the strength and time to smash the cask and set it on fire with the coals. And he managed to knife my hand to the floor. Why not stab me in the heart or cut my throat? Or finish me off with the pistol grip?
If he was driven by fear, maybe he recognized the fears that have been whittling away at me for so long. Being trapped in a small place. Being burned alive. Maybe he wanted my death to be the fruition of those fears.
Or maybe it's the opposite. Maybe he decided to spare me from my demons because he wants to be spared from his own.
I doubt I'll ever know. The furtive heroin seller who passes through Cabin John and calls himself Zimmerman has never sought out the survivors among his Williamsport family and his forsaken friends. No one who sees him now knows anything about his past. It will be easy for Gig Garrett to disappear again.
Yesterday I cleaned and sharpened the knife. I pull it from my coat pocket. The engraved initials HZ are worn but still legible near the base of the blade. Where the front of the gravestone meets the ground, I etch a shallow trench with a broken stick, then insert the knife and press the dirt and grass closed over it.
The knife is all that's left of Henry Zimmerman. His willingness to confront Gig Garrett left him shot, burned, and buried in another man's grave. Since Drew's murder, Zimmerman has served as the personification of my guilt and anger and doubts. Now I'll bury them alongside him. I hope they stay buried.
I have one more grave to visit tonight, on more familiar ground at St. Gabriel's. Then I hope to let go of the dead and make amends with the living. Starting with Clara and Winnie.
************
Thanks for reading BURYING ZIMMERMAN, the second novel in the River Trilogy. If you enjoyed it, I’d greatly appreciate a brief positive review on Amazon or Smashwords. If you’ve recently finished SWAINS LOCK, you’ll know who left the whiskey on the scow, and you’ll have a more informed perspective on Gig Garrett's irrational fears. Those fears resurface in book three of the River Trilogy, IF IT IS APRIL. You can find a brief description of all three novels at http://rivertrilogy.com.
Setting a work of fiction in the Klondike gold rush seems gratuitous, because the unembellished narratives written by men and women who were part of it are almost beyond belief. No aspect of Gig Garrett's or Henry Zimmerman's journeys stretches the reality experienced by the gold-seekers who came first in small groups, then by the hundreds, and finally by the thousands.
The combination of fin-de-siecle timing and the Yukon's relative inaccessibility made the Klondike campaign "the last great gold rush," in the words of the late Canadian author Pierre Berton. In the ensuing decades, technological progress made it possible to reach remote mining regions by air and strip out buried minerals with steam shovels. Pan-wielding pioneers gave way to mining engineers with clean fingernails. That evolution was already underway as the Yukon gold tide receded.
If I had to recommend just one book on the Klondike stampede, it would be Berton's KLONDIKE: THE LAST GREAT GOLD RUSH, 1896-1899. The story you just finished owes a tremendous amount to this gripping and exhaustively-researched survey. But Berton's book isn't your only option, because two accounts written by actual participants are equally compelling.
Tappan Adney set off for the Klondike shortly after the gold ships reached San Francisco and Seattle in 1897. He was a reporter for Harper's Weekly¸ and he joined the stampede to chronicle it with writings, illustrations, and photos. Adney was also an accomplished whitewater canoeist and a capable outdoorsman, and in his 1899 memoir THE KLONDIKE STAMPEDE, he explains everything from the design of sled-dog harnesses to the techniques of placer mining with a graceful and economic style.
And the account I turned to when I wanted to see and feel what the first wave of Yukon sourdoughs experienced was William B. Haskell's TWO YEARS IN THE KLONDIKE AND ALASKAN GOLD-FIELDS, published in 1898 and available through Google Books. It's hard to finish Haskell's story without swallowing hard in empathy and awe.
The same emotions are triggered by Arthur Arnold Dietz in his 1914 memoir MAD RUSH FOR GOLD IN THE FROZEN NORTH. The ordeals his party experienced on the glaciers eclipse anything found in my novel.
Lael Morgan's 1998 non-fiction work GOOD TIME GIRLS is a nice complement to Berton's overview, since it describes the important role that free-spirited young women played during the stampede, both in Dawson and in the Alaskan mining camps that sprung up later.
Finally, the 1895 book by Veazie Wilson that Zimmerman mentions, GUIDE TO THE YUKON GOLD FIELDS, really exists and is available from Google Books. If you read it you'll see that I owe much more than the photo on http://rivertrilogy.com to its author. Wilson's book can still do for today's readers what it did for his contemporaries: blaze a path for the imagination to follow.
Edward A. Stabler
BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) Page 30
