The Floor of Heaven

by Howard Blum

  Stuffing the can into his pack, George couldn’t help feeling that simply by making the purchase he’d done something nearly as extraordinary as what he’d accomplished up on Bonanza Creek. He’d a taste for peaches ever since he was a child, but after coming to Alaska he had learned to do without. Years back, in Juneau, he’d wanted to buy a can, only the price had been alarming. Now it wouldn’t be long, he teased himself, before he’d be drinking French champagne like some New York swell in one of the Horatio Alger books he’d borrowed from Reverend Canham at Fort Selkirk. It was an extravagance, no getting around that. At the same time, George felt proud that he could afford such a luxury. Once he started working his claims, George reckoned, he’d become very rich. Might as well get use to the high life, he told himself. Anyways, it wasn’t just for him. It was a gift, too.

  As he walked toward the cabin, little Gracie spotted him. She ran down the beach to meet her father, her long black hair twisted into a single braid and her dark eyes sparkling. George noticed, with a father’s anxious pride, that she’d soon be growing up into a young woman; she was already about mule-high, and although she was still as thin as a seedling, she was a pretty little thing, with an Indian’s chiseled face. As Kate approached, he called out, “I brought you something.”

  George had never given her a present before. She’d no idea what to expect. Perhaps, she hoped, they’d shot a bear up north. Winter was coming, and a bearskin would come in handy.

  “A can of peaches,” George announced. The way he said it, he might as well have been presenting a diamond.

  For a moment all Kate could think was that George had been drinking and the whiskey had led him to go off and do something crazy. But when he handed her the big tin can, he didn’t seem drunk. He was just grinning. Then a thought occurred to her, but still she had to struggle to get the words out.

  You found gold? she finally dared to ask.

  George began to tell the story, only his Chinook couldn’t keep up with his galloping excitement. So he wound up grabbing Kate’s hand, and then Gracie’s, too, and in the next moment he had them dancing around in a circle. He broke out in a wild hoot, and Kate started in with a Tagish chant, and Gracie, not really understanding but still caught up in it all, began making her own happy noises. The jubilant commotion carried on for quite a while.

  That night Kate and Gracie ate their first canned peach. The only fruit the girl had previously tried was a dried apricot. Biting into one was like chewing a stone. A peach, she discovered, was nothing like that at all. It was as soft as bone butter, and the syrup trickled down her throat like melted honey. It was the most wonderful taste she’d ever experienced, and even as an old woman she’d still be treasuring the memory.

  WITH THE new day, the celebration was over. There was so much to do. George needed to get back to his claim. He’d already been away too long, and the thought of Jim and Charley working on their own left him uneasy. He told Kate to pack up. They’d take whatever they could carry and just leave the rest.

  George had built the cabin with his own hands. It was the home where he and Kate had raised their daughter; where they’d taken shelter when gusting winds had hurled the snow so high that the white drifts reached toward the roof; and where they’d lain together warding off the brutal freeze of the subarctic nights. But George had no qualms about abandoning it. That was the way frontier life was lived in the far north. Alaska wasn’t like the West. Most pioneers didn’t think about putting down roots; this wilderness required too much of a struggle. It was a place in which to seek your fortune, and then ramble on. George walked away from the cabin without a sentimental thought.

  In fact, in the aftermath of the first giddy moments when he’d grasped the significance of his discovery on the Klondike, George had started to erase all the hardscrabble years from his memory. There was nothing, he told himself, worth remembering; it had been a time when he simply did what needed to be done to get by. He’d always been a man susceptible to whims, but now he fixed his mind on the future and held it there as steady as a compass needle. He focused on the day when he’d return to California to show his sister, Rose, the fortune he’d earned. But first, George knew, there was plenty of hard work ahead of him, and he hurried north, eager to get on with it.

  When he arrived along with his family at Bonanza Creek, George was relieved to see that Jim and Charley had been productive. Over just a few days the two Indians had felled a small forest of trees, hacked the branches off the trunks, and then piled the logs into a high pyramid. George was about to tell them they’d done good work when Jim approached. The big Indian revealed that he’d also put in some time panning on his own claim, and he held out a handful of gold dust for George to admire. Another week, Jim predicted, and he’d to be able to fill an entire poke, maybe even two.

  George exploded. The circumstances called for patience, and a bit of instruction, as well. Since the California days of ’49, working a claim had evolved into a time-tested craft that’d been passed on by one prospector to another. The Day brothers had tutored George when he’d arrived in Juneau as an ignorant cheechako. And there’d been a time when George was of a mind to share all the tricks of the prospector’s trade with Jim and Charley; he was the one, after all, who on their first expedition to the Yukon had shown Jim the sourdough’s art of panning with a smooth, gentle roll of the wrist. George could have explained that in only another month winter would be blowing in, and before the heavy snows there was a sluice box to build, thick layers of bedrock to uncover, and a deep shaft to dig. Panning would need to wait until the spring. But George felt no need to have a discussion. It was his success, and he was beginning to resent having to divvy up his fortune with two Indians just because they’d the good luck to partner up with him. He’d come around to thinking that he should never have gotten involved with those two Chinooks. It had been a mistake. All his time with the Tagish, in fact, now struck him as sheer foolishness, an experience best kept buried. It wouldn’t do at all for the man who’d pulled the first nugget out of Bonanza Creek to be known as Siwash George. So in this irritated, put-upon mood, he gave Jim a stern talking-to. He wanted it understood, he barked, that he was in charge. From now on, they’d do what he said. And that meant no more panning.

  Jim, prideful as he was, was not a man to complain. If George wanted to be the boss, he’d follow orders. At least that way they’d get the gold out of the ground. But at the same time he pondered the change that’d quickly come over his partner. He’d best be wary, Jim warned himself. Gold made white men unpredictable.

  George grew uneasy around Kate, too. She’d always been a formidable woman, willful and commanding. That’d been part of the attraction; George had appreciated that she knew her mind like his sister, Rose. Only now George was unwilling to be subject to a stiff, uncompromising squaw. His accomplishment had convinced George that he shouldn’t be letting anyone tell him what to do. He was no squawman, and it was suddenly irksome that people had ever referred to him in such a snide fashion. Full of his newfound confidence, George wouldn’t give an inch; and Kate, still the unbending granddaughter of a Tagish chief, wouldn’t either.

  On their first day at the claim they locked horns. Kate looked at the pile of logs and told George he’d better start in on building a cabin. George snapped back that there was no time for that right now. There were too many more important things to get done before the freeze-up. Then he just walked off. So they slept in a tent, and each night the cold’s sting seemed particularly mean since they were no longer sharing the same bearskin robe.

  ONCE AGAIN, George found that he stood alone. Without his thinking too much more about it, things got so that he barely spoke to Kate and he only bothered to talk to Jim and Charley when he needed to tell them what to do. He threw himself into working the claim, and that suited him fine.

  Straight off, he poked around the riverbank until he found a gully that’d do as a saw pit. Then he borrowed a two-man whipsaw from Dave McKay, who’d str
uck a claim downstream, and he and Jim started in on the pile of logs. Jim was top-saw; even in his self-important mood George had to concede that he was no match for the big Indian’s strength and mulish endurance. Standing in the bottom of the gully—the “underbucket,” as it was known—George’d grip a handle and do his best to keep up. Stroking back and forth, the two men moving in unison, they sawed one after another of the logs they’d laid across the pit into fairly straight planks.

  After a stack of boards had been cut and roughly planed with a sharp knife, George set to work on constructing a sluice box. It was a contraption the early panners in California had devised to mimic nature: Just as the rush of ancient rivers had carried the heavy gold downhill to stream beds, the prospectors would shovel gravel into this raised funnel-like box, and the water shooting through would push the gold along until it was trapped in slow spots created by a peg frame—called a riffle—along the way or in the crossbars and the matting at the far end.

  Years of practice had taught miners that a good “box length” was about twelve feet, while the height of the sides should be half that, with an opening at one end wide enough for a long-handled shovel piled high with gravel. A “string” of wooden boxes would be hammered together, forming a continuous waterway; the device, in its makeshift way, held to the same principles that had guided the Treadwell mine engineers when they’d welded together the metal pipeline stretching across Douglas Island. George kept at it; and still it took him more than two weeks to build this twelve-foot funnel.

  Positioning the sluice box over a “cut” in the stream bed was a careful business, too. Experience in the California mines had led to a precise formula for achieving the best downhill flow of water. The general rule of thumb, George knew, was a one-inch drop per foot of the length of the box. So from the “lead box,” into which the gravel was shoveled, to the “dump box,” where the gold would collect, the incline was about a foot. The elevations had to be just so, and although each gust of wind whooshing down from the mountains was a reminder of winter’s imminent arrival, George refused to be rushed. He was meticulous in his work. A miscalculation, a slipshod bit of carpentry, and there was no telling how much gold might never complete its journey to the dump box. A small fortune could be as good as lost.

  While the sluice box was being completed, George made sure Jim and Charley kept busy. Snapping out his instructions with a terse authority, George had them fill sacks with shovelfuls of dirt and gravel lifted from the cracks and crevices of the exposed bedrock scattered about the site. Although the bulk of the gold would be below the surface, in the core bedrock, the outcroppings might be laced with gold veins, too. There was no wheelbarrow, so the two Indians had to carry the sacks of “paydirt” to the site of the sluice box at the edge of the creek. They emptied the sacks, and soon a gravel hill miners called the “dump” started taking shape. In the spring cleanup, the dump gravel would be shoveled into the sluice box and washed. Until then, a long eight months off, they wouldn’t know if they’d dug up a heap of dirt or buried treasure.

  As the two Indians continued filling and unloading sacks, George began sinking a shaft on his claim. With the first frost the ground would be as hard as granite, so George had to start work without delay. He’d need to dig a hole wide enough for a man to stand in and that might need to go straight down for forty or even fifty feet; there was no telling how deep the bedrock would be buried. The work required a good deal of muscle: slamming a pickax into stiff ground, then pushing the long-handled miner’s shovel through the heavy rocks and thick dirt. By the end of each long day his arms and back would ache, and he’d be so weary that he felt as if couldn’t find the strength to make it back to the tent. Still he kept at it, going deeper and deeper, until soon he began to feel as if he were standing in his own grave. He worked surrounded by solid walls of muck and dirt, the air tight in the narrow space, and after a few weeks he’d gone so deep that when he looked up he could see only a tiny patch of sky.

  He was determined to keep digging until he reached bedrock; and while this was backbreaking work, George took comfort in the fact that getting the job done was simply a matter of will. Any man who put his mind to it could dig a hole. It’d be the next step that would be tricky.

  The subterranean bedrock would be the sign that he’d reached the stream that millennia ago had carried the gold to the floor of Bonanza Creek. This was the path to real riches. The muck and gravel of the buried waterway would contain the greatest concentration of gold ore.

  But this was not always easy to find. George would need to read the “dip,” or slant, of the bedrock and use that as his guide to decipher the path of ancient stream bed. Then he’d start in tunneling, digging through a wall of dirt.

  A stream, though, would more often than not run “spotted”; it could twist and turn at will. Chasing the right direction required a talent where intuition was as important as hard work. A miner could tunnel for weeks, working fifty feet below ground to shovel out a tunnel through a dense mountain of earth, only to realize that he’d lost the path of the stream. Then he’d need to start in on a new “cross-cut.”

  But once he hit the old creek channel, he’d have found the “paystreak.” There’d be yellow nuggets as big as a man’s thumb studding the soft creek bed. He could pluck them out with his hand. And every shovelful of clay and gravel would be laced with gold. So George kept digging.

  Then on the morning of October 13, George walked out of the tent and discovered that the ground was covered in a fresh white coat of snow. His boots crunched against the hard ice as he walked over to see about the creek. It was frozen solid. Winter had come to the Yukon, and he still hadn’t hit bedrock.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  eorge swung his pickax, but it didn’t even make an indentation. There was only a sharp clink. The ground beneath the fresh snow was frozen solid. Still, George was determined not to let the Yukon winter stop him. He was in a hurry to get rich. All his instincts told him he was close to reaching bedrock. He refused to sit idle, staring helplessly at buried treasure as he waited out the months until the spring thaw.

  Years back he had heard the old sourdoughs talking about how in ’87, up on Franklin Gulch, a prospector by the name of Fred Hutchinson had also grown impatient. When winter came, the notion struck him to build a fire at the bottom of his shaft. He’d let it burn all night, and in the morning he’d clear the ashes, shovel out a swamp of thawed muck, and then he’d be able to keep on digging through soft earth. To hear the sourdoughs tell it, the technique had turned out to be as effective as the spring sun. “Winter burnings,” they called it. George made up his mind to give it a try.

  He told the two Indians to start cutting cords of wood. At the same time, he went to work building a spruce-log winch—a windlass—over the shaft. Turning the crank would lower into the hole a wooden bucket attached by a spiral hook to a thick rope. That way, once he hit bedrock he’d be able to get the paydirt out of the shaft. Standing on top, the Indians would hoist the filled bucket up and carry the gravel to the dump. The bucket was big enough to hold about eight shovelfuls of dirt, so George figured that one hundred buckets would be a good day’s work. Come the spring cleanup, with any luck he’d be rich.

  The first time George built a fire in the bottom of the shaft, he piled on too many logs. The roaring blaze thawed the earth, but a fog of gray smoke remained trapped in the narrow shaft. Work was impossible. The next night he used fewer logs; in the morning smoke was still wafting through the hole, stinging his eyes and seeping into his nostrils and throat, but he didn’t feel the overpowering need to escape. He could work, and he filled more than fifty buckets. Encouraged, the following night he tried building an even smaller fire. But it proved too weak to thaw the earth, so he resigned himself to working through the smoke. He tied a bandanna over his nose and mouth, and in time he got used to it. He even found that there were advantages to working underground in the winter. The possibility of the shaft’s walls crumbling around
him and burying him alive had been a constant fear. Now it was no longer a concern. “The ground is frozen and never caves in,” he observed with relief.

  Only now that winter had arrived, it became clear that they could no longer continue living in tents. They’d freeze; the temperature would hit sixty below when the icy spears of wind came hurling down from the Arctic. As much as he wanted to concentrate solely on working the claim, George knew it was time—way past the time, truth be told—to build the cabins. Besides, that might put an end to some of Kate’s complaining.

  He picked out sites on flat land, and they set to work. The cabins would be built from logs chinked with moss, and each would be about the width and length of three canoes placed side to side. There’d be a window made out of empty glass jars, but it’d let in only a hazy light. The single room would be a tight, shadow-streaked space. Jim and Charley would share one cabin. About a hundred yards away was another site for George, Kate, and their daughter.

  As he started in cutting the logs, just the prospect of settling into the pokey cabin left George feeling as if he were heading off to prison. The confinement would be worse than being wedged into the narrow shaft and surrounded by walls of dirt. In the tiny cabin there’d be no place to escape Kate’s constant carping. He mulled building a separate cabin just for himself, but considering all he had to do, he realized this was not a possibility. Instead, he retreated, as he’d done so many times in his solitary life, into the comforting seclusion of his imagination. He lived in the future, and there he built his own home. In his mind he’d left Bonanza Creek and was already in California with Rose, the prodigal brother who’d returned a wealthy man.

  Yet as it became clear that the work on the cabins would drag on for a spell, not even the distance he was putting between himself and the others was of much comfort. After three days he was ready to explode from the frustration. He didn’t have time for what the sourdoughs called “dead work.” He needed to get back to digging his way to the bedrock. There was a fortune within his grasp—only he was sawing logs.