The Floor of Heaven

by Howard Blum

  His courage was remarkable. And no one doubted his resolve. The crowd continued to mill about for a while, but his grit had dulled their mood. Soon they dispersed. By the week’s end, the ringleaders of the Soap Gang had been sent to Sitka to stand trial. The rest were put on steamers bound for Seattle. You return to Alaska, they were told, you’ll be sorry you did.

  AS HIS men were rounded up, Soapy was buried. Only five people followed the cart with Soapy’s coffin to the overgrown field outside town. There were three of the lawyers who had worked on his many businesses, his mistress, and a member of the vigilante committee who wanted to make sure this wasn’t one last trick and that Soapy was truly dead. “The way of the transgressors is hard,” Reverend Sinclair reminded the mourners as the body was lowered into a small, stony grave.

  SOAPY HADN’T been buried for more than a month before people in Denver were lining up to pay a nickel to view a wax impression of Soapy’s face that had been molded in the mortuary. After Denver, the promoters took the relic from town to town across the West. Paying customers pushed and shoved and elbowed their way to get a good view. The death mask was a fake, but no doubt this detail wouldn’t have troubled Soapy at all.

  ary wanted proof. She refused to believe that her husband had been killed. Over the years, there had been dozen of reports of Soapy Smith’s death. He’d perished in Klondike avalanches, stormy shipwrecks, barroom gunfights—and all of these accounts had turned out to be tall tales. “Never believe I’m dead until you see me in the morgue,” Soapy had written her only weeks before she’d read the article in the St. Louis newspaper detailing the fatal shooting on the Skagway wharf. So Mary had paid it no mind. But as days passed without a letter from her husband, she began to worry. By the end of the month, his silence had become a torment. Mary decided to go to Skagway.

  Accompanied by eleven-year-old Jeff Jr., she arrived in Skagway in August. Wearing a crepe bonnet with a veil that reached down her back, Mary wandered about the town asking questions. She was a polite woman and comported herself with a prim reserve. People would remark that she was nothing like her husband. They were very solicitous.

  It didn’t take Mary long to establish that Soapy was dead. Dressed in widow’s black, she and the boy walked through the town to the rocky hill where her husband was buried. Mary stood by Soapy’s grave for over an hour, her head bowed. She didn’t cry. She didn’t say a word. She was lost in the rush of memories, a marriage of joys and disappointments. She was also deeply hurt. Without ever asking, she’d learned that her husband had been living with another woman. Had Soapy’s love for her, for their family, been one more false pledge in a life built out of illusions? Now she would never know. All Mary knew with any certainty was that the betrayal left a coldness in her heart as piercing as her husband’s death.

  The money was gone, too. She met with one courteous lawyer after another. She appealed to John Clancy, the friend and partner who’d been appointed executor of Soapy’s estate. She confronted the men who now ran the saloons and dance halls that had previously belonged to Soapy. Each of them offered a version of the same vague and perplexing explanation: Your husband unfortunately had a gambler’s sense of economy. He spent all he earned.

  But what about the businesses, the real estate? Mary demanded, her outrage building each time she found herself asking the same obvious questions. There must be something. A deed? A mortgage? A bill of sale?

  Time after time, the responses were apologetic yet adamant. Searches of the town records have been conducted, the men told her. Not a single document confirming either your husband’s ownership or his interest in any business has been found. We’d like to be more helpful, Mrs. Smith, but without the necessary legal papers, our hands are tied.

  But there must’ve been a bank account? Or cash? He was sending me money every month, Mary would challenge.

  No one knew anything. But finally John Clancy offered some modestly encouraging news. It seemed that, yes, $148.60 had been discovered in her husband’s room.

  By law, that money’s mine, Mary declared emphatically. As soon as she blurted it out, she realized she must’ve sounded terribly greedy. But she’d used her savings to buy the two steamer tickets to Alaska. She was concerned that she had no way to pay for the trip back home.

  Yes, Clancy agreed, the money was rightfully hers. However, the costs for the funeral, the inquest, the autopsy, and probate had amounted to $191. The town had claimed the $148 in cash and then had ordered the sale of Soapy’s personal property to cover the remaining $42.40.

  In the end, Dynamite Johnny, the steamship captain Soapy had stood with against a mutinous crew, offered his assistance. He gave Mary and the boy free passage on his ship to Seattle. She left Skagway without saying any good-byes.

  As the ship bounced through the Pacific waves, Mary, dressed for deep mourning, stood by the rail. She was a small, pale woman, and the boy was by his mother’s side holding her hand. He sensed her despair, and tried to get her to talk. But Mary was locked in her own thoughts. She stared out at the vast gray expanse of ocean as if to wonder whether all the seas on the planet would be sufficient to wash away the lies that had so soiled her life.

  IT WAS raining money. One after another, half-dollar coins flew out of the fifth-story hotel window. Coins bounced on the sidewalk and rolled clanging into the street. All at once streetcars came to a screeching halt, and the passengers and even the conductors jumped off to scramble after the loose change. Word spread quickly through downtown Seattle, and people flocked to the sidewalk outside the hotel. It was pandemonium. And the money kept raining down.

  Tagish Charley was enjoying himself. Sitting in the hotel room with Jim and Kate, the three of them happily passing a bottle around, it had occurred to him that it would be a lark to see the white men fight over something as meaningless as money. Besides, he’d more than he needed; why not give it away? So he’d summoned the bellboy and handed him $500. Get me half-dollars, he’d instructed. And more whiskey.

  When the bewildered bellboy returned from the bank with the one thousand coins, the Indian began tossing them out the window. Kate and Jim joined in, too. The three of them were pouring money down on Seattle when the police arrived. They would’ve been arrested for disturbing the peace if George had not returned in time from the meeting with the lawyer he’d hired to make his longstanding AWOL arrest warrant disappear. Only after offering profuse apologies did George manage to persuade the police to overlook the Indians’ odd behavior.

  The next time, however, George was not in town to intervene. He had traveled to northern Washington for a few days to inspect a mining property another new lawyer had suggested as an investment. Kate remained in Seattle with Jim and Charley, and they grew bored. There was nothing to do in the hectic, noisy city but drink whiskey. Inevitably, things got out of hand. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported:

  Mrs. George W. Carmack, the Indian wife of the discoverer of the Klondike, slept last night in the city jail, charged with being drunk and disorderly and disturbing the peace of the city of Seattle. Under the same roof in the men’s ward Skookum Jim, her brother, found lodgings as a plain drunk. So much for the debasing tendencies of great wealth and the firewater of the white man.…

  Domestic happiness has not been the lot of the Carmack family or its collateral branches since the wealthy squaw man and his relations came down from the north a few months ago.

  George bailed them out, but he was furious. Why did I ever get involved with these Chinooks? he reprimanded himself. Now that he was wealthy and respected, a man with lawyers, bank accounts, and investments, he refused to remember that his life had ever been lived another way.

  It had been George’s intention to leave the Indians in Seattle while he went to California for his long-awaited reunion with Rose. He now realized that this was not possible. There was no telling what would happen if they were left on their own.

  He told Jim and Charley that they would need to return at once to the K
londike. They were glad to go. They’d had enough of Seattle. They missed vast spaces and solemn quiet. They had no connection to this unnatural world. If this is what gold bought, then they were only too glad to throw their money out the window.

  George took Kate and their daughter to his sister’s ranch. He’d anticipated his return, he’d imagined all the things he would say to Rose, but the reunion turned out to be a disappointment. He’d been away for too long. What had once bound them together no longer existed. They were strangers to each other.

  Kate’s behavior was no better in Modesto than it was in Seattle. She would disappear for days, only to be brought back to the ranch reeking of alcohol by a chagrined neighbor.

  George had no sympathy. He was repulsed. Misery was all they shared. When it came time to return to his mine, he announced that he’d be traveling to the Yukon alone. Kate could stay with Rose if she wanted.

  George was in Dawson, now a booming gold rush city, when he met Marguerite Laimee. Only twenty-six, Marguerite had spent some time in the silver-mining camps in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and then had moved on to the gold fields in South Africa. From there, a man she’d met had taken her to Sydney, Australia. When that didn’t work out, she’d decided to head to the Klondike. She’d opened a cigar store in Dawson, but also spent a good deal of time on the second floor of the Green Tree Hotel, where a group of young women entertained the miners.

  George didn’t care about Marguerite’s past. He liked the way she tilted her head back when she laughed. He appreciated the way her silk dress curved around her torso. He thought she was the sort of woman who would look good on the arm of a middle-aged millionaire. Marguerite thought so, too. When George asked her to marry him, she accepted.

  He wrote to Rose. He wanted his sister to tell Kate he wouldn’t be coming back. “I can’t ever live with Kate again … I will send her some money,” he explained. And that was that. After all, they weren’t, he pointed out, officially married.

  George and Marguerite’s union was joyful and prosperous. They settled into a twelve-room white-frame house in Seattle with a garage in back for his kerosene-burning Mobile Steamer. He was one of the first men in Seattle to own an automobile, and he was very proud of the vehicle. Marguerite was a good businesswoman, and she directed her husband’s money into real estate. He owned office buildings, apartment houses, and hotels. He grew fat; the once-skinny prospector weighed well over two hundred pounds. With the passing of the years, his fortune multiplied, too.

  Yet George could never stop looking for gold. He worked several claims in California, on the western slope of the Sierra Nevadas, and in the Cascade Mountains east of Seattle. “I am convinced that there are enormous gold deposits in the Cascades and gold will be found when somebody with nerve enough to dig deep goes after it,” he told a reporter. Marguerite was not as optimistic. “Lovie, stop spending your money on the mine or we’ll go broke,” she chided.

  George paid her no mind. He was determined to find another mother lode. He’d all the money he needed, but he nevertheless spent the last decades of his life attempting to re-create the exalting moment of discovery he’d experienced as a young man on Bonanza Creek. He kept trying, but he never succeeded. When he died at sixty-two, he was working a new claim.

  CHARLIE SIRINGO found the man who’d sold the phony Mexican mine, and then hit the trail for other adventures. He spent months posing as an outlaw in Hole-in-the-Wall, Wyoming, while attempting to track down Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He went after Kid Curry, the outlaw who’d robbed the Union Pacific. He spent eight months in the hills of Kentucky questioning moonshiners about the whereabouts of the kidnapped son of a Philadelphia millionaire.

  He had lots of cases, and along the way there were women, too. Charlie tried to put Mamie behind him. He married Lillie in Denver, and they had a son. But within a year or so, the mother and child went off to California, and he never saw her again. On a case up in Oregon, Charlie met Grace. They married, and she came to live with him on the ranch he’d purchased in New Mexico. But this didn’t work out, either. He headed off to South Dakota on an investigation, and when he returned to Santa Fe, Grace was gone.

  Back in the warm sunshine of his Sunny Slope Ranch, spending his days riding Rowdy, his favorite saddle stallion, Charlie got to thinking. There was just no point in trying to re-create what he’d experienced with Mamie, his child bride. Why search for something that was not lost, he told himself. So he settled in comfortably with the memories of their shared life. In that way, his past would be his future.

  Now that his mustache had turned white, Charlie found that he was rethinking his youthful cowboying days, too. When he’d signed on with the Pinkertons, he’d done so in part because the West had been won. An era was over. He’d needed to move on with the changing times. But after twenty-two years as a detective, chasing all sorts of disreputable types, after he’d traveled around a new industrialized America, Charlie was no longer so sure. He’d come to believe it had been a mistake to break faith with the past. Courage, self-reliance, and backbreaking work were the cowboy way. A firmness of character and a boldness of vision had tamed the West. If America was to succeed in this new century, it would do well to reconnect to this heritage.

  So when he retired from detective work, Charlie sat down to write. He told stories that re-created a time in the West when men faced impossible odds and yet persevered. He wrote about heroes and villains. And when Charlie was in his mid-sixties, Hollywood discovered him.

  William S. Hart, who had made his reputation performing Shakespeare on the New York stage, had moved to Los Angeles in 1914 and helped make cowboy films enormously popular. He was the tall, chiseled hero who rode into town with his Colt strapped on, the man audiences knew they could count on to set things right. He played on-screen a version of the life Charlie Siringo had lived. After seeing a few of his films, Charlie wrote him a fan letter. Hart, who admired Charlie’s books, wrote back and asked if they might meet.

  That was how Charlie wound up advising Hart on the production of Tumbleweeds. It was a film about the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1893, and Charlie had lived in nearby Caldwell when it was a wide-open cow town. He was glad to help. To his delight, he even got to work as an extra.

  At sixty-eight, his back was still ramrod straight as he sat tall in the saddle, a bandanna knotted around his neck, his white broad-brimmed hat firm on his head, and his big Colt in the holster at his hip. When the camera started rolling, Charlie gave his horse some spur and galloped off into the distance, the last American cowboy.

  AND WHAT of Ed Schieffelin, the millionaire prospector who’d commissioned his own steamship to take him up the broad Yukon River years before Carmack or any of the stampeders? What had become of him after he’d grown discouraged and decided that there was no gold up in the frozen north?

  Schieffelin returned to the States, but he never gave up prospecting. He was in the forests of Oregon when the discovery was made on Bonanza Creek. Some men might’ve cursed their luck after hearing the news, but not Schieffelin. He kept on panning.

  The world was heading to the Yukon, but he stayed in Oregon. He was sure he was on to something. And one morning as he washed off his gravel, he saw that it was laced with bright gold. After all the years of searching, he’d found the mother lode. He rushed back to his cabin, eager to get into town to file his claim. As he reached his door, Schieffelin suddenly grabbed his chest; and then he collapsed. His heart had failed, and he was dead.

  Some folks said it was a tragedy, to die like that just when he’d struck it rich. But the old sourdoughs knew better. Schieffelin had died a happy man, and, after all, there weren’t many prospectors you could say that about.

  A Note on Sources

  DEEP INTO the rich unfolding story in Larry McMurtry’s Streets of Laredo, the sequel to his incomparable Lonesome Dove, there’s a small moment when Woodrow Call, the dour former Texas Ranger who personifies the heroism and grit of the men who civilized the Wild West
, pays a visit on a prosperous cattle rancher, Charlie Goodnight. McMurtry writes:

  Call had been inside the Goodnights’ house just once, to visit them. He had not paid much attention to the books, but Goodnight had one that had just come in the mail a few days before. It was called A Texas Cowboy; or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony—on its cover, it had a picture of a man sitting on a pony that was clearly not Spanish. The book was by Charlie Siringo, a kind of ne’er-do-well who had cowboyed a little and rangered a little, while gambling and drinking steadily, at least in the years when Call had been aware of him.

  It was a surprise that such a man had written a book, but there it was.

  “I want you to read it and tell me if you think there’s anything true in it,” Goodnight said. “I think it’s all yarns, myself.”

  Call read the book and agreed with Goodnight. It was all yarns, but what else would anyone expect from a braggart like Siringo?

  Now, Streets of Laredo is a novel. Call and Goodnight (at least as he appears in this book; there was, indeed, an early Texas cattle baron by that name) are fictional characters; that they live and breathe on the page with such an affecting complexity is a tribute to McMurtry’s genius. And this exchange is only a brief aside, a quick diversion from the gallop of the novel’s narrative. Further, the record demonstrates that Call had it wrong, at least about a couple of things: Siringo never was a Texas Ranger, and he wasn’t much of a gambler, either. Nevertheless, I read this passage with some concern. It is a stinging indictment of the veracity of Charlie Siringo and his books (especially if one supposes that the person going out of his narrative way to do the condemning isn’t a fictive character but, rather, the best living writer about the American West). It’s something an author setting off to write a true story centered around Siringo had better keep in mind.