The Floor of Heaven

ALSO BY HOWARD BLUM

Nonfiction

AMERICAN LIGHTNING

THE EVE OF DESTRUCTION

THE BRIGADE

THE GOLD OF EXODUS

GANGLAND

OUT THERE

I PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE

The True Story of the Walkers: An American Spy Family

WANTED!

The Search for Nazis in America

Fiction

WISHFUL THINKING

Copyright © 2011 by Howard Blum

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Blum, Howard.

The floor of heaven : a true tale of the last frontier and the Yukon gold rush / Howard Blum.—1st ed.

p. cm.

1. Yukon River Valley (Yukon and Alaska)—Gold discoveries. 2. West (U.S.)—History—1860–1890. 3. Gold mines and mining—Yukon River Valley (Yukon and Alaska)—History—19th century. 4. Siringo, Charles A., 1855–1928. 5. Smith, Jefferson Randolph, 1860–1898. 6. Carmack, George W. (George Washington), 1860–1922. 7. Yukon River Valley (Yukon and Alaska)—Biography. 8. West (U.S.)—Biography. I. Title.

F912.Y9B58 2010

978′.02—dc22 2010038230

eISBN: 978-0-307-46174-2

MAP BY JOE LEMONNIER

JACKET DESIGN BY W. G. COOKMAN

JACKET PHOTOGRAPH BY GETTY IMAGES/AURORA CREATIVE

v3.1

For my sister Marcy,

who has a heart of gold

Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music

Creep in our ears: soft stillness, and the night,

Becomes the touches of sweet harmony.

Sit, Jessica: look, how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patterns of bright gold.

—William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

They were a rough bunch, rough in dress, rough in speech and rough handed, but just as great hearted and manly as they were rough. Real men, every one of them, with muscles and sinews like iron bands, developed by continuous and arduous exercise. There was no real adventure too strenuous or dangerous for them to undertake. They possessed the kind of power and strength that make men invincible, with characters broadened and strengthened by the hardships and privations they had been forced to endure, in their unequal struggle with the mighty forces of Nature in the unknown and desolate wilds.

—George Carmack, My Experiences in the Yukon

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Map

A Note to the Reader

Prologue: Up the Yukon River

Part II: Gold!

Acknowledgments

About the Author

A Note to the Reader

his is a true story. It is a history of the last years of the Old West and of the Yukon gold rush. It is also a narrative that recounts the lives of three unique men—Charles Siringo, the cowboy detective; Jefferson “Soapy” Smith, the gambler who built an underworld empire; and George Carmack, the prospector whose discovery set off the stampede to the Yukon. In the telling of their interweaving tales, I have benefited from several firsthand accounts. Without these invaluable tools, I would not have been able to portray these men and what they were doing, saying, and even thinking with either accuracy or vividness.

Therefore, the reader should know that I am greatly indebted to the following sources: Charlie Siringo wrote four first-person accounts of his life. These are remarkable documents—folksy, witty, suspenseful, and perceptive. Soapy Smith was shot down before he could fulfill his often-made promise—or threat, considering the secrets he knew—to record his life story. Jeff Smith, his great-grandson, however, has taken Soapy’s letters, correspondence from other family members, diary entries, legal records, as well as the albums of newspaper clippings Soapy collected, and written a smart and exhaustive biography that was published by Klondike Research, in Juneau, Alaska. It was James Albert Johnson who in 1957 discovered an apple crate in a secondhand Seattle bookstore filled with the George Carmack papers. No one was certain how the collection had made its way to the Shorey Book Store, but there was no doubt it was a treasure trove: decades of letters from George to his sister, Rose; handwritten descriptions of his prospecting days; pages of his own romantic poetry; and family photographs. Johnson bought the contents of the apple crate for $500, and he willed the papers to the University of Washington. I am grateful to the university and its Special Collections Division for sharing this invaluable resource with me.

A chapter-by-chapter note on sources appears at the conclusion of this book.

s the millionaire’s steamboat chugged north against the current, up the Yukon River, and sidled past the distant Mackenzie Mountains that late-summer day in 1882, the river remained smooth and wide, easy to navigate, but the water had suddenly turned gray and opaque. It was as if the blades—buckets, the builder had called them—of the New Racket’s paddle wheel were pushing through a fog. The sun shined high in a big dome of blue sky; nevertheless, Edward Schieffelin stood on the deck staring out at a long stretch of water that held the color of a storm cloud. It was a puzzlement. But as Schieffelin sorted it out in his mind, he came to believe—and not for the first time on his long expedition into the Alaskan wilderness—that he’d stumbled onto a clue. When he was finally convinced, he gave the order to pull the New Racket close to shore and drop anchor. Gold, he predicted with an absolute certainty to his team, lay in this dark channel.

Schieffelin’s instincts had served him well before. Six years earlier he’d been a penniless Indian scout at Camp Huachuca in the Arizona Territory when on a similar hunch he’d ventured deep into Apache country. The soldiers had tried to warn him off; Geronimo’s renegade braves still roamed the cracked, treeless flatlands surrounding the Dragoon Mountains. “The only rock you’ll find out there,” he was told, “will be your own tombstone.” But Schieffelin paid them no mind.

He’d always been a willful, independent sort. Odd, too, if you asked some of the soldiers. His thick black hair and beard fell in a tangle past his shoulders, he was thin as a scarecrow, and his getup was homespun. Day after day, he wore the same slouch hat decorated with squirrel fur, its brim pulled straight back as though blown by a sudden gust of wind, and the same pair of deerskin trousers, which he’d patched over the years with scraps of flannel and corduroy. It was his eyes, though, that made folks jumpy. Schieffelin didn’t look so much as stare; his soft gray eyes always seemed to be focused on some distant place that he alone could see. Now that he’d gotten it into his mind that there was a “big strike” waiting to be found in the San Pedro Valley, he wasn’t about to let the threat of marauding Apaches scare him off. He went off into this rough country—and found a mountain loaded with silver ore. He also enjoyed a mischievous last laugh on the people who’d tried to discourage him: He named the town built on the mesa adjacent to his treasure-trove mine Tombstone. And by the time Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday had their shoot-out with the Clanton brothers in the town’s O.K. Corral, Schieffelin had shrewdly sold out to a group of Philadelphia investors for well over $1 million.

The money, however, didn’t change the nature of Schieffelin’s dreams. It stoked them. Visions of a new, distant treasure had taken hold of his imagination, and now he had the bankroll to pursue it. It had been his prospector’s habit to study maps, and this practice had led to a theory. A mineral belt, he’d deduced from just a smattering of evidence, circled the globe from Cape Horn to the far reaches of Asia, a highway through the core of the earth paved with gold and silver that crossed North America near the Continental Divide and went on down to the Andes. According to this theory, Alaska’s Yukon Valley stretched directly across its glittering path.

The maps he consulted were primitive. Much of the world, after all, was still waiting to be explored. And many geographers were insisting that the Yukon River flowed north into the Arctic Ocean, not west into the Bering Sea. But with his customary confidence, Schieffelin had no doubts that a fortune, a colossal golden windfall many times the size of his Tombstone discovery, had lain hidden for millions of years in the long Yukon River Valley. It was Nature’s gift, waiting to be claimed by the prospector with the requisite courage, daring, and knowledge. Edward Schieffelin decided it would be his.

Dressed in his slouch hat and deerskins but with the newly acquired authority that great wealth imparts, Schieffelin walked into a San Francisco shipyard in the winter of 1881 and commissioned a steamboat. As the 175-foot, three-decked New Racket was being built, he recruited a team to accompany him to Alaska. Two of the men had sweated alongside him in his Tombstone mine, his brother Effingham and Jack Young. The fourth, Charles Farciot, was a Swiss-born Civil War veteran who’d been traveling around the Arizona Territory for years, taking photographs of soldiers, miners, settlers, and Indians. Schieffelin presumed posterity would want a photographic record of his momentous expedition, too.

In the first days of the spring of 1882, a schooner dragged the New Racket by a stout towline from San Francisco up the Pacific to St. Michael, a port the Russians had established on the Bering Sea. After their supplies were loaded, the prospectors did not want to waste any time. Schieffelin and his team boarded the little boat and quickly went to work feeding cords of wood and shovelfuls of coal into the boilers, and before long an explosion of fresh, hot steam was roiling. Suddenly, a deep, guttural rumble shook the ship’s hold, but then the engines settled into their steady, noisy grind and the two paddle wheels at the stern of the boat started turning in monotonous circles as they sliced through the water. With a great plume of dark smoke rising from its two tall smokestacks into the perfect blue sky, the New Racket began its journey across Norton Sound, heading toward the uncharted meandering labyrinth of the vast Yukon River and into the heart of Alaska.

IT WAS a voyage where every moment seemed a discovery. All was new to their eyes; and, in fact, few if any white men had ever gone here before. The sun remained high in the sky day and night, illuminating a majestic wilderness that seemed as mysterious and exciting to the team of prospectors as a fantasy kingdom in a children’s storybook. They kept a fascinated watch as their boat chugged up the twisting river past ramparts of brawny snowcapped mountains, dense green-iced glaciers glowing in the strong light, forests of tall spruce and formidable evergreens that stretched on thick and endless like secret worlds, then through deep green valleys sparkling with brier rose and bluebells, and on and still on past brackish primordial marshes, and a hundred, no, a thousand unexplored and unnamed brooding islands. Dangers, real and imagined, gathered on every shore. Intricately carved totems rose on the riverbanks to mark Indian graves, and there were occasions when the more sharp-eyed of the men saw figures, no doubt Indian braves, darting through the forests, keeping watch on them and perhaps, they feared, planning to attack the invaders. There were also the stories they’d heard in San Francisco of what roamed out there, tales of woolly man-eating prehistoric beasts as large as hills and giant ferocious bears with razor-sharp talons the length of pickaxes. As they looked out into this fresh strange land, a wild kingdom, all the large stories seemed eerily possible. And each new twist of the river brought new challenges and new decisions; you could give the order to head in one direction and you might very well disappear into a maze of countless channels, lost forever in the winding tentacles of the great and unpredictable river.