BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (28 page)

Zimmerman says the Skagway Trail filled up
within a day or two and then deteriorated rapidly. At times the
traffic slowed to a standstill. Combining a trail that wasn't fit
for horses with horses that weren't fit for a trail – and men
didn't know much about either – proved lethal.

"It rains a couple hours most days, so the
first four miles got worn out right away," Zimmerman says. "Whether
you're a man or a horse, your feet and legs is wet and covered with
mud. Then you climb Devil's Hill, and the rocks get slick with mud
and manure. A horse's load shifts and he slips a foot and falls,
and sometimes his back goes out and he's done. Or a leg gets caught
in a crack and breaks. Then you got to shoot him in the head and
pull the carcass off the trail if you can. Four or five horses died
that first day.

"More often you got to unload the bags and
get the horse back on his feet, then calm him down so you can start
loading him again. Sometimes everyone gets stopped for an hour
while that happens. And most of them horses behind you is standing
on boulders or ledges, carrying two hundred pounds and can't move.
That happens more often every day, 'cause the trail keeps getting
worse.

"The train starts moving again, but then a
horse gets spooked on the other side of the hill, 'cause it lost a
shoe and the next step is three feet down onto a wet rock that
slants off a cliff. And when you look over that cliff you see a
dead horse at the bottom.

"The low ground between the hills was even
worse. The corduroy bridges held together, but mud pits opened up
where pup springs drain into the river. First the horses was
sinking up to their knees. Pretty soon the men was knee-deep and
horses was buried to their tails. Scared 'em bad. Some lost their
footing and fell over, and they was panicked or heart-broke by the
time you hauled 'em out. And if the horse was packed by tenderfeet
that don't know how to cinch a saddle, its back is bleeding from
scrapes and sores.

"After a couple weeks most of the trail
smelled like rotting horses, and sometimes you had to step across
what was left of 'em. If they been dead a day, their eyes was
pecked out by ravens. When the eyes was still there, sometimes you
see 'em blink or hear a groan when you pass by. That makes you want
to stop and find a bullet. But your own horses just step past and
don't look down.

"It was taking four or five days to get to
the pass and you never knowed when the train would stop, so when it
was moving you kept walking through the night. When it was stopped
you could rest, maybe try to start a fire in the rain, but if you
unload your horses it might start moving again, so stampeders kept
'em on their feet and burdened twenty-four hours straight. Three
fellers swore they saw a loaded horse walk off a cliff on Porcupine
Ridge to end the pain.

"By mid-August there was as many men turning
around as making it over, so you had people going both directions
on the trail. I was out there with the Metis building corduroy
bridges over the sink-holes, and some of the stampeders was
stopping to help. Others didn't want to lose time getting to the
Klondike. If the trail was open, they was going to push forward and
let someone else fix it. There was disagreements, but finally there
was nothing to do but close the trail. The stampeders got organized
and started cutting down trees and building corduroy bridges over
all the worst spots on the hills and swamps. I went back to Skagway
to get paid.

"After them bridges was built and the ground
froze, you could almost call it a trail, and stampeders started
moving up it again. But then it snows, and the tracks melt and
freeze into ice on the rocks, and the horses start falling, so you
got to leave 'em behind. If you ain't got dogs, you pack seventy
pounds on your back, move it five miles forward, and go back for
more. In the winter it was lines of men going up and down the trail
with caches buried on the sides in ten foot drifts. Your outfit
weighs a ton, so that means climbing over White Pass and down to
Bennett thirty times. Maybe you could pull a sled, but the trail is
an icy ledge, and if your sled falls off you got to haul it back up
and wait for a break in the line, and that takes hours.

"That winter a man named Brackett started
blasting a wagon road into the gorges along the river, and by
spring they was turning that track into a railroad. Meanwhile most
people getting to the lakes was using the Dyea Trail. But two years
later the White Pass Railroad turned Dyea into a ghost town.

"The papers said three thousand horses
started up the Skagway Trail ahead of the snow. Maybe a few hundred
made it to White Pass. Crossing into Canada you had to unpack and
pay customs on your outfit, and if the Mounties seen your horse was
hurt they shot it, so stampeders would wash the blood off its legs
and drape a blanket to hide the wounds on its back. On the other
side was twenty-five miles and two more hills before Bennett Lake.
A couple dozen men and even some women made it quick enough to sail
the lakes before they froze.

"The others camped and started building their
boats. There was a tent city at Bennett, with stampeders coming
over Chilkoot Pass all winter. A few horses that made it up the
Skagway Trail got sold and led back down, but the rest was turned
loose. They was carrying their own food, and after a week or two on
the trail it was gone. And there wasn't nothing to graze around the
lake.

"If you was cooking flapjacks or bacon up at
Bennett, you might hear a snort and turn to see a bony cayuse
poking his head into your tent. They was starving for company as
much as food. And maybe the first morning you give him a handful of
dried apples or a hunk of bread. Then at night he comes back, and
if you wasn't too tired from whipsawing green lumber all day, you
led him out into the trees and put a bullet behind his ear."

Chapter 33

Zimmerman stops for a taste of whiskey, then
leans back against the wall and closes his eyes. I let him catch
his breath. For the first time since his Yukon narrative began a
few hours ago, a hint of compassion has crept into the story. Not
for the victims of Garrett's thefts, like Nokes or the cheechakos
in Dawson. Not for the hapless stampeders who drowned in the rapids
or expired out on the ice. And not for those Garrett killed, like
Jessie Delaney and Drew.

Zimmerman's compassion is for the three
thousand horses who suffered and died on the Skagway Trail. It
reminds me that he grew up driving mules on the C&O towpath, so
there were months on end when he spent as much time with mules as
with people.

And the sight of his truncated finger resting
on his trousers reminds me that he's one of Garrett's victims
himself, and that Garrett never showed remorse for gigging Henry's
hand. But lack of compassion and remorselessness seem like
different stages of the same current, with one flowing toward a
misanthropic act and the other receding downstream. If Zimmerman
has more sympathy for suffering horses than suffering men, does
that increase the likelihood that he was complicit in Drew's
killing? Or maybe that's just tonight's whiskey drawing my thoughts
into a swirling eddy. I reach for my cup and tilt back a sip, then
prod Zimmerman back into the story.

"You said they closed the trail and you went
back to Skagway to get paid."

For a moment his eyes look lifeless, as if
the ghost of '97 that has been inhabiting him has departed. Then
the internal projector snaps on and the animation resumes.

"Captain Moore told us he was done with the
trail. We was going to build a wharf instead."

Moore's plan, Zimmerman says, had been to
make sure the Skagway Trail gained acceptance, then sell building
lots on the harbor townsite he had sketched out. Businesses would
flock to Skagway as the gateway to the Yukon, and their proprietors
and employees would need to build stores and houses.

But the stampeders ignored Moore's claimed
ownership of the Skagway beach and the level ground beyond it.
Instead they formed a committee, appointed a surveyor, and laid out
evenly-spaced streets and standard-sized lots themselves. And while
Skagway wouldn't realize its potential as a Yukon gateway until the
White Pass Railroad was finished two years later, stampeders
continued to arrive from the west-coast ports, and the impassable
state of the Skagway Trail ensured that most of them remained in
town for weeks or months.

By November, the Mounties at White Pass were
preventing anyone without a full year's outfit from crossing
Inside, and that policy kept some stampeders in Skagway even when
the trail became usable again. Zimmerman was one of them.

He says that before long, Skagway's muddy
streets were home to one-room hotels and saloons, and at various
tents along the trail you could have your shoes repaired or your
hair cut, or buy medicines or a sled dog. Denied the opportunity to
sell land in Skagway, Captain Moore found another way to profit
from the stampede. He hired Zimmerman, the Metis, and others to
build a long wharf across the tidal flat to deep water, then
charged the steamers a fee for using his dock to load and
unload.

"I worked all winter in Skagway," Zimmerman
says. "Drove a mule-train for a packing outfit until I seen too
much of that trail. Then back on the wharf unloading boats. Hauling
logs to the sawmill with a couple of horses that was still strong
enough to pull. And I watched that town turn into hell on
earth."

Zimmerman says that half the five thousand
people who landed in Skagway during those first six months were
stampeders determined to get to Dawson, and the other half were
opportunists determined to get rich without leaving town. Maps of
the Klondike gold fields drafted by artists who'd never set foot
Inside were marketed on the streets. Lime juice was sold for five
dollars a pint to stampeders who'd brought no defense against
scurvy. Others paid sky-high prices for dried cherries or chocolate
or tea. Packers with a team of mules cleared a hundred dollars a
day hauling outfits to the foot of Devil's Hill, and husbands and
wives opened restaurants in roomy tents and served scrambled eggs
and beer-fried sausages.

Gamblers played faro and blackjack at saloons
with names like the Golden Rose, the Midnight Musher, and the
Trembling Scale. Alaska law prohibited the sale of spirits, so the
whiskey flowing from behind the bar was siphoned from casks that
came ashore bonded and signed through to customers in Canada. Dance
halls sprung up, and men paid a dollar for a two-minute whirl with
colorfully-named women like the Ethel Tower and Diamond Lil.
Actresses emerged to sing and dance on stage, whether they
possessed those skills or not.

Out on the streets of Skagway, conjurers and
fire-eaters collected a few dollars after each performance, and so
did a Wild West sharpshooter and a Russian with a trained bear.
Captain Moore's daughter traveled through town in a moose-drawn
cart. A young soothsayer named Verity Bowen scanned the palms of
eager greenhorns and foretold whether riches awaited them across
the mountains. With one blue eye and one brown eye framed by long
chestnut curls, she struck an arresting presence on her
street-corner stand. The daily Skagway News was launched to
chronicle the arrivals, openings, fist-fights, and flying bullets
that characterized the town's raucous growth. And Soapy Smith and
his confidence men slipped into Skagway, intent on plying the
parasitic trades they'd mastered in mining towns like Leadville and
Creede.

"In Dawson you got Inspector Constantine and
the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Up at the passes, you got the
Mounties and Sam Steele. They was honest and they had guns. Try to
bribe or smuggle your way past 'em and they'll give you ten days
chopping wood. From the minute you crossed Inside you knowed you
was on lawful ground, and none of them crooks made it ten steps
into Canada.

"But Skagway is Alaska and there wasn't no
Mounties, so people took it on themselves to keep the peace.
Committees was making the rules and miners' courts settling the
disputes. Frank Reid been all over the west for thirty years, seen
lots of fights in mining camps and Indian country, so they made him
surveyor, and he decided all the scraps over land. But that didn't
stop the con men, and by January of '98, Jefferson Smith owned that
town."

Zimmerman says there were over a hundred men
on Smith's payroll. Dock workers and saloon keepers, money lenders
and ministers, journalists and jugglers were all part of an
elaborate theatrical performance designed to separate the
stampeding greenhorns from their money.

"You never knowed who was part of the gang or
who was a snitch, so you kept your mouth shut. Tommy Santoro was in
on it. He was a newspaperman and would meet every steamer. Shake
hands with a couple of cheechakos on the dock and welcome 'em to
Skagway, then pull out his pen and pad and get their story for the
newspaper. Where they was from, who come with 'em, what kind of
outfit they was bringing in.

"Then he would introduce 'em to a couple of
friendly fellers named Ross and Joe who would help 'em carry their
bags up into town. And Ross and Joe might tell 'em what packing
outfit to use, what hotel was safest, and what bartender was a
sourdough who just come back from the Klondike. Might even warn 'em
to watch out for Soapy Smith's gang. But of course Ross and Joe and
all those businesses was in on it too. By the time the cheechakos
was ready to look around, the gang was already figuring out how
much money they had and how to fleece 'em.

"Sometimes they would get 'em into a crooked
card game, and that was the easy way. If the greenhorn wasn't a
sporting man, a nice feller might lead him to the Information
Office, and that was nothing but a hut where Jeff's men would put
on a show. When an expert behind the counter was going to sell the
greenhorn a map, a thief would jump in and take his wallet. All the
other customers would holler and grab and punch the thief, and the
greenhorn would get knocked out of his senses.