BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (23 page)

"While the Swedes was trading their claim at
Baker Gulch and Wylie was down at Circle, Gig was helping Nokes and
his partner burn shafts on Mammoth Creek, so he knowed as much as
the rest about winter diggings. But none of 'em knowed for sure
where to sink the first shaft.

"There was only two dozen claims getting
worked that winter, but some of the owners showed how to do it
right. Alex McDonald owned half of 30 Eldorado. Bought it from a
Russian for a bag of flour and a side of bacon, back in November
when most miners still didn't believe what they was hearing about
Eldorado and Bonanza. He offered a lay on part of it a few weeks
later, and four laymen burned a shaft for thirty nights, then took
out forty-thousand dollars in coarse gold. McDonald got half of
that and used it to hire four men to work his own part of the
claim. They sunk and drifted forty feet and pulled out almost a
hundred thousand from a pay-streak two feet thick. McDonald spent
that money buying pieces of ground on other Klondike creeks.

"Big Alex was a schoolteacher from Wisconsin.
Said he worked hard-rock mines on Douglas Island and placer mines
in Colorado, but most of the sourdoughs in Dawson wasn't too sure
about that. He tramped up the Stikine River Trail and floated down
the Yukon on a raft just 'cause a dozen greenhorns he met in Juneau
said he could come along. Then only two of 'em made it past the
lakes.

"McDonald was shaped like a moose – barrel
chest, long legs, thick hair and moustache – but he never slung a
pick or washed out a pan in the Klondike hisself. He spent his time
borrowing and buying and trading his way into more claims and
percentages than you could count. All his debts was secured by
claims, and when one of 'em was coming due, he scrambled to clean
up enough gold to pay it off, so he was usually one step away from
going bust. But when all the diggings from that first year was
washed out, Big Alex was the richest of the Klondike Kings.

"Clarence Berry was the opposite – paid all
his attention to one stretch of rich ground. He staked 6 Eldorado
and traded half his claim on upper Bonanza to Antone Stander for
half of 5 Eldorado. Stander probably guessed Eldorado was richer
than Bonanza, but he swapped because the ACC store wouldn't sell
him an outfit without someone to guarantee the debt, and Berry said
he'd do it.

"So Berry and Stander was working their
Eldorado claims together and taking five-dollar pans from the first
diggings, then using the money to hire men and sink more shafts.
Maybe up to fifteen or twenty holes at one time, and every day they
would add to the dumps and Berry's wife would wash out a few pans
to pay the men. When they reached bedrock and the pans was worth
one or two hundred each, Berry and Stander bought most of 4
Eldorado.

"Plenty of ground on Eldorado and Bonanza was
staked by greenhorns that couldn't figure out how much it was
worth, so they would sell part of a claim for a few hundred
dollars. Then six months later that piece would sell for five
thousand. The next spring, fifty thousand, or maybe a hundred and
fifty.

"Lindfors and Ruud was at the other end of
Eldorado from Berry and Stander, and they didn't find five-dollar
pans near the surface. But while the Swedes and Gig and Wylie was
still digging waist-deep, Berry and Frank Phiscator and Jamie
MacLanie and a few others got down to bedrock. Word started
spreading about Eldorado pay-streaks a hundred feet wide and four
feet thick, with enough gold mixed into the gravel that you could
see the colors by candle-light. By April the stories was about
five-hundred-dollar pans and nuggets the size of walnuts."

Zimmerman can't resist invoking other
Klondike legends. Tom Lippy from Seattle walked away from his upper
Eldorado claim when 16 Eldorado came open. It was easier to build a
cabin on the lower part of the creek where the trees were more
abundant, and after sharing Lippy's long journey down the Yukon,
his wife didn't want to live in a tent. The couple eventually took
over a million and a half in gold out of 16 Eldorado – the richest
claim on the richest creek. It and 17 Eldorado had been vacated by
four Scotsmen who staked 15 through 18, then decided to spread
their bets across two Klondike creeks. The other creek proved
worthless.

Back at Fortymile, Charley Anderson had taken
to drowning his sorrows after spending the last few years
prospecting with little luck. When Carmack paraded through town,
Anderson watched his colleagues flock to the Klondike, but
dissolution or doubt left him parked on his stool at Kerry's
Saloon. A month later Al Thayer and Winfield Oler came down to
Fortymile from Dawson hoping to sell what they thought was a
worthless Klondike claim, and the inebriated Anderson was a sitting
duck. By the end of the night Anderson was out eight hundred
dollars, and when he sobered up all he had to show for it was a
signed deed to 29 Eldorado. He took it to Inspector Constantine and
told a sad story, but Constantine said the sale was valid. Anderson
hung his head and made his way upriver to 29 Eldorado, never
guessing that his claim held over a million in gold. His peers in
Dawson later christened him "the Lucky Swede."

On Bonanza, claim 2 Above was staked by Jake
Dusel, and he used a generous length of measuring rope to make sure
his claim reached high enough to capture the mouth of Skookum
Gulch, which runs into Bonanza from the south, roughly parallel to
Eldorado and a little downstream. Dusel's claim was cut down to
five hundred feet when William Ogilvie arrived to survey the
Klondike creeks on behalf of the Canadian government and resolve
any errors or disputes. Ogilvie's survey released an eighty-six
foot fraction between 2 Above and 3 Above on Bonanza, and an
observer from Circle City named Dick Lowe thought hard about
whether the undersized, wedge-shaped patch was worth claiming.

Like Gig and Wylie, Lowe had reached the
Klondike after Bonanza and Eldorado were located end to end. What
if he staked the fraction and another rich prospect was discovered
soon afterward? He'd be ineligible for a full claim on the new
creek. Lowe walked away from the little wedge, hoping he could find
a bigger fraction as the survey proceeded. Then he changed his
mind, came back, and staked it. Skepticism returned, and he tried
unsuccessfully to sell it. No takers. Nor was anyone willing to
work a lay on a fraction that small.

Out of alternatives, Lowe decided to sink a
shaft on the claim himself, but that too yielded nothing. As a last
gesture he sank a second shaft, and this time he hit the pay-streak
dead center. In eight hours he took out forty-six thousand in gold.
"Dick Lowe's Fraction" ultimately yielded over five-hundred
thousand, making it the richest square-footage ever staked in the
Klondike or anywhere else.

On lower Eldorado, Clarence Berry and Antone
Stander found pay-dirt under nine feet of glacial drift, and the
streak ran the full length of their claims, averaging three feet
thick and a hundred and fifty feet wide. But on upper Eldorado,
Zimmerman says, the pay-streak was buried deeper, and it was
thicker but not as wide, making it more elusive even if the creek
basin was narrower from rim to rim. So the Swedes and Gig and Wylie
burnt their first shaft near the east rim on 48 Eldorado, reached
bedrock at fifteen feet, and drifted twenty feet toward the creek,
but found no layer of gravel laced with gold.

The second shaft went down simultaneously
near the west rim and also came up empty. Even on the upstream
reaches of Eldorado the grade of the basin is minimal, so the creek
wanders lazily through bends and half-loops between the rims,
offering no insight into the location and path of the submerged
pay-streak, which traces the path the creek followed thousands of
years ago, after glaciers scraped away all the accreted muck and
debris.

"That shaft is four by six, with cordwood
three foot high across the bottom, and when you light a fire it
smokes like a volcano. Even smokier when you drift sideways at
bedrock, 'cause then the fire gets starved for air. So keeping that
fire burning long enough to thaw the ground ain't easy. And then
you got embers and ashes to shovel into the bucket every morning
before you haul any dirt up to the surface. Until you hit the
pay-streak, you just empty the bucket around the crib-work and it
builds into a cone. But when you're raising pay-dirt, them buckets
get carried over to a pile they call the winter dumps."

"But they missed the pay-streak with the
first two holes."

"And the third. Cut into it on the fourth,
after drifting eight feet. That showed 'em where to sink next, and
they was taking out pay-dirt all along the drift on that fifth hole
until water starts seeping in. April was wearing out by then, so
even though they knowed the lie of the streak and could hit it
every time, it was getting too warm to burn another shaft.

"It's twenty days to sink fifteen feet and
drift twenty – when everything goes right. When you got problems
with the fires or the hole, it's thirty days. So even though
Lindfors started working that claim in October, then Ruud come on
in December, and Gig and Wylie hired on in January, they only got
one shaft into the pay-streak that winter. Took out a hundred
buckets a day for about a week. Eight pans to a bucket, and
averaging about two dollars a pan, which don't sound like much when
Clarence Berry can find a five-hundred dollar pan, but what counts
is average across the whole streak, and two dollars is ten times
what anybody ever seen in Colorado or California."

"So the Swedes finally struck it on
Eldorado," I say, "thanks to Gig and Wylie."

Zimmerman smirks and shakes his head a few
inches, as if he's recalibrating.

"When they got to sluicing that summer, they
cleaned up ten thousand dollars in dust and nuggets from the winter
dumps. But most of that gold runs through your fingers before you
get a chance to count it. Every shaft you sink costs ten dollars a
foot, if you got hired hands. Firewood is twenty-five dollars a
cord. Thirty dollars for a sluice box with riffles in it, and it
takes dozens of boxes to sluice a claim all summer.

"Shovels and picks, wheelbarrows and buckets
for moving dirt. Saws and hammers and nails for building a trestle
through your summer cut to carry water for sluicing. The creek
grade is so low you need to dam two hundred feet upstream and
channel the water from there. If you ain't got someone to haul
supplies, you pay ten cents a pound from Dawson to the mouth of
Eldorado. And that's in the winter. In the summer it's twenty-five
cents a pound, 'cause you can't run a sled and no dog carries more
than forty pounds. Add that all up and maybe the Swedes cleared a
couple thousand dollars from the winter dumps, but you need all of
that and more in Dawson to lay in grub and supplies for the next
winter."

"You've been saying that Eldorado was the
best creek in the world, but it sounds like the Swedes were barely
scraping by."

"The gold was there," Zimmerman says. "Maybe
not like Dick Lowe's fraction, but even the top of Eldorado was
rich. You had to be smart or lucky to get it out without going bust
first. And you had to have the nerve and stomach to stick with it,
which lots of men didn't that first year on the Klondike."

He leans away from the wall and twists to put
his hands on the table, then stares momentarily into his cup.

"It got easier in '98," he says, "after the
main creeks proved out and all the claims was being worked. But by
then there was thousands of stampeders coming into the Klondike
from Outside, and some men figured there was easier ways to get
rich in Dawson."

Chapter 27

"So Gig and Wylie stuck it out as hired hands
through the summer?"

"Mostly," Zimmerman says with a smile. "Gig
wasn't too happy when they was digging the first few shafts and
coming up empty. Makes you wonder if you was going to get paid. But
while they was working for the Swedes up on Eldorado, they had ears
to the ground. Gig reckoned there'd be more discoveries and he
wanted to be ready. The Swedes knowed that if a good prospect got
located, Gig and Wylie was going to stampede. And there was a run
of new creeks in the spring and summer of '97.

"In late April it happened just below the
mouth of Eldorado. A sourdough named Taylor working down at
American Creek on the lower Yukon – that's a few hundred miles past
Circle, down near where the Tanana River come in – got the Klondike
news after the Yukon froze, so he set out for Dawson in the dead of
winter with a dog team, six hundred miles over the ice, fifty or
sixty below zero most of the way.

"He got up to Dawson in February and there
was nothing left on Bonanza or Eldorado, so he joined a couple
other men and took a lay on George Carmack's Bonanza claim. A
Discovery claim is a thousand feet, and Carmack couldn't afford to
work it all.

"Skookum Gulch come into Bonanza just a
stone's throw upstream from Discovery, so when Taylor and his men
wasn't busy they staked claims 1 and 2 on Skookum Gulch and started
panning the creek-bed and cutting wood for a shaft. They found a
pay-streak only four feet down, and that was enough for 'em to walk
away from Carmack's lay, even though they already cleaned up seven
thousand on it. Like most fellers, they didn't like giving away
half of what they worked for.

"In the first week of drifting they took out
almost three thousand dollars. That set off a stampede and Skookum
Gulch got located top to bottom in a few days. This time Gig and
Wylie was in on it. They come down Eldorado when word got out and
climbed Skookum Gulch early enough to stake 19 and 20. Went down to
Dawson to record and then back to 48 Eldorado. To work their
claims, they was going to need full pokes, so through May and June
they spent most of their time with the Swedes and got over to
Skookum Gulch when they had a chance.