The Floor of Heaven (19 page)

Charlie was directed to the machine shop, where a terse foreman handed him a large tin of oil and a metal cylindrical oiling device that narrowed into a long, thin pointed tip that reminded Charlie of a barn rat’s tail. The job, as quickly explained, struck Charlie as simple enough: He was to tour the mine and mill operations each day, according to a prescribed rotating pattern that was posted on a wall of the shop, and oil the machines in each of these facilities. It was a ten-hour shift; for the first week he’d work days, the next week, nights. At the conclusion of those brief instructions, the foreman sent Charlie on his way with a bit of advice: You have any questions, come see me. But I was you, I wouldn’t have too many questions. Do your work, and we’ll get along just fine.

And so Charlie went off. He had had a few occupations in his time—cowpuncher, merchant, and, most recently, detective—but nothing in his experience had prepared him for the strange new industrialized enterprise he was entering. Work in the mine was broken down into different procedures, and each one left Charlie, a man with a curious bent, fascinated. “It was a world of which I had never dreamed,” he marveled.

The glory hole—as the deep muddy pit where hundreds of miners were busy digging the ore-bearing rocks from the earth was called—was wider and longer than the steamship that had brought Charlie to Alaska. Charlie would descend into its depths and immediately be unnerved. With an army of men swinging picks and wielding shovels at close quarters, he feared that at any moment he’d be speared. The noise, too, was another sort of assault. It wasn’t simply the commotion created by some two hundred diligent miners attacking an underbelly of solid rock. Rising at a sharp angle over the pit, supported by a series of increasingly tall log pillars until it reached higher than the tree line, was a massive wooden flume. A nearly constant flood of water rushed through it with a powerful force, cleansing the excavated rocks, and in the process created a rumbling din that echoed like the reports of a dozen Winchesters off the pit’s steep stone walls.

But time spent in the tumult of the glory hole, Charlie came to decide, was a holiday when compared to life below ground. A steel cage elevator descended with a careful, rhythmic slowness deep into the earth, carrying teams of miners to a network of long, narrow, timber-shored tunnels. Each of the candlelit tunnels, known as chambers, was its own community. The men worked their shifts digging and scraping in a tight, nearly airless darkness, isolated in caves of shadows, emerging only into the common corridor when they loaded the piles of heavy rock into wooden wagons drawn by massive horses. The wagon master would lead the horses back to the elevator, where another crew would dump the rocks into a cart, which would be wheeled into the cage; then, on his signal, the elevator would begin its long rise up to the surface.

For Charlie, who’d always treated his mounts like family, the sight of the brawny horses, some weighing as much as two thousand pounds, kicking and bucking wildly, near to crazy with terror, as they were led into the elevator at the start of each shift, filled him with revulsion. As soon as they were out of the cage, the horses would become docile; they could be hitched to the wagons and they’d pull their loads without incident. It was only as they were led back to the cage for the trip up to the surface that they’d again turn wild, snarling and whinnying as though possessed. Having witnessed this one afternoon, Charlie was of half a mind to intervene; his blood boiled at the sight of such willful abuse. In the end, though, he decided that the risk was too great. He didn’t want to provoke an incident that would attract attention his way. He was, he reminded himself, working undercover; and—an even more persuasive restraint—he’d made a promise to McParland. The best he could do was to try to gentle the horses as they were led into the cage. Still, he sure would’ve liked to have punched the wagon master flat on the nose; maybe that would teach him to be little more respectful of the animals he was handling. Truth was, Charlie had no trouble understanding what was spooking the horses. He had spent most of his life in big open country, and his emotions, too, would rage dangerously as soon as he began the slow, dark descent underground.

While the glory hole and the underground chambers were curiosities that, though intriguing, left Charlie uneasy, he had nothing but admiration for the collection of inventive machinery housed in a series of long shacks at the crest of the ridge. Massive quantities of the excavated rocks from the mine would be loaded into low flatbed railroad cars, which then traveled up the ridge on a specially designed narrow-gauge track. There, the rocks were placed on wide rubber conveyor belts, which carried them along to the machines. Each piece of machinery performed a separate step in the process of extracting gold. Hydraulic devices that the men called “squeezers” and “crushers” pounded away, their clamor the equal of a stampeding cattle herd, Charlie complained; these machines separated the pyrite and gold from the waste rock. Next, the valuable ore would be washed by a forest of long hoses constantly squirting water, then moved along on vibrating vanner rollers to the chlorinization vats, a series of deep troughs filled with a sulfuric acid mix. Finally, the ore would continue on to the foundry, where it would be baked in gigantic brick-lined ovens, the flames burning around the clock like the fires of hell itself. The finished product—gold bars—would be loaded onto the railroad cars for the ride to the windowless warehouse on a stumpy hill directly above Gastineau Channel. Once a month, under the protection of a squad of heavily armed guards, the bars would be loaded onto a steamship docked at the island’s wharf. This “treasure ship,” as the envious prospectors up and down the panhandle dubbed it, would steam nonstop to Tacoma, Washington, carrying a shiny fortune of nearly pure gold bullion bars.

For Charlie, the most fascinating aspect of the entire process was that any fool could be hired to do the work. As the ore moved forward on rolling belts, each worker was required to do only a single simple task. The difficult work was done by the machines. On the range, a cowboy prided himself on being a jack-of-all-trades; he had to ride, brand, lasso, scout, and, on occasion, shoot straight. A top hand carried himself with a well-earned pride. But in this new world of machines, there didn’t seem much that could give a man any real satisfaction.

It was while working the night shift, though, that Charlie got to thinking more and more about where the West—the entire country, for that forlorn matter—was heading. His first afternoon on the island, he’d watched as the weak winter sunlight faded, the sky turned dark—and then suddenly the entire horizon glowed with bright electric lights. Charlie had encountered electricity in Chicago, and over the past five years a good many neighborhoods in Denver had been wired for electrical current; but he’d never expected to find electric lights on an island up in the far north. However, the Treadwell people, determined to keep their lucrative operations going around the clock, had brought in engineers to set up a water-powered electric generator, and as a result the entire island blazed at night with a harsh artificial light. Charlie was astonished. And saddened. He had lived too long in a frontier of endless distances and dim horizons illuminated after the sun set by only an immense starry sky. He didn’t cotton to people bringing civilization to places that got on just fine without it. Still, he realized that this world of machines and electric lights was the future and there was no stopping it. Once he settled into being resigned, it tickled him that he’d had to come up to the wilds of the far north to see progress firsthand.

Of course, all his time on the island he was looking for clues. There was a dining hall that, he figured, seated as many as two hundred men at a time, and on his meal breaks he’d go out of his way to make conversation. He didn’t know precisely what he was trying to discover, and some of the men gave him odd looks, as though he was being a mite forward. But it was the best he could do. The problem was, after a month it hadn’t gotten him anywhere, and so he hadn’t written McParland, as he had promised. He knew he should, but he wanted to get more of an idea who might’ve been behind the robberies, and how they’d done it, before he gave the superintendent the okay to send up another man. As it was, Charlie had nothing at all to go on. Except, he decided, for possibly one small notion. He found his mind circling back time after time to this same simple fact. It had first occurred to him as he’d watched a crew unload the gold bars from the beds of the railroad cars and carry them into the warehouse. He wasn’t certain how this observation fitted into a solution to the mystery; nevertheless, instinct told him it was important. And so his detective’s mind kept mulling one distinct and certainly undeniable fact: Gold was heavy.

THROUGHOUT THE Treadwell mine, the stamp room was a source of pride. It was well known as the largest operation of its kind in the world: 240 “stamps” under one roof. Charlie’s head, though, would start to ache as soon as he put his foot through the door. Each stamp was a heavy metal rod about the circumference of a fence post and, powered by a hydraulic engine, it would crash down like a hammer on an iron box. Inside this enclosed box—the mortar, it was called—were rocks dug from the mine. On impact, they’d be smashed into pieces that would reveal whether they contained veins of gold. The mechanized coordination of a row of 240 metal stamps repeatedly slamming into 240 iron boxes made the concrete floor vibrate beneath Charlie’s feet and created a din so powerful that his head felt ready to explode.

Fortunately, the work required of him was routine. Not much concentration was required. He’d wait until a rod was rising back to the start position, then stoop over and give its mechanism a quick squirt of oil before the rod came crashing down. Since each of the 240 stamps needed to be oiled, it was a long process. All he could do to escape the noise and the monotony was to lose himself in his thoughts. Invariably, it would not be long before his mind focused on Mamie. He was still haunted by her memory.

So there was no warning. He did not even realize what he’d done until it was too late. He had gone a good ways down the line, oiling each mechanism in turn; and now he was on his knees, bending toward the next machine, absently angling the tip of his oil can into the hydraulic mechanism, his thoughts elsewhere, when he tried to remove his hand and move on. He couldn’t. He was wedged tightly into a narrow space and he couldn’t free himself. Somehow the right-hand sleeve of his mackinaw had gotten stuck in the hydraulic mechanism, while his left sleeve had been caught in the belt of the vanner rollers that delivered the rocks. It was as if he were in a grizzly’s merciless grip. Only more dangerous. In a moment the heavy metal stamp would come crashing down on his hand.

Desperately, he tried to move away, to unbutton his heavy coat so that he could escape. But the angle of his entrapment made it impossible. He was crouched in the narrow space between two stamps and the rubber belt. His right arm lay exposed. It was impossible to free it. And the heavy stamp was coming down fast. The best he could do was close his fingers into a fist; maybe that way he could avoid getting them severed.

His mind raced but found no way to stop the descent of the metal stamp. Or to get free. He’d seen the stamp smash into the metal box; the heavy rocks inside were reduced to smithereens. It would crush every bone in his hand to dust.

Suddenly Charlie felt an arm reach in, grab the sleeve of his coat, and with one strong motion pull it free. Immediately he jumped up from his crouch and stepped back. Then the stamp crashed down against the mortar.

Shaken, Charlie turned to see an Indian walking away. There were plenty of them at the mine; they worked for a dollar a day less than white men, so Durkin was glad to hire them. Charlie hurried after him. Maybe he didn’t speak English, and that was why he was scurrying off. But Charlie still wanted to thank him. If he hadn’t come along, there was no telling what would’ve happened. ’Cept, for sure, Charlie’s hand would’ve been busted up, if not severed.

It was only when Charlie caught up with the Indian that he realized his mistake. Sure, the man had a few hairs on his chin and one of those drooping black mustaches all the Tlingits wore, and there was a string of green beads around his neck, and his dirty slouch hat had a perky feather in the band; but he was no Indian. The set of his eyes, the shape of his nose, his skin color—all revealed him to be a white man. Charlie had, however, just come too close to disaster to be of a mind to make judgments. He simply extended his hand and asked, Who do I have the pleasure of thanking for saving my skin?

Shaking the offered hand, the man answered, “George Carmack.”

FIFTEEN

y the time George Carmack had come to Charlie’s rescue, he had been to the Yukon and back. He’d also had abandoned any dreams of ever finding gold. Instead, George was driven by a new ambition: He wanted to be made an Indian chief.

It had been a strange and unpredictable journey that had brought George—now known and dismissed as a Siwash, another red-skinned savage, by most of the men with whom he’d once panned for gold—to the Treadwell mine. Yet it had started off in a seemingly uneventful fashion when, upon first arriving in Juneau four years earlier, George had gotten himself a room in the same hotel where Charlie would later register under an alias. Also just like Charlie, his initial morning in Juneau had started out in disappointment.

With the first light, George had headed up to Gold Creek to get a sense of how the prospectors were faring. The murky waters were high and roiling from the heavy spring rains and melting snow, but he found plenty of men working. Some stood on the banks of the creek shoveling gravel into sluice boxes, and others were panning, knee-deep in the swift, frigid waters. To a man, though, each gave George a similarly despairing report: Gold Creek had been played out. A few years back, a fellow could stick his pan into the creek bed and he could count on seeing some yellow in the siftings. There’d been a time, you could walk away with twenty, sometimes even fifty dollars’ worth of nuggets and dust after only a morning’s work. But gravel and black sand was all anyone was finding nowadays. You’ve come too late, young fella, George heard time after time.