Howard Blum - The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier and the Yukon Gold Rush

ALSO BY HOWARD BLUM

Nonfiction

A MERICAN L IGHTNING

T HE E VE OF D ESTRUCTION

T HE B RIGADE

T HE G OLD OF E XODUS

G ANGLAND

O UT T HERE

I P LEDGE A LLEGIANCE

The True Story of the Walkers: An American Spy Family

W ANTED !

The Search for Nazis in America

Fiction

W ISHFUL T HINKING

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

C ROWN 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.)History18601890. 3. Gold mines and miningYukon River Valley (Yukon and Alaska)History19th century. 4. Siringo, Charles A., 18551928. 5. Smith, Jefferson Randolph, 18601898. 6. Carmack, George W. (George Washington), 18601922. 7. Yukon River Valley (Yukon and Alaska)Biography. 8. West (U.S.)Biography. I. Title.
F912.Y9B58 2010

978.02dc22 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

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 menCharles 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 documentsfolksy, witty, suspenseful, and perceptive. Soapy Smith was shot down before he could fulfill his often-made promiseor threat, considering the secrets he knewto record his life story. Jeff Smith, his great-grandson, however, has taken Soapys 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 millionaires 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 bladesbuckets, the builder had called themof the New Rackets 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 believeand not for the first time on his long expedition into the Alaskan wildernessthat hed 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.

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

Hed 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 hed patched over the years with scraps of flannel and corduroy. It was his eyes, though, that made folks jumpy. Schieffelin didnt 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 hed gotten it into his mind that there was a big strike waiting to be found in the San Pedro Valley, he wasnt about to let the threat of marauding Apaches scare him off. He went off into this rough countryand found a mountain loaded with silver ore. He also enjoyed a mischievous last laugh on the people whod 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 towns O.K. Corral, Schieffelin had shrewdly sold out to a group of Philadelphia investors for well over $1 million.