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

Abstract

 Reviews progressive, well-educated” establishment, and have confidence that that establishment is solving regional and national problems. This collection offers little to help us learn whether those from less privileged positions understand region in similar terms. Perhaps laborers, youth, immigrants, down-winders, the poor, and others (people less likely to be accomplished writers, to be sure) experience the Pacific Northwest more as closed than as open space. John M. Findlay University of Washington, Seattle The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier and the Yukon Gold Rush by Howard Blum The Crown Publishing Group, New York, 2011. Photographs, maps, notes. 420 pages. $26.00 cloth. Scholars of the American West will have trouble with this book. Howard Blum glosses the careers of three known figures of the turn of the twentieth-century West, each of whom found his way to the Alaska gold rush: George Carmack, who made the discovery claim in the Klondike; Jefferson“Soapy”Smith,the con man who preyed on the Argonauts passing through Skagway and paid with his life; and Charlie Siringo, who most historians know as a professional cowboy,Pinkerton detective,and determined author, one of whose cases took him to Juneau for a short time. Alternately tracing the adventures of each character,Blum brings them together in a dramatic, armed confrontation in the harbor at Skagway in 1898, the only time all three of their paths crossed directly. Except they probably did not. Like much else in the book, Blum surmises the meeting without providing his sources. The book includes no footnotes. Instead, Blum explains in a“Note on Sources”that the autobiographical accounts he consulted are inconsistent and likely exaggerated.He does faithfully list Howard Lamar’s thorough biography of Siringo,but does not note that Lamar makes no mention of the meeting Blum imagines. Neither does Smith’s great-grandson in his work, which is the most complete published account of Smith’s life, nor James Albert Johnson in his 2001 biography of Carmack. Blum is a storyteller, not an analyst. The stories he tells of his three protagonists will titillate the untutored; the three led extraordinary lives, and Blum captures, and somewhat inflates, the remarkable experiences they created or that befell them.But readers wishing to distinguish fact from conjecture will do better with the previously published works on each. Unfortunately, most of Blum’s analysis is implicit. Carmack took a common-law Tagish Indian wife but rejected her when he became rich, manifesting a syndrome Sylvia Van Kirk described in 1983 (Many Tender Ties). Blum simply describes the rejection, imagining for readers Carmack’s inner dialogue. Blum often attributes to Smith an introspective objectivity that conflicts with the impulsive thuggery he portrays elsewhere and that seems incompatible with the type. In his depictions of Siringo, Blum focuses on the same individualism and personal independence Lamar did. But Blum’s detailed presentations of specific episodes in all his characters’lives frequently reach beyond the available source material, indulging in a level of speculation more appropriate to a writer of adventure fiction than to an interpretive historian. In the trajectory he designs for each of his characters,Blum creates a sense of inevitability for their finally coming together for the meeting in Skagway Harbor. Had he not got them there with his narrative, Blum’s readers would have been sorely disappointed, and so, we may imagine, would have Blum. Stephen Haycox University of Alaska, Anchorage ...