Chapter 22
JUNEAU, ALASKA
As City of Pueblo made its way through the Gastineau Channel, dense green mountains, carpeted with towering spruce, rose up from behind the mining town in a verdant wall of green.
The magnificent peak of Mount Roberts loomed high above the town and trees, its rocky summit still covered in snow at the end of April, massive and majestic, yet also hemming the town in, seeming to crowd it against the blue-green bay.
Maggie stood at the deck of Queen, the steamer that had taken them from Port Townsend to Fort Wrangell, then onto Victoria and now here.
They had been traveling for just over a week, and yet it felt like a lifetime.
The journey northward had been breathtaking in its beauty, as the steamer had gone past the wild coasts of California and Oregon, the massive redwood trees, the like of which Maggie had never seen before, seeming to reach heaven itself.
When they’d reached the Inside Passage in northwestern Washington, the weather had become stormy, and for a day and a half Maggie had taken to her bunk, barely able to manage a sip of water until they’d passed around Cape Caution and through the Queen Charlotte Strait.
It had been just as well, because after that painful conversation with Brendan, where he’d revealed his deep unhappiness at having her accompany them to Alaska, she hadn’t wanted to risk seeing him for so much as a second, and he also seemed to have made himself scarce.
Her reunion with her father and brother had been happier, at least. As the ship had begun to steam out of the Bay of San Francisco, Maggie still by the railing with Brendan, Danny had stridden down the deck, followed by their father, both of them nattily dressed and not looking any worse for wear from their brush with the gangs of San Francisco.
“Maggie?” Danny had exclaimed in amazement as he’d caught sight of her. He’d sounded as incredulous as Brendan had been, but also delighted, which had been a balm to Maggie’s battered soul.
“Lass, you came!” Her father had taken her by the waist and swung her around so her skirts flew out around her, and Maggie couldn’t help but tip her head back and laugh.
In that moment, despite everything she’d sacrificed, everything Brendan had said so despairingly and accusingly, she was glad to be with them.
Danny and Da were her family. She couldn’t let them leave her behind.
Her brother and father were eager to tell her about their exciting adventures.
For now that they were safely aboard City of Pueblo, that was how they viewed their escape from the gangs as well as the police of San Francisco.
They insisted Maggie come back with them to their cabin, which, although modest, was far more comfortable than her bunk in steerage, and claiming seasickness, they asked the steward to bring them the noonday meal there rather than go to the dining room.
And so the three of them ate clam chowder, roast beef, potatoes, and plum pudding while perched on the cabin beds, chatting all the while.
Danny and her father were ebullient with what they saw as their victory over the fearsome gangs of San Francisco, their nefarious shell game no more than a lighthearted lark, and somehow Maggie couldn’t find it in herself to be disapproving of or alarmed by any of it.
She was tired of feeling those tiresome emotions, of always worrying about what other people might think, what might happen, or what might not.
She didn’t want to dread the stern looks or pursed lips of someone who thought she was no better than she should be, for whatever reason.
Surely in Alaska such matters of propriety wouldn’t signify, and that, Maggie decided, would be a relief.
“You’re both utterly shameless!” she’d scolded them, but she’d been laughing, and they had grinned in return.
It had been so nice to sit and chat, to feel cozy and loved, part of something.
Her father had gotten out his harmonica, and he’d pleaded with Maggie to dance, and laughing, a little embarrassed, she had, picking up her skirts to show off the quick, neat steps while her da played and Danny cheered her on.
It wasn’t until she’d been finishing her plum pudding that Maggie had realized, with a jolt, that Brendan must have slipped away at some point. He hadn’t accompanied them to Danny and her father’s cabin; he hadn’t shared in their meal, their merry stories, or their music.
Guilt needled her, especially when she considered what it would have been like if she hadn’t been there.
It would have been Brendan joining Da and Danny for the noonday meal, Brendan laughing at their lurid tales, Brendan sharing in their plans for adventure once they reached the wild shores of Alaska.
And yet, that piercing guilt was followed by a determined, reckless defiance. Danny and Da were her family, and she belonged there with them as they’d said themselves. If Brendan absented himself because of her, then so be it.
She’d made her choice, and she would live with it. Gladly.
And now, at last, they were arriving in Juneau, and for the whole voyage she’d barely seen Brendan at all.
He’d checked on her once, when she’d been at her lowest with seasickness, and fetched her some fresh water and a sea biscuit, for which she’d been very grateful, even if he’d tersely brushed aside her stammered thanks.
Despite that kind intervention, anytime she’d strolled the deck with Danny and Da, or had gone to their cabin for a cup of tea and a chat, Brendan had made himself scarce.
Maggie was sorry for it, but at the same time she wasn’t. She’d made her choice, and so, it seemed, had Brendan.
Now she watched in avid curiosity as the town of Juneau loomed closer, a motley jumble of buildings—some three stories with impressive wooden facades, others no better than miserable shanties.
There were log cabins, tents, and dwellings made from sheets of corrugated iron and old packing crates.
It looked to be made up of only half a dozen streets, huddled against the sight of that towering wall of spruce, the waterfront a crowded jumble of wooden warehouses, shacks and sheds, the harbor filled with all manner of steamers and sailboats.
Juneau was, she’d learned during the voyage, a town of nearly two thousand people, with many more Indians of the Tlingit tribe besides, living in a collection of shanties and cabins alongside the town proper, by the tidal mudflats.
The Tlingits worked in the gold mines of Douglas Island, which they’d passed as they’d entered the channel, its two hundred and forty ore hammers pounding away at the gold trapped in veins of glittering quartz, so the clattering racket filled the air and made Maggie want to cover her ears.
“You get used to it,” one passenger, a woman in her mid-forties who had a weatherbeaten face and a calm, confident manner, had told Maggie.
She was returning to Juneau after visiting her daughter in Victoria; she’d been living there with her husband, who worked as a manager for the Treadwell mine, for eight years already, which was a long time for anyone to be in Alaska.
Juneau had only been formed as a town fifteen years ago.
Treadwell was, the woman had informed Maggie, the largest hard rock gold mine in the world. “And the sound isn’t so bad from the mainland,” she’d assured Maggie. “Juneau music, they call it.”
Maggie had nodded, overwhelmed by everything she’d seen already.
Earlier that morning, before they’d arrived in Juneau, the steamship had passed the most magnificent thing Maggie had ever seen—an enormous glacier, glittering as if it had been strewn with diamonds, rising seemingly all the way to the sky.
A fellow passenger, not a cheechako like Maggie—the term used for someone new to this wild land—told her it was the Auk Glacier, renamed Mendenhall just a few years ago.
It stretched thirteen miles in a river of ice to Mendenhall Lake.
Maggie had been mesmerized by the sight of the rushing water transformed to glittering ice, flowing over the hills in a ribbon of frozen beauty.
As they’d passed by the glacier and come to the meadows and mountains around Juneau, she’d been struck by the verdant green of it all, especially in comparison to that frozen, flowing river of ice.
She realized she’d thought Alaska nothing but an arctic wasteland, an endless expanse of snow and ice from which hardy, weatherbeaten prospectors pried a few flakes of gold from the unforgiving rock.
It was an image that she’d absorbed without realizing it, from various shock-inducing articles in newspapers and magazines, but the reality was both different and far more awe-inspiring.
It was also troubling—as they’d gone past Douglas Island, she’d seen one of the veins of quartz from which they extracted gold, crushing the rock to profitable dust. It was a livid scar in the earth, a gaping maw of darkness so different from all the wild beauty around them.
Maggie had been glad when the steamer had gone past the ruinous sight.
“Well, sure, and here we are,” her father announced cheerfully as he strolled up to her, bouncing on his heels.
He nodded toward the approaching waterfront, the bright, blue-green water of Auke Bay lapping and foaming against the sides of the ship.
“What a sight for sore eyes! And a bigger town than I expected. Why, I’ve been told Juneau has over twenty saloons! ”
“None of which you’ll be frequenting, I hope,” Maggie replied, but she was smiling.
She knew Danny and her father were both earnest about making their fortunes, but she could also imagine her father drinking away that fortune, meager though it might be, in one of the many drinking establishments of their new home.