I touch my face, and she’s right: I am. “It’s all over. All that hard work . . . gone.” I gesture to the saloon. It was more than just our business. It was our life. Our inheritance from Lu.
“It is,” she concedes. “But I think we’ve gained more than we’ve lost.”
I shake my head. “I don’t follow.”
“Look at all those happy people: talking about us, drinking to our future, finishing our revenge for us. We’re forever part of Skaguay’s history now. You and me, Lil. We’re going down in legend. The infamous Garrett sisters.”
I suppose it’s something. Eventually, I draw a shaky breath. “You were very specific about where they should start digging. Where do you have them coming up?”
Her eyes sparkle. “Well, it’s hard to be precise when you’re that far underground.”
“But?”
“If they dig straight up?” Her lips twitch. “They should surface pretty much in our outhouse.”
“The Legendary Garrett Girls” was first inspired (though I didn’t know it at the time) by a family vacation to Alaska, where I rode the White Pass railway and saw the grave of Soapy Smith. I even started my research, accidentally, when I bought William B. Haskell’s memoir, Two Years in the Klondike and Alaskan Gold Fields, 1896–1898, as a souvenir of the holiday. Many details of daily life in this story come straight from Haskell, including the use of gold dust as currency.
One of the tricky things about researching Soapy Smith is the proliferation of legend and rumor around his rather murky life. It’s safe to discount the wildest legends (“He was the new Napoleon of crime!” “Moriarty had nothing on Jeff Smith!”), but there are clear factions in the interpretation of Smith’s life and times. For a writer of fiction, this is ridiculously liberating: I was free to cherry-pick the details that best suited my dramatic impulses.
My research into Tlingit culture suggests that formal names are private and not to be used lightly. In homage to Kate Carmack, Jim Mason, and Dawson Charlie, members of the Tagish and Tlingit First Nations who discovered gold and triggered the Klondike gold rush, I’ve given my Tlingit trader, John, an English name of convenience.
If you’re curious about Soapy and the Klondike gold rush, please visit my website, where I’ve posted a short bibliography. For readers and writers of historical fiction, it’s never too late to stake a claim!
ANTONIA’S TIMING WAS PERFECT. The sun was just flaming over the horizon, making insects shimmer and lighting the green glass insulators in the new electric poles that marched up and down the empty streets. This far north on the Kings Road, buildings stood at a distance from one another and looked like they’d been thrown together in a day. Everything felt unfinished and exciting, changing minute by minute — blink and you saw something new. Five years ago Tony’s father had brought her here to see horse races at the track — now the same racetrack served as an airfield and hosted flying shows.
Today, Tony was here to see the flying.
There were a few other people waiting across the street from Paxon Field, early risers like herself who’d been lucky enough to get a tip-off about the informal flying show that was going to happen this morning. Bessie Coleman, Queen Bess, Brave Bess — the only black woman in the world with a pilot’s license — was coming out here to do a test flight before tomorrow’s air display.
Tony hesitated for a moment at the closed door of the airfield office. Traffic amounted to a milkman’s horse and one rattling old Tin Lizzie Ford, which didn’t even slow down as it passed, but someone had decided the test flight was important enough to warrant a young white uniformed policeman patrolling the front of the wooden office building. The policeman came out to stand in the middle of the street and waved the car on importantly. As Tony stood wondering whether she should go into the office and explain that she’d been invited, or if it would be better just to wait until Miss Coleman and her escort got here themselves, the policeman turned and saw her.
He tried to shoo her away like a stray dog.
“This show ain’t open to the public,” he told her. “The parachute jump is tomorrow, over at the racetrack. If you want to watch just now, you can stand on the other side of the road.”
“Miss Coleman’s publicity manager invited me,” Tony explained. “He’s Mr. Betsch, from the Negro Welfare League. Yesterday she came and lectured at my school — I go to Edwin Stanton —”
The policeman’s lips parted as though he were about to interrupt. Tony plunged on, speaking fast: “She’s got a moving picture of her aviation stunts in Europe, and yesterday while she was rewinding her film reels, Mr. Betsch told me I could come along today so I can interview her for my Physics Club —” She realized she was talking too quickly, sounding a little desperate.
“Other side of the street,” the policeman said, pointing.