St. Elmo

The old buildings of St. Elmo have a way of making people lower their voices. The mountains crowded in, the road ran past storefronts that had outlived their customers, and every board seemed to have a year hidden inside it.

Berny stood in the street and looked toward the building where her great-grandfather had once done business. Phloyd waited beside her, patient in the way he got when he knew a story was working its way to the surface. The Russell-Thorp Building still stood there. “He rented this,” she said, slowly and deliberately. “Before Destiny…” She let the words trail off.

“He came here after he’d already been around and lived a lifetime,” Berny said. “People tend to start his story with the bank in Destiny. Even the family does that sometimes.”

“And you don’t?”

“No. It started a lot farther away.” She glanced up the street. “Deadwood. Before Alaska. Before he knew a thing about mining, buying ore, or banking.”

Phloyd looked at her, then at the weathered street. “How far back?”

“Eight, nine years old, give or take. Before everything changed.”

A wind moved through St. Elmo and rattled a loose board. For a moment it was only a board in an empty Colorado town. Then the sound belonged to another place, another century, and a boy who had no reason to imagine what the world would ask of him.

Deadwood — Before the Fire

Tobias Joseph Blue knew the difference between the road into Deadwood and the road home. The first led to shop windows, horses tied along the street, men carrying ledgers and parcels, and the bank where his uncle worked. The second led out among the Black Hills, to his parents’ homestead, farther from town than his uncle’s property.

Tobias was born here in 1884. His life unfolded on the farm. They grew a little more each year—enough for themselves, with the rest sold in town. There were a few pigs and cows. The chickens and ducks were Tobias’s chore. Many people didn’t make it through the winters, or they simply moved on. Three thousand souls still hung on. They had come for the gold, and some had settled and stayed. His father had come to make a fortune. Instead, he and Tobias’s mother made the homestead pay. Deadwood was where they had married, on March 5, 1883.

At eight, Tobias had already discovered that grown people talked differently about money when they thought a child wasn’t listening. In town, a man might talk about a claim that would make him rich before winter. At home, his father talked about what something actually cost. His mother counted what they needed before setting out for supplies, and she had little patience for buying what they didn’t. Tobias went along on those trips and had learned to listen, be polite, and keep quiet.

His Uncle Carson worked at First National Bank of Deadwood. As a senior lending officer, his days were spent hearing what people wanted to borrow and deciding whether they could repay it. To Tobias, that seemed a strange kind of work. A man could spend all day sitting at a desk and still be responsible for more money than his family might see in years.

He liked visiting his uncle’s place. Carson Ranch was just a few miles from his home, both properties resting alongside Whitewood Creek. The ranch lay four miles from Deadwood, close enough that town business was ordinary, yet far enough out that there was work to do before and after it. A couple of hired men and his cousins were there. The cousins were all older and “worked,” they would tell him. They got paid. What they did was more than just “chores.”

The outbuildings, the tools, the livestock, and especially the barn—Tobias liked the sheer size of it, the motion and steady sounds of people getting through a day. It was family. They had finer things, sure, but the place was familiar enough. It was just bigger. He wandered the ranch and creek as he did at home. As he got older, he wandered between the two properties and returned home for the evening work.

Sunday, March 4, 1894

The trip into town had been planned. Tobias’s parents needed to see about supplies, but that wasn’t the main reason they were going. They were taking a couple of nights away for their wedding anniversary.

Tobias begged to stay with his uncle’s family that day, not knowing it had been the plan all along. The wagon rocked back and forth as he pleaded his case for not going all the way into town. He had fishing plans at the pond, which always seemed to have more sunfish than anybody could catch in a day. He rambled on about sunfish and eggs for breakfast the next morning, too. The arrangement suited everybody. His cousins would keep him occupied, and his parents would have a couple of days to themselves.

The adults talked for a while, as adults do when a stop takes longer than the waiting boy thinks necessary. Tobias was already thinking about what he and his cousin might build or mend between fishing and supper. He had no particular interest in going back into Deadwood. Not again.

His mother reminded him to mind his uncle. Whatever else was said was ordinary enough that no one had reason to remember it word for word. Then his parents continued toward Deadwood.

They took a room at Mrs. Chilson’s place, the Home Restaurant. The town was familiar, the occasion was happy, and they had allowed themselves a little time that belonged just to the two of them.

Monday, March 5, 1894

Sometime around three in the morning, the town’s night was broken by fire.

The story was that a drunken patron had overturned a kerosene lamp. The flame found more to burn, and what began in one room spread into a blaze that would scar Deadwood’s business district.

The west side of lower Main Street went up in flames so hot that firefighters had to wait before they could get close enough to fight them. The Home Restaurant and its lodging rooms, along with the Gem Theatre, were engulfed in fast-moving fire. Flames leaped across Main Street and took Star and Bullock’s Hardware, leaving the brick warehouse behind it standing. Clements & Whalen, Haines & Hein Dry Goods, Graves & Company, Fash’s Saloon, and the Warner Building were all lost. Lower Main Street burned from Wall Street toward the Badlands and Chinatown. In all, some thirty buildings.

Four miles outside town, Tobias slept through the hour that took his parents from him.

(Later, that day Tobias had stood looking at the burned ruins of his parents’ last night. He turned and saw the red-brick warehouse, flame-streaked and blackened but still standing. Then he sobbed uncontrollably.)

Before dawn, news was already moving outward from Deadwood. A rider was sent to fetch Carson. The bank was all right, so far, but he needed to get to work as quickly as he could. Galloping into town, he could think only of his brother. The harder news would take much longer to settle into words he could say to a boy.

When Tobias was told, there was no sentence that made sense of it. His parents had gone into town. He had watched them leave. They were supposed to come back. He returned to that simple fact over and over, as though thinking it hard enough might make it true.

The fire was a thing the whole town would discuss—the buildings lost, the merchants ruined, the streets blackened. For Tobias it was smaller and larger than any of that. Two people were gone. The place he had always called home could never be quite the same.

A Room of His Own

There was no spare room in his uncle’s house. That was a fact of space, not affection. Tobias was fed at the family table, included among the children, and looked after as one of their own. His bed, however, would be in an outbuilding at the barn.

It was no punishment, and it was no miserable place. Tobias loved the barn; it was where he wanted to be. Over time, it became a little room worth coming home to. A wood stove stood ready against the cold. There was a bed, a table, and two chairs. Tobias and his cousins built much of what furnished the space, learning which boards would split, which joints needed another try, and why measuring twice usually saved a third attempt.

One of the chairs never sat quite as evenly as the other. Tobias knew exactly whose fault that was and saw no great need to tell anybody.

His uncle gave him work, as he would any hired hand capable of doing it, and he paid him for it. The boy was never required to buy his place at the supper table with labor. He already belonged. The wages taught another lesson: work had value, and a person who earned money ought to know where it went.

Carson showed him where it went: into the bank, into Tobias’s own account. Carson sold his brother’s farm and placed the proceeds in that account as well. Tobias thought little about it, but a nest egg sat there, growing as he grew. His uncle’s position at First National Bank made the lesson much more than a saying.

Some days were good. Some days the loss of his parents arrived in the middle of an ordinary chore without warning. Years passed anyway. Tobias grew taller. The work changed as he grew strong enough to do more of it. Coins saved in a small account began to mean something beyond the number stamped on them. They meant choices.

The Man Outside the Bank

One day in Deadwood, Tobias was enjoying a meal at the Bodega Saloon when he heard a man boasting about Alaska. The Bodega had been rebuilt after the fire and stood as a grand brick-and-stone building. Tobias had already decided that someday he would build a brick home; he just had no idea where.

The fellow rambled on to anyone who would listen about Nome and gold, about a distant coast where a person willing to endure the trip might find an opportunity that wasn’t waiting in the Black Hills. Tobias thought it was the kind of story that made distance seem like an invitation instead of a warning.

He had heard enough talk around mining country to know that not every claim produced what its owner promised. His uncle had made certain of that. But Tobias was fifteen, old enough to work hard and young enough to imagine that the next place might hold the beginning of his fortune.

The stranger looked him up and down. Over six feet tall, broad in the shoulders—a working man, he thought. Young, maybe twenty. Just the sort who might bite on his story. And he was asking questions. For the price of a drink, the stranger had answers galore. How did a person get there? What did a fellow need? Was there really work for somebody without much money?

The man answered as men who had traveled did, with details mixed into enthusiasm. Tobias carried the conversation home with him. After that, Alaska appeared in his thoughts when he split wood, when he put away tools, and when he sat at the table he had made with his cousin.

His uncle did not mistake the interest for a passing fancy. There would be hard talk about expense, danger, and what a gold rush did to people who believed every tale they heard. Tobias listened. He had learned how to do that at the bank, even when he disliked the answer.

Leaving Deadwood

By the time departure came, Tobias had wages behind him and money in a small bank account he could draw upon if needed. He carried a letter of introduction as well—a piece of paper meant to tell someone far away that the young man standing before them had a name, and someone willing to speak for it. More importantly, he had a bank willing to back him. His word was good. The turn of the century held promise.

The money was not a fortune. The letter was no guarantee. His uncle knew both things, and Tobias did too.

He took one last look around the room in the barn: the stove, the bed, the table, and the two chairs. What had begun as a place to sleep had become the first place he could properly call his own. Most of it bore the marks of work he had done with his cousins. There was a satisfaction in that which he had not quite learned to explain.

He said goodbye to the family who had fed him, paid him, worried over him, and made room for him when there had been no room in the house. There were practical instructions and probably more of them than he thought necessary. That, too, was family.

Tobias Joseph Blue left Deadwood at fifteen, on horseback, heading for Cheyenne. He carried some of what he had earned and all of what he had been taught. Ahead lay Alaska, as wide and uncertain as the stories that had drawn him north.

He did not yet know how much of his life would be spent learning the difference between the promise of gold and the business of making a living.

The next stretch was spent traveling toward Cheyenne. The route was well established as the Cheyenne-to-Deadwood stage routes. Coaches were giving way to the railroads, but those roads were still well traveled on foot and horseback. Dropping out of Deadwood along narrow trails, Tobias rode past Custer, down into the canyons, and out onto the open prairie near the Wyoming border.

High-desert plains. Sagebrush and river crossings. Occasional stops at places like Hat Creek Station and Rawhide Buttes, then on to Fort Laramie on the North Platte River. Chugwater Station, Lodgepole Creek, and finally Cheyenne. Eleven days in all. A spring snowstorm had held Tobias at Horse Creek for an extra day.

At the depot in Cheyenne, he purchased a ticket to Seattle and settled in for another two days. He had sold his horse to a man just off the train and used the money to pay for a room. The Metropolitan Hotel stood just two blocks from the depot. His first meal was roast beef, fried potatoes, and biscuits. Then Tobias ordered a whiskey. He had already had a few with his cousins in the barn.

This was a grand adventure, he thought to himself.