the Klondike.
CHAPTER II.--Lure of Great Wealth and Love of Gussie Lamore Starts
Swiftwater on His Career--True Story of Famous Egg Episode in Dawson.
CHAPTER III.--Swiftwater Buys Gussie’s Love by Giving Her Virgin
Gold to the Exact Amount of Her Weight--Fickle Girl Jilts Him in
San Francisco and He Marries Her Sister, Grace--Burglarizes His Own
Residence After Quarrel With Bride.
CHAPTER IV.--Our Hero, Now a Big Operator and Promoter, Meets His
Future Mother-in-Law in Seattle for the First Time.
CHAPTER V.--Love on First Sight of Bera Beebe Is Followed by an
Elopement, Which Ends Haplessly on the Hurricane Deck of the Steamer
in Seattle Harbor.
CHAPTER VI.--Swiftwater Again Elopes With Bera, and They Are Married
in the Yukon.
CHAPTER VII.--First Born of Swiftwater and Bera Sees Light of Day on
Quartz Creek, Where First Gold Was Found in the Klondike--Financial
Entanglements Drive Swiftwater to Abandon Immensely Rich Property.
CHAPTER VIII.--Swiftwater Deserts His Child and Authoress in Dawson
and Skips for the Nome Country.
CHAPTER IX.--Hard Lines for a Deserted Woman in Dawson--Driven From
Shelter by Phil Wilson, Swiftwater’s Friend--Mounted Police Are Kind
to Deserving Unfortunate.
CHAPTER X.--Swiftwater Elopes With Kitty Brandon, His Fifteen-Year-Old
Niece, After Deserting Bera in Washington, D. C.--Is Pursued by
Kitty’s Mother, but Escapes at Night from Seattle.
CHAPTER XI.--One Woman’s Ingratitude to Another, Who Had Befriended
Her--Bera Is Sent Home Penniless--The Return to Seattle.
CHAPTER XII.--Swiftwater Returns, a Broken Man, to Seattle--Hides
Under the Bed Clothes at His Hotel in Terror When Discovered by His
Mother-in-Law--My Gems Are Pledged to Raise Money to Get Him a New
Start in Alaska.
CHAPTER XIII.--Swiftwater Gives Business Men Swell Banquet on Borrowed
Money and Then Decamps for the Tanana Country--A Spring Rush to the
New Gold Fields Brings Picturesque Crowd to Seattle.
CHAPTER XIV.--Swiftwater Strikes It Rich on No. 6 Cleary Creek--Trip
to the Interior Over the Ice--Swiftwater Promises to Make Reparation.
CHAPTER XV.--We Come Out Together From the Tanana--Bera Has Swiftwater
Arrested on Landing in Seattle for Wife Desertion.
CHAPTER XVI.--How Swiftwater Secures His First Great Miscarriage of
Justice--Remarkable Legal Transaction in a Seattle Hotel, Involving
Court and Lawyers--Bill Persuades Bera to Secure a Divorce.
CHAPTER XVII.--Swiftwater, Again in His Familiar Role as the Artful
Dodger--I Take Another Trip Over the Ice to the Yukon--Gates Makes
More Fair Promises and Then Runs Away to the States.
CHAPTER XVIII.--Laws of Our Country Have Large Loopholes for Criminals
of Wealth--Swiftwater Travels Scot Free and Makes Another Fortune in
the New Mining Camp of Rawhide, Nevada.
CHAPTER XIX.--Nurse Abducts Clifford, Swiftwater’s Eldest Son, and
Takes Him to Canada--Miner Fails to Make Any Effort to Recapture
Child--Waiting to Get What Is My Own Out of the Northland--The End.
PREFACE.
IT may seem odd to Alaskans, and by that I mean, the men and women
who really live in the remote, yet near, northern gold country,
that “Swiftwater Bill”--known to both the old Sour Doughs and the
Cheechacos--should have asked me to write the real story of his life,
yet this is really the fact.
Bill Gates is in some ways, and indeed in many, one of the most
remarkable men that the lust for gold ever produced in any clime or
latitude.
Remarkable?
Yes--that’s the word--and possibly nothing more remarkable than that
he, in a confiding moment said to me as he held his first born child in
his arms in the little cabin on Quartz Creek, in the Klondike, where he
had amassed and spent a fortune of $500,000:
“I’d like somebody to write my life story. Will you do it?”
I can only believe that the romantic element in Swift Water
Bill’s character--a character as changeful and variegated as the
kaleidoscope--led Swiftwater Bill to ask me to do him this service.
I was then the mother of his wife--the grandmother of his child. The
sacredness of the relation must be apparent.
Probably a great many people--hundreds, perhaps--may say that my labor
is one that can have no reward, and these may speak ill things of
Swiftwater, saying, perhaps, that he is more inclined to do royally by
strangers and to forget those who have aided and befriended him.
I am not to judge Swiftwater Bill, nor do I wish him to be judged
except as the individual reader of this little work may wish so to do.
If he has turned against those near and dear to him--if he has
preferred to give prodigally of gold to strangers, while at the same
time forgetting his own obligations--I am not the one to point the
finger of rebuke at his eccentricities.
For this reason, the narrative within these covers is confined to the
facts relating to the career of Swiftwater Bill--a character worthy
of the pen of a Dickens or a Dumas--with his faults and his virtues
impartially portrayed as best I can do.
IOLA BEEBE,
Mother-in-law of Swiftwater Bill.
[Illustration: MRS. IOLA BEEBE, Mother-in-law of Swiftwater Bill.]
CHAPTER I.
A LITTLE, low-eaved, common, ordinary looking road house, built of
logs, with one room for the bunks, another for a kitchen and a third
for miscellaneous purposes, used to be well known to travelers in the
Yukon Valley in Alaska at Circle City. The straggling little mining
camp, its population divided between American, French-Canadians of
uncertain pedigree, and Indians with an occasional admixture of canny
Scotchmen, whose conversation savored strongly of the old Hudson Bay
Trading Company’s days in the far north, enjoyed no reputation outside
of Forty Mile, Juneau and the Puget Sound cities of Seattle and Tacoma.
From the wharves of these cities in 1895 there left at infrequent
intervals, small chuggy, wobbly steamers for Southeastern Alaska points
usually carrying in the spring months motley cargoes of yelping dogs,
rough coated, bearded, tanned miners and prospectors from all points of
the globe, and great quantities of canned goods of every description.
In those days the eager and hardy prospector who fared forth to the
Yukon’s dangers in search of gold was usually indifferent to whatever
fate befell him. He figured that at best the odds were overwhelmingly
against him, with just one chance, or maybe ten, in a hundred of
striking a pay streak. It was inevitable that a great proportion of
the venturous and ignorant Chechacos, or newcomers, who paid their
dollars by the hundred to the steamship companies in Seattle, should,
after failing in the search for gold, seek means of gaining a miserable
existence in some wage paid vocation.
Were it in my power to bring my hero on the stage under more
auspicious circumstances than those of which I am about to tell, I
would gladly do it. But the truth must be told of Swiftwater Bill,
and at the time of the opening of my narrative--and this was before
the world had ever heard the least hint of the wonderful Klondike
gold discovery--Swiftwater stood washing dishes in the kitchen of the
road-house I have just described.
The place was no different from any one of a thousand of these little
log shelters where men, traveling back and forth in the dead of winter
with dog teams, find temporary lodging and a hurried meal of bacon
and beans and canned stuff. It was broad daylight, although the clock
showed eleven P. M., in August, 1896. The sun scarcely seemed to linger
more than an hour beneath the horizon at nightfall, to re-appear a
shimmering ball of light at three o’clock in the morning.
“Bring us another pot of coffee!” shouted one of three prospectors,
who sat with their elbows on the table, greedily licking up the
remnants of a huge platter full of bacon and beans garnished with some
strips of cold, canned roast beef and some evaporated potatoes, which
had been made into a kind of stew.
The hero of my sketch wiped his hands on a greasy towel and, taking a
dirty, black tin coffee pot from the top of the Yukon stove, he hurried
in to serve his customers.
One of these was six feet two, broad shouldered, sparsely built,
hatchet faced, with a long nose, keen blue eyes and with auburn
colored hair falling almost to his shoulders. French Joe was the
name he went by, and no more intrepid trapper and prospector ever
lived in the frozen valley of the Yukon than he. The other two were
nondescripts--one with a coarse yellow jumper, the other in a dark blue
suit of cast off army clothes. The man in the jumper was bearded, short
and chunky, of German extraction, while the other was a half-blood
Indian.
Swiftwater, as he ambled into the room, one hand holding his dirty
apron, the other holding the coffee pot, was not such a man as to
excite the interest of even a wayfarer in the road-house at Circle.
About 35 years old, five feet five inches tall, a scraggly growth of
black whiskers on his chin, and long, wavy moustaches of the same
color, curling from his upper lip, Swiftwater did not arouse even a
passing glance from the trio at the table.
[Illustration: SWIFTWATER HEARS FROM FRENCH JOE THE FIRST NEWS OF THE
GOLD DISCOVERY IN THE KLONDIKE.]
“Boys, de’ done struck it, al’ right, ’cause Indian George say it’s all
gold from ze gras’ roots, on Bonanza. An’ it’s only a leetle more’n two
days polin’ up ze river from ze T’hoandike.”
It was French Joe who spoke, and then when he drew forth a little
bottle containing a few ounces of gold nuggets and dust, Swiftwater
Bill, as he poured the third cup of coffee, gazed open mouthed on the
showing of yellow treasure.
It is only necessary to say that from that moment Swiftwater was
attentive to the needs of his three guests, and when he had overheard
all of their talk he silently, but none the less positively, made up
his mind to quit his job forthwith and to “mush” for the new gold
fields.
And this is why it was that, the next morning, the little Circle City
road-house was minus a dishwasher and all round handyman. And before
the little community was well astir, far in the distance, up the
Yukon river, might have been seen the little, dark bearded man poling
for dear life in a flat-bottom boat, whose prow was pointed in the
direction of the Klondike river.