IT WAS pitch dark when I left the cabin and made my way directly, as
best I could, to the town with its dimly lighted streets. It seemed
to me that I had never had a friend in all this world. Friend? Yes,
FRIEND. That is to say--a human being who could be depended upon in any
emergency and who was right--right all the time in fair as well as in
foul weather.
There was only one thought in my mind--that was to find some man or
woman in all that country to whom I could go for shelter and for
aid. I knew naught of Swiftwater and Bera, except that they had left
me. Swiftwater’s child, I felt as if he was my own--that little babe
smiling up into my face as I had held him in my arms but a few minutes
before, seemed to me as if he was my own.
I knew instinctively that there was none in all that multitude of
carefree or careworn miners who thronged the three cafes and the dance
halls of Dawson who could do much, if anything, to help me.
Past the dance halls and saloons and gambling halls of Dawson I went
my way, down beyond the town and finally found the dark trail that led
to the barracks of the mounted police. I told the captain exactly what
had happened. I said:
“Captain, I am left all alone here by Swiftwater Bill and I have to
find some place to shelter his little two months’ old child and to feed
and clothe him. He told me to live in his cabin. But I have no home
there now as long as that man Wilson lives there.”
No woman who has never known the hard and seamy side of life in Dawson
can possibly understand how good are the mounted police to every human
being, man, woman or child, who is in trouble without fault of their
own. The captain said.
“Mrs. Beebe, I have long known of you, and I do not doubt that a wrong
has been done you. You and your little grandson shall not suffer for
want of shelter or food tonight.”
With that the captain detailed two officers with instructions to
accompany me to Swiftwater’s cabin and to see that I was comfortably
and safely housed there, no matter what the circumstances. We went
back that long, dark way, a mile over the trail to the cabin. When we
arrived there, the two officers went inside.
“Place this woman’s clothes and belongings where they were before you
came in here, and do it at once,” commanded one of the mounted police.
Wilson looked at me in amazement, and then his face was flushed with an
angry glow as he saw that the two officers meant business.
Without a word, he picked up all the baby’s clothes and my own and put
them back where they had been before. Then he took his pack of clothes
and belongings and left without a word.
It would merely encumber my story to tell how I was summoned into
court by Phil Wilson, and how the judge, after hearing my story of
Swiftwater’s brutality--of his leaving me in Dawson penniless with his
baby--said that he could hardly conceive how a man could be so inhuman
as Swiftwater was, to leave the unprotected mother of his wife and
his baby alone in such a place as Dawson and in such hands as those
of the man who stood before him. He said that such brutality, in his
judgment, was without parallel in Dawson’s annals and that, while he
felt the deepest sympathy for me, left as I had been helpless and with
Swiftwater’s baby, yet the law gave Phil Wilson the right to the cabin.
This ended the case. I turned to go from the courtroom when the
Presbyterian minister, Dr. McKenzie, came to me and said:
“Mrs. Beebe, I do not know anything about the circumstances that have
brought you to this condition, but if you will let me have the child I
will see that he has a good home and is well cared for.”
But this was not necessary, as it turned out afterwards, because Dr.
McKenzie took the matter up with the council, where it was threshed out
in all its details. The council voted $125 a month for sustenance for
the nurse and the baby. The mounted police took me to the barracks and
there provided a cabin and food, with regular supplies of provisions
from the canteen.
I do not doubt but that the monthly expense during the winter that I
lived there with the baby is still a matter of record in Dawson in the
archives of the government, and I am equally certain that, although
Swiftwater Bill has made hundreds of thousands of dollars since that
day and is now reputed to be worth close to $1,000,000, he has never
liquidated the debt he owes to the Canadian government for the care and
sustenance and shelter they gave his own boy. All of the facts stated
in this chapter can easily be verified by recourse to the records of
the court and mounted police in Dawson.
Although I knew that Swiftwater was making money in Nome, I placed no
more dependence in him from that moment and managed to sustain myself
by manicuring and hairdressing in Dawson.
The winter wore away, and there was the usual annual celebration of
the coming of spring with its steamers from White Horse laden with
the first papers and the mail from the outside. In May of that year I
received a telegram from Swiftwater Bill telling me to leave Dawson on
the first boat and come down the river to Nome, as he and Bera would
be there on the first boat from Seattle. The day after I received the
telegram the mail came and brought a letter written by Swiftwater from
Chicago, saying that he had the money to pay me all he owed me and more
too, and for me not to fail to meet him and Bera in Nome.
Isn’t it curious how a woman will forget all the injustice she suffers
at the hands of a man, when it seems to her that he is trying to do and
is doing the right thing?
Does it seem odd to you, my woman reader, that the thought of meeting
Bera again and of giving to her and to Swiftwater the custody of the
dear little child I had loved and nursed all winter long, should have
appealed to me?
And now, as there must be an end to the hardest luck story--just
as there is a finish at some time to all forms of human grief and
sorrow--so there came an end to that winter in the little cabin near
the mounted police barracks at Dawson, where baby and I and the nurse,
Lena Hubbell, had spent so many weeks waiting for a change in our luck.
Again there was a mob of every kind of people in Dawson.
On the first steamer leaving Dawson I went with the child, after giving
up a good business that netted me between $200 and $300 a month. I took
the nurse girl with me--who had been in unfortunate circumstances in
Dawson--and I speak of her now, as she figures prominently in another
chapter in this book.
It matters little now that Swiftwater could have provided handsomely
for me and the child--that he took the money that he made from his lay
on Dexter Creek and spent it gambling at Nome; and that Bera, knowing
my circumstances, took from a sluice box on his claim enough gold to
exchange for $500 in bills at Nome, to send to me.
And when I think of this my blood boils, for Bera, after she had the
$500 in bills wrapped in a piece of paper and sealed up in an envelope
addressed to me, met Swiftwater on the street in Nome and he took the
money away from her, saying:
“Bera, I’ll mail that letter to your mother.”
Of course, I never got the money because Swiftwater gambled it away,
and I laying awake nights crying and unable to sleep because of my
worry, and working hard throughout the long winter days to support
Swiftwater’s child.
So it came about that we boarded the big river steamer Susie for Nome.
Her decks were jammed with people eager to get outside or anxious to
try their fortunes in the new Seward Peninsula gold fields or the beach
diggings at Nome. The Yukon was clear of ice, wide, deep and beautiful
to look upon in summer, though in winter, when the ice is packed up one
hundred feet high, it carries the death dealing blizzards that bring an
untimely fate to many a hardy traveler.
In Nome I found no further news of Swiftwater nor Bera and waited there
for three weeks. Then, after days of watching at the postoffice, I got
a letter from Swiftwater, saying that it would not be possible for him
to come to Nome, and there was not even so much as a dollar bill in the
letter.
Disheartened and miserable, I turned to go back to my hotel. As I
turned from the postoffice a news-boy rushed up from the wharf, crying
out:
“SEATTLE TIMES--ALL ABOUT SWIFTWATER BILL RUNNING AWAY WITH ANOTHER
WOMAN.”