AS I write this chapter, which is to interest not only the friends
and acquaintances of Swiftwater Bill, but which also may throw a new
light on his character, and may even arouse a general interest in the
odd freaks of human nature which one finds in the northern country,
I am moved to wonder whether or not there is a human pen capable of
portraying all of the many-sided phases of Swiftwater’s nature. The
story in the Seattle paper merely gave an outline of Swiftwater’s
escapade, when he ran away with Kitty Brandon, took her from Portland
to Seattle and back to Chehalis and there married her on June 20th,
1901.
If Swiftwater Bill’s title as the Don Juan of the Klondike had ever
been questioned before this affair, it seems to me that his elopement
with Kitty Brandon from Portland early in June of that year would have
forever settled the matter in his favor. The Seattle paper merely told
that Swiftwater and Kitty had been married, against the will and wish
of her mother at Chehalis, and that the girl’s mother learning of the
affair had followed the lovers to Seattle.
Kitty was a fragile, neatly formed girl of fifteen years, when she
went to St. Helen’s Hall in Portland as a student. Swiftwater left Bera
in the spring of that year at Washington, D. C., and hurried across
the continent, intending, as he told me in all his letters, on making
another fortune in Alaska. He had valuable interests in the gold mining
district near Teller, Alaska, and in his fond imagination there was
every reason to believe that the Kougarok country was as rich, if not
richer, than Eldorado and Bonanza in the Klondike.
“Bring my baby down to Nome and meet me at Teller,” Swiftwater wrote
me. “I am so glad you have taken such good care of my darling son all
winter in Dawson. I shall pay you all that you have loaned me and I
will see that you make more money in Teller City than you ever made in
Dawson. I could hug and kiss you for taking such good care of our baby
boy.”
Such was the language of Swiftwater’s letters to me, written in
Washington in the spring of that year. Swiftwater reasoned that all of
Alaska is underlaid with gold; that the fabulous riches of Eldorado and
Bonanza would be duplicated again and again on Seward peninsula. To
his mind, the making of a fortune of a million of dollars in a summer
in the new diggings near Teller was one of the simplest things in the
world, and it is not to be wondered at that there were hundreds among
his friends who believed then and do now that his mining judgment and
fairy-like luck were such as to enable him to go forth into the north
at any time and bring out hundreds of thousands of dollars in the
precious yellow stuff.
Be that as it may, when Swiftwater reached the coast, he happened by
ill chance to stop at Portland. In St. Helen’s Hall there was Kitty
Brandon, known as his niece, a girl of more than ordinary mental and
physical charms. Once again the amorous nature of Swiftwater Bill
asserted itself. It is related that he called at St. Helen’s Hall and
interviewed Kitty Brandon, and then after that was a frequent visitor,
taking Kitty at odd times driving through the beautiful city of
Portland or entertaining her at lunch or dinner, as the case might be,
in Portland’s swell cafes.
That Swiftwater had no plans for his immediate future can well be
believed when it is known that after a few days of courtship of Kitty
Brandon, he eloped with the little girl and came to Seattle. On the way
to Seattle Kitty and Swiftwater were married at Chehalis.
It is not surprising that Swiftwater found his last love affair
anything but a summer holiday, when it is remembered that his
legal wife, Bera, was in Washington, D. C., awaiting his return.
Considerations of propriety and, even of the law, seemed to have
left Swiftwater’s mind entirely, until Kitty’s mother learned of his
elopement and followed the loving pair to Seattle.
What followed afterwards was told in the Seattle, Tacoma and Portland
newspapers of that time. Learning that Swiftwater and Kitty were
registered as man and wife at a Seattle hotel, Kitty’s mother followed
them and sought to apprehend them. Then it was that Swiftwater evinced
that capacity for resource and tact which, as all his friends know, is
one of his most distinguished characteristics.
With the irate mother of his newest love lying in wait at night in
the lobby of one of Seattle’s best known hotels, it was Swiftwater’s
task to show that skill in maneuver and celerity in action which tens
of thousands of Northerners attributed to him as the origin of his
odd nickname. There was no time to repent for his infatuation for the
pretty Kitty Brandon, or to remember the fate of his deserted wife and
child in Washington.
And Swiftwater was equal to the emergency. Bidding Kitty’s mother wait
in the hotel parlor, Swiftwater rushed to his room, telephoned for a
hack to come to the rear of the hostelry, and in less than ten minutes
Bill and his sweetheart were being driven at breakneck speed through
the streets of Seattle, southward over the bridge across the tide
flats, headed for Tacoma. It was told by Swiftwater afterwards that in
nearly every mile of that trip fear that Kitty’s mother was pursuing
him and his inamorita followed him and for the greater part of the way
he kept watching down the dark road in the rear of his hack, expecting
that at every turn of the road the wrathful parent would be in sight in
readiness to pounce upon him.
[Illustration: ESCAPE AT NIGHT OF SWIFTWATER AND KITTY BRANDON FROM
THE GIRL’S IRATE MOTHER.]
From Tacoma, where Swiftwater and Kitty found only temporary shelter,
the runaway pair escaped to Portland, to return to Seattle and spend
their honeymoon in a little cottage in an obscure district near
Interbay.