SOMETIMES, when I recall the stirring events in Swiftwater Bill’s
career, following the time he used the money I raised by pawning my
diamonds and then went to California, I am tempted to wonder whether
or not a man of his type of mental makeup ever realized that the hard
bumps that he gets along the corduroy road of adversity are one and all
of his own making. For, if one will but pause a moment and analyze the
events in Swiftwater Bill’s melodramatic career, the inevitable result
comes to him, namely, that the bumps over which Swiftwater traveled
during all of those years, when, one day he was worth a half million
dollars in gold, and the next was hiding in all manner of dark and
subterranean recesses in order to avoid deputy sheriffs and constables
with writs and court processes, were placed there by his own hands and
as skilfully and effectively as if he had deliberately planned to cause
himself misery.
Swiftwater’s transformation from a broken down tramp of the Weary
Willie order to a fine gentleman and prosperous business man, with new
tailor made clothes, patent leather shoes and his favored silk tile,
was rapid after he got his hands on the money I borrowed from the
jewelers, with my diamonds as the pledge. The change in Swiftwater was
simply marvelous. The day before almost, Swiftwater had stood before
me, as I have told, without collar or tie, a dirty black growth of
beard nearly an inch long on his unshaven chin and cheek, a dark frock
coat of a nondescript shape that had seen better days and hung on
Bill’s frame as though it might have been loaned to him by some friend;
a pair of trousers of mediocre workmanship and his feet almost sticking
out of his shoes.
Then picture Swiftwater ready to board the steamer for San Francisco,
where his friend Marks was waiting to grubstake him to the tune of
$18,000, jauntily wearing his polished beaver on the side of his head,
his black moustaches curled and waving in the breezes, his chin as
smooth and immaculate as an ivory billiard ball and his air and manner
that of a man who had absolute confidence in himself and his future.
It is no wonder then, that when Swiftwater reached San Francisco
outfitted as I have described, he found plenty of men, who, charmed
by the magic of his description of the golden lure of the North and
hypnotized into a state of enthusiasm by the halo of romance and river
beds lined with gold attached to Swiftwater’s name, were willing to
back him heavily for another venture in the North.
By this time the Tanana District was becoming famous throughout the
world and the town of Fairbanks had been located and Cleary had brought
forth from the stream that bears his name thousands of dollars of
virgin gold, thus proving beyond question the richness of the country.
Now, I am ready to believe that most people will agree with me that
Swiftwater was about as rapid and agile a performer as any of his
contemporaries who occupy the hall of fame in the annals of Alaska.
Because it was only a few short weeks until Swiftwater returns to
Seattle with his pockets bulging with currency and prepared to leave
for Fairbanks.
Of course, I knew nothing of Swiftwater’s presence in Seattle, though
it had been only a few short weeks since I had, with my own hands, in
the kitchen in the little two-room apartment we occupied, washed his
only suit of underclothes, so that he could go on the street without
being annoyed by the police.
The first I knew of Swiftwater’s return from San Francisco was when
I read in the morning paper that “W. C. Gates, the well known and
opulent Alaska miner,” had entertained a distinguished party of Seattle
business men at a banquet at one of the big down town hotels. The cost
of that feed, as I afterwards learned, was about $100--of Mr. Marks’
money. Be that as it may, before I could find Swiftwater and gently
recall to him the fact that his wife and two little children were
almost in absolute want in Seattle he had managed to board a steamer
for the Tanana and was off for the North.
Now, when I found that Swiftwater had gone, I was frantic with the
desire to follow him up to Alaska. For the year and a half that I had
remained in Seattle, waiting like Micawber for something to turn up,
the fever to get back to Alaska seemed to be growing in my veins at a
rate that meant that something had to be done. For, after Alaska has
once laid her spell over a man or woman, in nine times out of ten, she
will claim him or her from that time onward to the end of life as her
devoted and always loyal slave. I know not, nor have I ever found any
who did know, what it is that makes one who has ever lived in Alaska,
and who has left there, unhappy and discontented until they go back
once more to the land of gold.
I have seen and talked with old “sourdoughs,” trappers and dog
team freighters, and they all tell the same story. When the first
big clean-up had been made in Dawson, I remember well, the winter
following found a mob of big, boisterous, pleasure loving, money
spending, carefree and happy hearted Klondike miners in the hotels of
Seattle, San Francisco and New York. They lived on nothing but the
choicest steaks and the richest wines, and the sight of a plate of
beans would start a fight. Then they would all come back to Seattle in
the spring, sick, feverish, unhappy, with a look in their eyes like
that of a mother hungering for her lost babe. In Seattle they would
spend a restless week, but when they struck the trail at White Horse
just before the spring breakup in the Yukon every man jack of them was
himself again--jolly, joyous, carefree, full voiced and filled with the
enthusiasm of a two-year-old.
Why, I have known more than one broad shouldered giant of the trail
grow as sick and puny as a singed kitten while waiting in Seattle for
his boat to take him, late in February or early in March, to Skagway. I
knew one miner, who in health was six feet five inches tall, weighing
two hundred and forty pounds without an ounce of fat on him, come
within an ace of dying with quick consumption, which it afterwards
proved was due to his longing for the biting wind that blows from the
top of Alaska’s Coast Range and bears company with the wayfarer down in
the valley of the Yukon past the lakes and into the gold camps of the
Klondike.
Well, all this came to me then as I realized that Swiftwater was
gone North once more in search of gold, but, with Bera in Seattle and
the two babies, I was shackled as securely as any one of the wretches
who walk the streets of this city with chains and ball working out a
sentence for vagrancy.
It is not a less remarkable thing to be told of Swiftwater that he
turned Dame Fortune’s wheel once more with the dial pointing in
his direction as quickly as he had raised the necessary money in
San Francisco to make a new start in Fairbanks. To all who know of
Swiftwater’s kaleidoscopic changes from rich to poor, and back again to
rich, it seems as if the fickle Dame, carrying a magic horn spilling
gold in all directions, followed Swiftwater wherever he went into
Alaska and out again, down to the cities of the States and back again,
and, if she seemed to lose him for a while, always to welcome him back
with a winning smile.
Of course, it is part of my story that after Swiftwater had amassed
another fortune on Cleary Creek, in the Tanana, and his friend, Mr.
Marks, who had grubstake him, sought to obtain his rights in the
property, it was found that the contract between them written by
Swiftwater was as full of holes as a sieve. Again the lawyers went to
work earning big fees in the litigation which Marks brought to compel
Swiftwater to do the honorable thing--to do that by him which any man
in Alaska, at least while he lived there, never failed to do--to divide
with the man who grubstaked him.
Now, Swiftwater, as my reader has by this time safely guessed, was
made in a different mould. They used to say in the early days when the
stories of the incredible richness of Eldorado’s gold lined bedrock
were told on the “outside,” that when a man in Alaska drank the water
of the country, the truth left him. I have never, for my own part,
fully determined whether this is true, and I may frankly say that in
some of my experiences, the opportunities for judging of the truth or
falsity of this theory were limited, the reason being that most of the
men drink something beside water in that country.
As for Swiftwater Bill, he never did drink anything but water--I never
knew him to take a drop of any intoxicating liquors or wine--so that
if the water of Alaska had any demoralizing effect on Swiftwater, it
must have been in the direction of his sense of business honor and
integrity and a decent sense of his obligations as a husband and a
father. And I am satisfied, too, that the water of Alaska, if such was
the demoralizing agent in Swiftwater’s case, certainly worked terrific
havoc.
[Illustration: SWIFTWATER BILL GATES, FREDDIE GATES AT RIGHT, AND
CLIFFORD GATES, AT BOTTOM.]