Public-domain ebook
The True Life Story of Swiftwater Bill Gates
by Iola Beebe
Language: en386 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: Biographies·Adventure·History - American
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #47979.
The opening · free to read
By His Mother-in-Law, Mrs. Iola Beebe. ]
Copyrighted 1908, by Mrs. Iola Beebe.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.--Swiftwater First Hears of the Golden Find on Bonanza, in 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.
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.
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