“I was so sorry for him that I put him in one of the first cabins and took him home without charge.”
Swift-Water Bill Gates’ story was a good deal like Anderson’s. He was a Portuguese, who got his nickname from his claim that he swam down the rapids of the Yukon on his way to the gold fields. He began as a waiter in an eating house. One day while serving two miners he heard one tell the other of the gold discovery in the Klondike. He left their order unfilled, got a dog team, and rushed to Dawson. He was in at the first and picked out a number of claims, including that on Eldorado, which made him a fortune. He was successful for years, but was so dissipated that he ran through his millions, and when he left with the stampede to Fairbanks, he had only fifty cents in his pockets. There he made a second great strike, but he lost that fortune as well.
Swift-Water once cornered the egg market in Dawson, and all for the love of a lady. He was a gallant suitor, and at this time he was courting Miss Gussie Lamore, a popular and beautiful young woman who had been nicknamed “The Little Klondike Nugget.” But the course of true love did not run smooth, and for a time it seemed as though Bill’s cake were all dough. Then he remembered that Gussie doted on eggs, and he prepared to corner the supply. There were just eight thousand eggs in the town, and they were selling at a dollar apiece. Bill slipped about from store to store and bought every one of them. He then remarked that if Gussie wanted more eggs she would have to eat out of his hand, or if she stuck to his rival “she wouldn’t eat no eggs.” Gussie succumbed, and so Cupid won by an egg.
In another claim on Eldorado a young Y. M. C. A. secretary struck it rich. This man had started mining on Forty Mile Creek, but when gold was discovered near Dawson he left his young wife there and came on with the crowd. The first claim he selected was comparatively small and had no timber upon it. As he needed logs to build a cabin, he traded his claim for another farther down the creek where the valley was wider and timber was plentiful. He built a cabin, sent for his wife, and they started to work. When he had thawed the earth to some distance below the surface he laboured down in the pit and his wife wound the windlass that drew up the buckets of rocks. Time and again, in despair, they talked of selling out and going back home. But they held on until they came to bed-rock, where the gold was so rich that their claim paid them about two million dollars. Unlike Anderson and Gates, this man invested his money in real estate in Seattle.
All sorts of characters came to the Klondike in the early days. With such types as the Lucky Swede, Swift-Water Bill, and Frank Slavin, the prize fighter, came business and professional men from all parts of the United States. Joaquin Miller came to mine gold and write poetry and newspaper articles. Rex Beach was here, and so was Jack London. Jack London was at one time a partner of Swift-Water Bill, and it is said that the two owned a claim that eventually produced more than one million dollars in gold. Jack London began the work on the property. He made a fire and thawed the muck on the top of the gravel. He left his tools in the soft mud over night. Before morning the thermometer dropped to sixty degrees below zero, and when he again started to work he found he would have to thaw out his tools, but that if he did so their handles would be burned. He left in disgust, and Swift-Water Bill got all the gold. Jack London’s wealth came from the literary material he carried away as the result of his experiences. The same may be said of Rex Beach, who has written so many good stories of Alaskan life, and of Robert Service, whose shabby cabin still stands near the Dome.
To-day most of the Klondike gold is recovered by machinery in large-scale workings, but now and then one sees a miner washing the gravel by hand in a contrivance like this.
Some of the miners, instead of moving on to new scenes of action when the gold began to give out, have stayed on with their families, working a few acres of land and occasionally panning out a little gold.
