“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.