[CHAPTER X.]
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.