Iola Beebe

“ 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. ”

“ And now, as I remember how innocent Bera was, how girlish she looked, how confiding she was in me, yet never for a moment forgetting, perhaps, the lure of the gold studded gravel banks of Eldorado which Swiftwater held constantly before her, it seems to my mind that no woman can be wronged as deeply and as eternally as that woman whose daughter is stolen from her through guile and soft deceit. ”

“ I read in the Seattle papers that scores of the old-timers are in the hotels down town, laying up stores of supplies, mining outfits, etc., ready for a big summer’s season of work in the north, of digging far below the surface to the eternally frozen bedrock, in search of the only thing which is imperishable among all the perishable things of this earth—GOLD. I can see them thronging the hotel lobbies, the bars, and the cafes—great, burly, broad-shouldered, big-chested men of the North—the bone and sinew of the greatest gold-producing country in the world. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus ended the curious story of Swiftwater’s wooing of Gussie Lamore. All the world knows how, when Gussie reached San Francisco, where her folks lived, she banked Swiftwater’s gold and turned him down cold.
Swiftwater reached the Golden Gate a month after Gussie had arrived at her home. All his entreaties for her to carry out her bargain came to nothing.
Bitter as he was towards Gussie, Swiftwater still seemed to love the girl. His first creed, “I can buy any woman with gold,” seemed to stick with him. ”

“ All things finally come to an end. I was in Dawson. At the little temporary dock on the Yukon’s bank, stood Bera and Swiftwater. The miner did not wait till I landed from the little boat. He went up the gang plank and grasped me in his arms.
“Mrs. Beebe,” he said, “we’re married. Come with us to our cabin. We are waiting for you, and dinner is on the table.”
Swiftwater during all that summer and winter in Dawson was the very soul of chivalry and attention both to Bera and myself. ”

“ When Bill laid down his poke of gold on the bar of a Dawson saloon—it was so heavy he could hardly lift it—he was instantly surrounded by a mob of thirty or forty men and a few women.
“Why, boys!” said Swiftwater, ordering a case of wine for the thirsty, while he chose appolinaris himself, “that’s easy enough! All you’ve got to do is to go up to Eldorado Creek and you can get all the gold you want by simply working a rocker about a week.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ So it came about that we boarded the big river steamer Susie for Nome. Her decks were jammed with people eager to get outside or anxious to try their fortunes in the new Seward Peninsula gold fields or the beach diggings at Nome. The Yukon was clear of ice, wide, deep and beautiful to look upon in summer, though in winter, when the ice is packed up one hundred feet high, it carries the death dealing blizzards that bring an untimely fate to many a hardy traveler.
In Nome I found no further news of Swiftwater nor Bera and waited there for three weeks. ”

“ No pen can adequately portray the bitter clash, and struggling, and turmoil—man against man, man against woman, woman against man, fist against fist, gun against gun, as this mob of gold-crazed human beings surged into the vortex of the Yukon’s valley and found their way to the new Golconda of the north. ”

“ There was nothing too good for us in the little market places at Dawson and a box of candy at $5 a box just to please Bera or to satisfy my own taste for sweetmeats was no more to Swiftwater than the average man spending a two-bit piece on the outside.
As the spring broke up the river and then summer took the place of spring in Dawson, the traders from the outside brought in supplies of fresh eggs, fresh oranges, lettuce, new onions—all the delicacies greatly to be prized and more esteemed after a long winter than the rarest fruits and dainties of the States. ”

“ Swiftwater had obtained a big working interest in the mine on Cleary Creek, a stream that has produced its millions in yellow gold. And, after the first discovery of placer gold in paying quantities in the Tanana, the whole Western coast of the American continent knew the story. Like Dawson, the town of Fairbanks quickly sprang from the soil as if reared by the magic of some unseen genii of the Arabian Nights. ”

“ And for my own part, I used to always figure that money would buy anything,” said Swiftwater, “even the most beautiful woman in the world for your wife.”
Swiftwater’s mental processes were simple, as the foregoing will illustrate. It was hardly to be expected otherwise. Swiftwater decamped from the drudgery and slavish toil of a kitchen in the little road-house at Circle City to gain in less than three months more money than he had ever dreamed it possible for him to have.
Two hundred thousand dollars was the minimum of Swiftwater’s first big clean-up. ”

“ Why is it, then, that a man like Swiftwater could come to Seattle at night locked in the drawing room of a Pullman car, be taken swiftly in a closed carriage to a steamer bound for Valdez, and remain hidden in his stateroom on board the boat for two days before the ship sailed, while deputy sheriffs were scouring the town to compel him to provide from the ample money he had, food and clothing for the wife and babies he had deserted? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No woman who has never known the hard and seamy side of life in Dawson can possibly understand how good are the mounted police to every human being, man, woman or child, who is in trouble without fault of their own. The captain said.
“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. ”

“ It was almost worth your life to try to break through the mob and gain admission to the lobby of the Hotel Butler in those days, for the place was absolutely packed at night with men as thick as sardines in a box, and all shouting and gesticulating and keeping up such a clatter that it drove one nearly crazy. ”

“ I sometimes wonder whether or not I have overladen my little narrative with grief and misery and crime against humanity and against human laws, as well as God’s. And then I wonder still more why it was that there were men in Seattle, in San Francisco and in Fairbanks in those days who were always ready to exalt [93] Swiftwater and do him honor and take him by the hand, while the world would look askance at Bera Gates, his wife, whom he had so grieviously wronged. ”

“ Perhaps, after all, Swiftwater’s belief that the power of gold is omnipotent, may be the true and right one. Gold in the hands of such a man is a monstrous implement of crime, of degeneration to women and to innocent children. ”

“ Kitty was a fragile, neatly formed girl of fifteen years, when she went to St. Helen’s Hall in Portland [84] 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. ”

“ Now, most men and most women will admire a MAN, but a cur and a coward are universally despised.
As I looked at that huddled up mass of humanity underneath the white bedspread, my heart rose in rage. The contempt I felt for him is beyond all expression.
“Come out of that, Bill,” said I. “I have no gun!”
After a while, Swiftwater poked his head from beneath the bed clothes and showed a blanched face covered with a three weeks’ old growth of black [98] beard. I told him to dress and I would wait outside. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Are the laws so framed that men of Swiftwater’s type can go at large throughout the country ruining the lives of young girls, and, followed by a halo of gold and the fame that quick fortune making brings, claiming and receiving the friendship of their fellow men? ”

“ Then Swiftwater and I got in the boat and pushed off down stream.
Swiftwater confessed to me for the first time that he was in serious trouble.
“There have been three strange men from Dawson out here on our claims,” said Swiftwater, “and I know who sent them out. They are watching me.”
As I look back upon that awful trip down Indian River, with poor, wan, white-faced Bera hugging the little three weeks’ old baby to her bosom, so sick that she could hardly talk, I wonder if there is any hardship, and peril, and privation, and suffering, a woman cannot endure. ”

“ His property on Number 6 Cleary is still a big producer of gold, and it seems that by merely turning his hands, Swiftwater could, within a few months, pile up enough money to make happy those who have innocently suffered such grievous wrong at his hands. And here my heart grows hard as I think of the farce of the law—how fine are its meshes if an innocent [135] person is taken—how wide are its loop holes when the smooth and oily crook with money becomes entangled therein. ”

“ 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 [104] Klondike miners in the hotels of Seattle, San Francisco and New York. ”

“ Now, Swiftwater and Gussie had been in the habit of breakfasting on fresh eggs some days before, when the first infrequent trader of the season had managed, after enduring several wrecks on the upper river, to reach Dawson. Fresh eggs were to Gussie what chocolates and bon bons are to the average girl in the States.
The next morning Swiftwater arrived at the restaurant for breakfast, a little earlier than usual, and in a few minutes the waiter placed before him a steaming hot platter containing an even dozen of the eggs, nicely poached and served on small strips of toast. ”

“ No thought of cold, or hardship, or danger deters any of these men, and even women, because they know at the end of the journey their mission will not be valueless, and that for at least a great proportion of them there will be a real shining pot of gold at the end of their rainbow of hope—where’er they find it—even though they must needs go as far as the rim of the Arctic Circle. ”

“ Swiftwater’s previous conduct, particularly that $100 dinner that he gave in Seattle a few months before, had taught me one thing, and that was that if Gates was ever to do the square thing by me and by Bera and the babies it would be only when some one with sufficient will power to accomplish the task would reach him and see that he did not forget his duty.
Now, it is no May day holiday for a woman to “mush” over the ice from the coast of Alaska to the interior mining camps. ”

“ For two months I stayed in that cabin, trying my best to find a way out of Dawson and unable to move a rod because of the fact that I had no money. Swiftwater, as I learned afterwards, took a lay on a claim on Dexter Creek and cleaned up in a short time $4,000.
When I heard this, I wrote to him for money for the baby, but none came.
A month passed and then another and no word from Swiftwater. I felt as long as I had a roof over my head, I could make a living for myself and the baby by working at anything—manicuring, hairdressing or sewing. ”

“ HYDRAULIC mining in the Klondike country, by the time that Swiftwater had assembled his big outfit on Quartz Creek was in its very infancy, yet there were plenty of wise men in Dawson who knew that the tens of thousands of acres of hillside slopes and old abandoned creek beds would some day produce more gold when washed into sluice boxes with gigantic rams, than the native miner and prospector had been able to show, even with the figures, $50,000,000, output to his credit. ”