Description
The True Life Story of Swiftwater Bill Gates
CHAPTER I.
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 mu
Product ID: 9781776788590
Sku: 9781776788590
