This is the story of Chicken Billy and his ten-thousand-dollar potato patch. It is about a young American who became the poultry king of the Klondike, and then turned to farming with such success that he has had a field of potatoes that brought in ten thousand dollars in one year. Chicken Billy is a representative type of the farmers of the Far North. I first met him yesterday afternoon when he called at my hotel here in Dawson. A rough-looking man of less than medium height, his face is bronzed by the hot summer sun of the Arctic and his hands are horny from handling the plough. He had brought some of his crops of hot-house vegetables into Dawson for sale, and he wore his working clothes--a flannel shirt open at the neck, blue jeans somewhat the worse for wear, and a pair of rough boots that reached to his knees. Billy was born in Philadelphia and went to school there. He was still under twenty when he passed the examinations for appointment to the navy. He was so excited over his success that when he came into the hands of the surgeons to be tested as to his physical fitness his heart was throbbing at the rate of a hundred-odd beats to the minute, and the result was that the doctors said he had heart disease and pronounced him unfit for service. Billy then worked at odd jobs, without great success, until one day he read in a newspaper about the gold strike in the Klondike. The article was headed “Gold at the Grass Roots,” and Billy tells me he decided to dig into the grass and take out a fortune. He had only seventeen dollars at the time, but with that he got to St. Paul and thence worked his way up to Skagway. He walked in over the Dyea trail and fought for his own with the miners of Dawson. He got some gold from his various ventures, but made no big strikes, and finally gave up mining to raise chickens. For this purpose he bought an island in the Yukon not far from the mouth of the Klondike, and built a henhouse of logs with glass windows facing the south. For a while Billy prospered. His eggs sold for fifty cents each, and his fat chickens brought in forty or fifty dollars a dozen. He built up his flock until he had nine hundred chickens, and his fresh-laid eggs became so well known that he acquired the nickname of Chicken Billy. When he thought he was on the sure road to success, competition arose. The other poultry raisers cut prices, and chickens dropped to a dollar apiece. Billy began to lose money and so looked about for other kinds of farming. He is now raising only fancy chickens, and is devoting his energy to hogs and potatoes, with occasional crops of turnips and oats.