Canada and NewfoundlandCarpenter, Frank G. (Frank George)
History
Canada and Newfoundland
Carpenter, Frank G. (Frank George)
Canada -- Description and travel; Newfoundland and Labrador -- Description and travel
Swift-Water Bill Gates’ story was a good deal like Anderson’s. He was a
Portuguese, who got his nickname from his claim that he swam down the
rapids of the Yukon on his way to the gold fields. He began as a waiter
in an eating house. One day while serving two miners he heard one tell
the other of the gold discovery in the Klondike. He left their order
unfilled, got a dog team, and rushed to Dawson. He was in at the first
and picked out a number of claims, including that on Eldorado, which
made him a fortune. He was successful for years, but was so dissipated
that he ran through his millions, and when he left with the stampede
to Fairbanks, he had only fifty cents in his pockets. There he made a
second great strike, but he lost that fortune as well.
Swift-Water once cornered the egg market in Dawson, and all for the
love of a lady. He was a gallant suitor, and at this time he was
courting Miss Gussie Lamore, a popular and beautiful young woman who
had been nicknamed “The Little Klondike Nugget.” But the course of true
love did not run smooth, and for a time it seemed as though Bill’s cake
were all dough. Then he remembered that Gussie doted on eggs, and he
prepared to corner the supply. There were just eight thousand eggs in
the town, and they were selling at a dollar apiece. Bill slipped about
from store to store and bought every one of them. He then remarked that
if Gussie wanted more eggs she would have to eat out of his hand, or if
she stuck to his rival “she wouldn’t eat no eggs.” Gussie succumbed,
and so Cupid won by an egg.
In another claim on Eldorado a young Y. M. C. A. secretary struck it
rich. This man had started mining on Forty Mile Creek, but when gold
was discovered near Dawson he left his young wife there and came on
with the crowd. The first claim he selected was comparatively small
and had no timber upon it. As he needed logs to build a cabin, he
traded his claim for another farther down the creek where the valley
was wider and timber was plentiful. He built a cabin, sent for his
wife, and they started to work. When he had thawed the earth to some
distance below the surface he laboured down in the pit and his wife
wound the windlass that drew up the buckets of rocks. Time and again,
in despair, they talked of selling out and going back home. But they
held on until they came to bed-rock, where the gold was so rich that
their claim paid them about two million dollars. Unlike Anderson and
Gates, this man invested his money in real estate in Seattle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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