When I think of what happened to me and my daughters, Blanche and Bera, in the next few days following this incident, and of the years of wretchedness and misery and laying waste of human lives and happiness that came after, I am tempted to wonder what curious form of an unseen fate shapes our destinies and turns and twists our fortunes in all manner of devious and uncertain ways. My whole hotel outfit had gone up to St. Michael the fall previous and I with it--and at great cost of labor and trouble I had seen to it, at St. Michael, that the precious shipment--representing all I had in the world--was safely stored aboard a river steamer bound for Dawson. Now, spring had come again, and with it the big rush to the gold fields of the Yukon was on, and Seattle was again filled with a seething, surging, struggling, discontented, optimistic, laughing crowd of gold hunters of every nationality and color. 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. It was no place for a woman, and the few women whose fortunes or whose husbands had brought them thither were seated in a little parlor on the second floor, where they could easily hear the clamor and confusion that came from the noisy mob in the lobby. In the crowd were such old-time sourdoughs as Ole Olson, who sold out a little piece of ground about as big as a city block on Eldorado for $250,000, after he had taken out as much more in three months’ work the winter previous; “French Curley” De Lorge, known from White Horse to the mouth of the Tanana, as one of the Yukon’s bravest and strongest hearted trappers and freighters; Joe Ladue, who laid out the town of Dawson; George Carmack, whose Indian brother-in-law, Skookum Jim, is supposed to have turned over the first spadeful of grass roots studded with gold on the banks of Bonanza; big Tom Henderson, who found gold before anybody, he always said on Quartz Creek; Joe Wardner and Phil O’Rourke, both famous in the Coeur d’Alenes; Henry Bratnober, six feet two, black beard, shaggy black hair and black eyes, overbearing and coarse voiced, the representative in the golden north of the Rothschilds of London; and men almost equally well known from Australia, from South Africa and from continental Europe, including the vigilant and energetic Count Carbonneau of Paris. By appointment, Swiftwater, attired in immaculate black broadcloth Prince Albert, low cut vest, patent leather shoes, shimmering “biled” shirt, with a four-karat diamond gleaming like an electric light from his bosom, stood waiting for us in the parlor. I had left Bera, who was fifteen years old, in my apartments in the Hinckley Block and had taken Blanche, my eldest daughter, with me.