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. Many have bought their tickets and stateroom reservations for the first Nome steamers, weeks in advance, unmindful of the fact that their ship must plough her dangerous way through great icebergs and ice floes in Bering Sea. Scores of others are planning to take the first boats of the spring season, while yet winter lingers with heavy hand on Alaska’s coast and inland valleys, on their way to Valdez and thence over the ice to the Tanana, four hundred miles away. 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. Many of my friends tell me that Swiftwater’s life story, as I have set it down here, recounting only the facts, sparing nothing, adding nothing, will be eagerly read by tens of thousands of Alaska people. If this is true, then will Swiftwater be known in his true light to all that multitude of adventurous men and women of the North, who come and go through Seattle, fall and spring, spring and fall, like the myriads of Alaska’s water fowl who seek the sunny South in October, to speed their way north again in the spring, the moment the ice floes in the headwaters of the Yukon are gone. And now, as I survey my work, I am moved to ask all who read, if they can answer this question: “What manner of man, in Heaven’s name, is this Swiftwater Bill Gates?” Yes, what manner of man, or other creature is Swiftwater? Perhaps some people will say that when Swiftwater Bill, down deep in his prospect hole on Eldorado, looked upon the glittering drift of gold that covered the bedrock, the glamor of that shining mass gave him a sort of moral blindness, from which he has never recovered. It is possible that the lure of gold, which he had seen in such boundless quantities, had so entered into his very soul that all sense of his duty and obligations as a man may have been dwarfed or utterly eliminated.