"Swiftwater" Bill Gates (? - 1935) was an American frontiersman and fortune hunter, and a fixture in stories of the Klondike Gold Rush. He made and lost several fortunes, and died in Peru in 1935 pursuing a silver strike.
In one famous Klondike story he presented Dawson dance hall girl Gussie Lamore her weight in gold.
Gates was married briefly to Grace Lamore in 1898; he later married Bera Beebe, with whom he fathered two sons, Fredrick and Clifford. Gates subsequently abandoned her for 15-year-old Kitty Brandon, his niece.
His biography "The True Life Story of Swiftwater Bill Gates" (c. 1908) was authored by Iola Beebe, his mother-in-law.
Swiftwater Bill was known to be at the gold fields of Nome, Alaska at the same time as William H Gates I, grandfather of the Microsoft founder. However, despite the similarity in name and coincidences of geography, there is no apparent family relationship between "Swiftwater Bill" and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Famous quotes containing the words bill and/or gates:
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to penetrate without a shudder those ivory or horned gates which separate us from the invisible world.”
—Gérard De Nerval (1808–1855)