Re: "Bill Gates"

[blackm00@cam.org (Michael Black)]

Stephen Shaw <xstephenx@apple2.org.za> wrote in message news:<a453fb$6sv$1@venus.itns.co.za>...
> In the local newspaper on Monday 21st January 2002.
> Datelined : Ankara
>
> 'A 49 year old Briton, William Bernard Gates, slashed his throat in a
> mid-flight suicide bid yesterday, forcing a Sri Lankan Airlines plane to make a
> emergency landing in Turkey. It was en route from Colombo to London when Gates
> was found in a pool of blood in one of the airplane's lavatories, where he had
> apparently cut his throat with a piece of broken mirror.'
>
> My genuine sympathies to this Mr. Gates but with a two names like that what
> else can you do?

If you check histories of the Yukon gold rush, there's a "character" named
Swiftwater Bill.  I gather he was a minor con-man;  he did things he
shouldn't have like going off to buy important things and spending
other people's money on frivolities, and maybe marrying more than one
woman at a time.  He wasn't nearly as bad as some, like Soapy Smith
who was the scourge of Skagway.  Swiftwater Bill hailed from Seattle.

The guy's full name was Bill Gates.

(Pierre Burton's book, "Yukon" is where I first read this, and it
is a good book about that gold rush.  I think Swiftwater Bill
appears in biographies of Jack London, and might appear in one
of the latter's stories for all we know.)

I've looked around, and have found articles about this connection,
and it would seem that while the story is good, Swiftwater Bill
is not in fact related to the Bill Gates of Microsoft.

   Michael