Humboldt Gates (b. 1873)
	
Humboldt Gates was born in Kilburn, Wisconsin but the family settled in Eureka, California when he was young.((Betty Glad, //Key Pittman: The Tragedy of a Senate Insider.// Columbia University Press, 1986: 15; //The Klondike Nugget// (Dawson), 1 November 1899.)) In 1894, at age nineteen, Gates came over the Chilkoot Pass and into the Yukon River watershed. He staked a claim on Miller Creek and, when he heard about the Klondike strike, he rushed to Bonanza Creek which he found fully staked. Whipple Creek, now Eldorado, was open and he staked Claim No. 28, one of the very rich claims on the creek. At the height of the staking fever, he went to Forty Mile to bring back a doctor for an ailing man. Many stories are told of his prowess as a hunter, and he shared his bounty with others less skilled.((//The Klondike Nugget// (Dawson), 1 November 1899.))
	
In 1898, Humboldt’s mother, two sisters (Maude and Mimosa), and brother Ed [Edgar] crossed the Chilkoot Pass and made it to Dawson. Mimosa met Key Pittman in Dawson and they later married [in 1900].((Betty Glad, //Key Pittman: The Tragedy of a Senate Insider.// Columbia University Press, 1986: 15.)) Edgar and Gate’s stepfather, C. W. Hall, acquired good prospects and Mimosa was successful with her unusually good business acumen.((//The Klondike Nugget// (Dawson), 1 November 1899.))
	
Gate’s and his partner, Dr. L. O. Wilcoxen, owned twelve claims, located on Hunker, Dominion, Sulphur and Eureka creeks. They were all worked in the fall of 1899. They also had a few other claims in one or both of their names as well as claims on the Yukon River, at Haines, Alaska and in Juneau.((//The Klondike Nugget// (Dawson), 1 November 1899; W. R. Hamilton, //The Yukon Story.// Vancouver: Mitchell Press, 1967: 32.)) Gates tried to buy a claim on Sulphur Creek from newspaperman Casey Moran, but he did it at the Monte Carlo dancehall. Gates offered Moran twenty thousand dollars with an instant downpayment of two thousand. Moran rejected the offer as it would have been hard to dance with that much gold dust in his pocket.((Pierre Berton, //Klondike, The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899.// McClelland and Stewart, 1972: 366.))
In the late fall of 1899, Gates tried to bring three scows of machinery and provisions down the Yukon River to a claim on Sulphur Creek. One scow cleared Miles Canyon and then struck a bar in the rapids below and overturned. A man named Robertson drowned and was found caught on the stern wheel of a steamer tied up at the tent town of White Horse. The body was found by Walter Hamilton and his partners who were searching for two men lost from their own party.((//The Klondike Nugget// (Dawson), 1 November 1899; W. R. Hamilton, //The Yukon Story.// Vancouver: Mitchell Press, 1967: 32.)) Gates’ scow and two others were frozen in further down the river.((//The Klondike Nugget// (Dawson), 1 November 1899.)) 
	
In 1900, Syd and Hill Barrington leased the sternwheeler //Florence S.// from Humboldt Gates and made more than one trip from Dawson up the Koyukuk River in Alaska. On 21 July 1900, the steamer was on the Thirtymile River when the load shifted during a turn and the boat went over on her side and then capsized. Three people drowned and Syd Barrington, who was not at the wheel at the time, was arrested for manslaughter. Syd’s business partners, Humboldt Gates and Tom Rockwell, paid his $10,000 bail and a court hearing a day later declared Syd free of all blame.((Nancy Warren Ferrell, //White Water Skippers of the North: The Barringtons.// Hancock House, 2008: 51-55.))