Do not scorn her with words fierce and bitter
Do not laugh at her shame and downfall
For a moment just stop and consider
That a man was the cause of it all...

"She's More To Be Pitied Than Censured"

It was prophetic that "She's More To Be Pitied Than Censured" was the favorite number of soubrette Kate "Kitty" Rockwell Warner Matson Van Duren.¹ The "Queen of the Klondike"—as many called her—lost her heart in the Klondike rush and subsequently lost all her hard-won riches. The later prominence of her deserting lover, theater magnate Alexander Pantages, and Kate's appearance at his nationally headlined rape trial, assured her a place in history. Yet even without the hype, Kate would have been a memorable standout.

She had natural red hair, violet eyes, long black lashes, and a splendid figure. Her face was a delicate oval of innocence in marked contrast to her husky voice, her worldly experience, and her blatant sexual appeal.² Kate also had talent and grace—rare qualities among Dawson showgirls. Her special come-on was something she called her "pixie stare," a projection of sweet innocence and raw sex that few men could resist, but it was her capacity for fun that ultimately won them. For Kate, who managed to enjoy herself even during tough times, reveled in the excitement of the great Klondike rush.

She was born Eloisa Rockwell near Oswego, Kansas, in 1876, a birth-date she would ignore for a lifetime, preferring 1880, 1882, and—during a particularly bizarre lapse—1892. Her upbringing was surprisingly refined given the fact that her mother, Martha, was a waitress, her father, John Rockwell, was a railroad telegraph operator, and both had defied Victorian mores in divorcing their first spouses to marry each other.

After five years with John Rockwell, Martha divorced again and married her lawyer, Allison Bettis, a former legislator. He had just shed his second spouse, too, so the newlyweds moved to Spokane for a fresh start. Here Allison became a successful judge and invested in all the trappings of wealth and power: a fine house, servants, and a governess for Kate, whom he adored. Spoiled rotten, "Kitty" (as the child was known in early years) grew into an unrestrained tomboy, learning to ride horseback and camp. She also developed an unbridled enthusiasm for men, so her unnerved parents cloistered her in private Catholic girls' schools, first in Kansas, then Minnesota, then California, all with dismal results.

Kate returned to Spokane during a recession in which her stepfather lost his shirt and her mother further indebted him through real estate speculation. Divorce followed. Martha, "one of those sweet, trusting souls, who depended heavily on her husband," tried running a rooming house, then sold it for $65,000 and headed for South America with Kate to visit her son by an earlier marriage, Ralph Morris.³ Kate was enthralled with both the eighty-seven-day cruise and the young naval officers aboard their square rigger. When she announced her engagement to one, her mother stuck her in a Catholic school in Valparaiso, Chile, and went to England on what was probably a romantic adventure of her own.

On returning to New York, Martha heard that her daughter had circumvented convent chaperones to become engaged to a young diplomatic attache from Spain. Martha ordered Kate to take the first trustworthy vessel to New York. After a hair-raising trip around Cape Horn and ninety-seven days at sea, Kate arrived to discover that Martha had squandered all their money and was about to seek work in a shirtwaist factory.

"I was only sixteen but I knew I must help in some way," she recalled. "I read an ad in a newspaper. It said: 'Chorus girls wanted. No experience necessary. "

Kate was a natural. She first appeared as a page girl in a Coney Island honky-tonk, but quickly graduated to the chorus line. "I was still a virgin about life in those days," she later told a feature writer. "Mother allowed me so many minutes to get dressed after my last act and enough time to ride home from Coney Island on a streetcar."⁴

Soon she moved up to New York s legitimate vaudeville houses and on to a not-so-legitimate variety theater back in Spokane where, professing shock and distaste, she learned to work customers after each show for a commission on drinks, although she stuck to lemonade. Still working there when news of the Klondike rush broke, she decided to follow the excitement.

Settling her mother in Seattle, Kate Rockwell quit the Spokane show to start a sister act with Gertie Jackson and head north.⁵ In Victoria, B.C., she became a soubrette at the Savoy, a first-class vaudeville house where she developed two new song-and-dance acts each week. Owners Jack MacDonald and Billy Jackson chaperoned her, and she became engaged long-distance to Danny Allmon, a minstrel star with a real gift for comedy whom she had met in New York. Danny, who was thirty-one and the son of a former mayor from Salem, Illinois, planned to join her but before he could make it across the country, she’d headed for Alaska. Her friend Gertie Jackson bowed out at Skagway, but Kate found work in Southeastern Alaska and stayed on.⁵

"I did the dance wearing a crown of candles for the first time in Juneau. I could have skipped rope and the men would have been just as appreciative," she confided in disgust to a reporter there years later. "The saloon was called the Louvre then, and it was the only place in town where entertainers didn't have to entertain in the upstairs rooms."⁶

Friends recalled that Kate spoke of climbing Chilkoot Pass with a man carrying a small piano. Biographer Ellis Lucia suggests Kate may have teamed with the "Sunny Sampson Sisters Sextette," a fairly respectable troupe that enlisted piano-packing "Klondike Mike" Mahoney to accompany them. The girls—turned back at the border by the Mounties, who claimed the trail was too rugged for them—retreated to Skagway, where they performed for six months in Soapy Smith's honky-tonk, yet according to the press retained their modesty and virtue.⁷

In her autobiography, Kate gave few details of this period and no account of climbing the pass, probably because the railway from Skagway to Bennett had been completed by the time she’d saved enough to make the trip. "I kept getting closer and closer to the Klondike," she wrote tersely. "I accepted an engagement to play Bennett, a gold-mad town, where the men outfitted themselves and built scows to freight into the Yukon for gold.

"It was the end of the train line—and life was high-keyed. Someone recently told me that he spent a night in an old hotel in Bennett, and there on the ceiling was my name, 'Katie Rockwell, nailed in champagne corks. It was custom in those days." ⁸

Gone were the chaperons. Her fiance was a continent away. Bennett was a rough-and-tumble transportation center, with ill-heated, makeshift buildings, very few amenities—and no lemonade. Kate was determined to work her way out of there, whatever it took, champagne-filled evenings included. But apparently those were too few to turn much profit. Most of Kate s clientele, like herself, were working their way to the gold fields, and a dance hall show was about all they could afford.

Charles Lombard, a fine musician called the "Little Parson," who played there just before Christmas in 1899, recalls that Kate was their only entertainer and that they often played all night.⁹ Sometimes she made as many as twenty appearances. Yet she didn t accumulate enough cash to move on until June of 1900, when she finally headed for Dawson.¹⁰

Again the Northwest Mounted Police interfered, stopping women from going down the Five Finger Rapids because it was considered too dangerous. "Well I was young and didn t give a whoop," Kate recalled. "So I put on boys clothing, waited until the scow was about to pull out, and jumped aboard just as the lines were released from the bank.

"The Mountie saw me hit the deck—I should say hit the water—but I got a-hold and was pulled aboard. He bellowed orders 'in the name of the Queen and he was still fuming when we hit the rapids. That Mountie didn t get his woman. I waved at him as our square boat went into the seething froth of Whitehorse and Five Finger Rapids at twelve miles an hour. My trip . . . was perhaps the most exciting trip I ever made. That man at the giant oar-rudder muscled us through with great uncanny skill."¹¹

At Whitehorse a letter offered her a job with a 173-member troupe being formed back in Victoria to play the Savoy in Dawson. Kate briefly returned to Victoria to join the troupe and finally arrived in Dawson via steamship to find the town rebuilding after an disastrous fire, but lively with gold kings. She still planned to marry Danny Allmon, but she took off his modest engagement ring and set to work at the Savoy.

BENNETT
Gold stampeders headed for Dawson along the Chilkoot and White Pass Trails usually waited out the winter at Bennett, a rough-and-tumble town where Kate Rockwell spent several months performing because she couldn’t afford the transportation farther north. By the time she finally arrived at Dawson she understood gold camp audiences far better than performers fresh from Seattle and San Francisco.
UW #12827

Nor did she seem distraught when Danny died of a brain hemorrhage later in November of that year, at Nanaimo en route to join her, but she saved his obituary and would treasure photos of him all her life.¹²

The Savoy, which had been closed by Dawson officials, re-opened to a full house and good reviews. Kate, billed as a "Soubrette Extraordinaire," was better trained than most in pleasing Klondike audiences from her grim days at Bennett. She wowed them wearing a rose-tinted, lace-trimmed gown, embellished by a Lillian Russell hat with ostrich plumes, belting out throaty renditions of old ballads that the sourdoughs loved. Showman "Arizona" Charlie Meadows was impressed, not only with her youth and talent, but what he discreetly described as her "French flair." He immediately offered her more money and the Star's Suite at his lavish Palace Grand Theater, and she took it.¹³ Her new accommodations were papered in red and gold, with a red carpet, a bed, a rocking chair, a wash stand, and a window overlooking the main street and the Yukon River. Kate loved it.

FLOWERS FOR A FINE PERFORMACE
Klondike Kat’s most famous number was her Flame Dance, in which she kept 200 yards of chiffon airborne. Dawson’s audiences loved it and the performer as well.
UAF, Barrette Willoughby Collection, #72-116-336N.

Charlie Meadows recognized Kate's choreographic skills and, with his encouragement, she developed her famous Flame Dance, in which she moved gracefully to music in flashy costumes at a pace that kept about 200 yards of chiffon airborne. For this number she was paid $200 a week, and she claimed she often earned an additional $500 after each show.

"Sure I was a percentage girl. We got 50 percent on dances and 25 on drinks," she admitted to biographer Rolv Schillios in 1955. "The commission on a pint of champagne was $7.50. . . . My best night I made $750, just for talking to a lonesome miner. A good entertainer was slow if she didn't cash in at least $100 worth of percentage checks every night. Dances were short and one dollar, and the man took his girl to the bar—if not a box—and splurged."¹⁴

Readers may be leery of Kate's accounts of receiving huge sums for "just listening" to miners, but she had a genuinely sympathetic ear and apparently did keep a couple of depressed millionaires from suicide, for which they gratefully rewarded her.

Biographer Ellis Lucia maintained that there was sincerity in Kate's tender talk. "She felt deeply committed when told a tale of woe. It became her own personal problem and she spent many sleepless mornings wrestling with the troublesome affairs of some raw-boned sourdough who was whipped to the point of cashing in his chips. She seemed to need many men constantly about her, lavishing their attentions on her, paying her compliments and presenting her with tokens of affection," he wrote. "She soaked up this attention like a sponge, seeking more and more, almost abnormally; she yearned to feel important and needed and loved. . . . At least for the passing moment, she was tenderly loyal and sincere, and she would demonstrate her feelings by grubstaking a sourdough who was down on his luck or bringing hot soup to a stricken miner in his cabin."¹⁵

Ed Lung, a young miner and a happily married man, struggled to explain the impact she had on him.

"She was certainly very young! Couldn't have been more than nineteen or twenty. [Actually, she was twenty-four.] She had an appeal and win-someness that was truly captivating. It was alluring, intangible—something, yes, difficult to describe," he began.

"She was just a bit taller than average; hair, reddish gold; eyes, blue; complexion, like peaches and cream; her voice ranged from velvety soft to musical bells; and yes, she was as sweet as honey!

"Well, impulsively, I reached into my hip pocket and drew out my small poke of nuggets. How very hard I had worked for that poke of gold!

"'Look at these yellow babies,' I said eagerly, as I spread the nuggets out in the palm of my hand, so that each shiny, gold particle could show off its best advantage in the bright sunlight.

"'They're beautiful! Real gorgeous! Why, I've never seen such rare beauties! Say, did you get them all from your claim on Dominion Creek?'

"'Sure,' I replied, 'do you like them, Miss Rockwell? Then pick one out,' I invited, 'and you can keep it.'

"'Oh, thank you, thank you,' she exclaimed. Her lovely hands grasped, fondled, and almost weighed each nugget. And then, she chose my biggest one.

"'This piece of gold will always remind me of you, Ed Lung,' she said sweetly, as she quickly opened her purse and dropped the shiny gold into a collection of many other nuggets. 'Yes, I think the one you gave me is the prettiest yet!'"¹⁶

Kate claimed to have accumulated more than $30,000 during her first year in Dawson, yet she insisted, "I was never a gold digger. The men threw their gold at my feet when my dances pleased them."¹⁷ She never denied that she might have turned a trick or two to supplement those nugget showers. "We were not vestal virgins. Far from it," she said.¹⁸ But Kate could afford to be discriminating and she was discreet, at least until she met a Greek waiter named Alexander Pantages.

His real name was Percales Pantages,- he had re-christened himself after Alexander the Great. He wasn't rich and it was a stretch to call him handsome, but he lived and breathed theater, and his blinding drive to succeed was even stronger than Kate's.

Scarcely taller than she, he had a swarthy complexion, a sensuous mouth, deep-set, brooding eyes, and black hair with a patent-leather shine. His barrel-chested body, of which he was inordinately proud, was graceful and well-muscled from years of hard labor. He was at least twenty-five, but his father, a minor civil official, had altered records so his son could avoid the draft, and Alexander never knew his real birthdate. He neither drank nor smoked, and was meticulously clean and clean-shaven . . . all features that made him stand out in the frontier camp. He didn't talk much, perhaps because his English was ragged, but Kate found his accent charming. He couldn't read or write, but was fluent in several languages, and she guessed (correctly) that she would never meet anyone smarter.¹⁹

THE CAUSE OF IT ALL
Alexander Pantages, the soon-to-be-wealthy showman whom Kate Rockwell loved and lost, embodied a prophetic line in her favorite showtune: “A man was the cause of it all.”
UW #2242.

Raised in punishing poverty, he had abandoned his native island of Andros at about age nine to travel to Cairo, where he worked with his father as a waiter and busboy. Escaping, he became a cabin boy on a French tramp steamer touring Mediterranean ports and then worked his way to South America. When he caught malaria, shipmates abandoned him on a Panama beach.²⁰ On his recovery, he headed for America, jumping ship in San Francisco. There he worked in a beer garden and as a prize-fighter (hating both jobs), and also in theater, first as an usher and handyman and later in pantomime.²¹

Catching gold fever, Alexander embarked for points north with about $1,000 savings in 1898. How he lost his stake is unclear, but he landed in Skagway with only twenty-five cents and a pair of boots wrapped in a copy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

"I'll give you five dollars for that paper," a man called when Alexander stepped off the boat.

"I'll give you ten!" yelled another.

"Not for sale," snapped Alexander, who that night hired a hall and a reader, selling tickets for one dollar a head to the news-starved community.²²

In Dawson he landed a lucrative job as a bartender and also staged shows for his boss, Charlie Cole. Then he became a swamper and waiter at Charlie Meadows's Monte Carlo, where he assisted Kate in relieving drunks of their gold dust in private boxes after the show. He attracted Charlie Meadows's attention when a professional prize-fighter the club owner had booked failed to show up for a sell-out match.

"I'll save the pot for you, Charlie. I'll fight the guy myself," Alexander volunteered.

"What do you know about fighting, Pan?" Charlie asked, astonished, not realizing the sturdy Greek had fought welterweight in San Francisco.

"Not a thing—except for a few rough tumbles I've taken, but you've been a good boss, Charlie, and I'll take a licking for you right now," Alexander replied at his ingratiating best. He made short work of his opponent, kayoing him in just a few minutes. Charlie was so grateful he gave Alex a ten-percent interest in his show, and the talented Greek became his stage manager.²³ Alexander also started a stock company on the side, producing tearjerkers like Uncle Tom's Cabin and East Lynne.

Alexander Pantages had a considerable nest egg when he wooed and won Kate Rockwell. After he got her to live openly with him, he invested in a cooperative stock company with Gussie Lamore and a number of other headliners like Beatrice Lorne, "the Nightingale of the Yukon," who had a truly lovely voice.

The Dawson Daily News reported on January 2, 1900, that "Alex Pantages, the well-known porter at the Opera House, has been selected as the manager to look after the general supervision of the house. Alex has been thrifty in his habits and has saved quite a poke, which he is willing to chance in the Dawson show business. The salaries of the performers have been placed on the same basis as during their last engagement and any surplus is put into the general fund for contingencies."

Kate continued as a headliner at the Monte Carlo, most memorably appearing at the Christmas Cake Walk wearing a $1,500 ivory satin gown designed by Worth of Paris, with a crown miners cut from a tin can supporting fifty flaming candles. When Alex's cooperative stock company failed, she kept him in seventy-five-cent cigars and fifteen-dollar silk shirts, and spent forty-five dollars a week on meals for him. She was among his investors when he opened the Orpheum in late 1900, and she quit working for Charlie Meadows to star in her lover's show.²⁴

Her friend "Diamond Tooth" Gertie Lovejoy declared publicly that Kate was "plum crazy to fall so hard for a foreign 'patent-leather kid' who will love her, take her gold and leave her." But Alexander's venture with the Orpheum paid off, grossing about $8,000 a day, and by all accounts Kate was never happier. "I began my day's work with an hour in a gymnasium to keep in trim. Then I would take my own dog team and go lashing out over the frozen snow. I had my own horse and in the summer I'd drive like wild through the strangely beautiful country," she wrote forty years later.

"Then there was gold in the streets of Dawson, gold in the hills, and gold in the Yukon. And I was named the queen of it all. . . . All my lingerie was French and handmade. My dresses were covered with rhinestones and seed pearls and spangles and sequins. . . ."

But it was Kate's lover who had become the focus of her life. "Alex Pantages and I laughed, danced and worked hard during those months at the Old Orpheum. We opened it together and it became the brightest spot north of the International Boundary Line. In the spring we'd go picking poppies together on the banks of the Klondike. And we'd make plans for the day when we would later marry."²⁵

There is reason to believe Kate bore Alexander's child during this period. After a brief absence to the States, she took care of an infant, explaining that it was the child of a young tubercular girl she had befriended, who had died giving birth.²⁶

Meanwhile, Alex focused on making his fortune, not only watching his audiences intently to figure out what they wanted, but after hours sweeping the floors and sifting out the gold dust. Fire gutted his theater three times. Each time he rebuilt, but when gold was discovered at Nome, business slowed in Yukon Territory.

"He was playing for high stakes and he seldom made a move without seeing dollars at the end of the trail," theater writer Eugene Elliott observed. "While he could be 'ingratiatingly servile,' according to one description, he was insolent, indifferent and taciturn to many who knew him. He rarely smiled and was seldom heard to laugh, for he lacked an open sense of humor, and often treated people coldly. . . . His mind worked in dollar signs, which was about all the reading knowledge he needed for getting ahead in this land of gold."²⁷

This was a side of her lover that Kate had not observed, or perhaps had ignored because his drive was an asset in her own quest for wealth and fame. But she'd also fallen in love with the magic of the Klondike rush itself—partying and drinking on an increasingly lavish scale—and she was shocked when Alex suggested they leave in the spring of 1902.

"Leave?" she echoed. "And miss all the excitement? There isn't another place like this in the world and I love it."²⁸

Alexander talked her into spending her savings on a grand tour that included New York City, a visit to her mother, and the boomtowns of Texas. While in Texas, Kate deserted him briefly for a gambler who did not treat her well. Alexander's attorney, Leroy Tozier, later congratulated him on winning back Kate, as she was a financial asset. "Sincerely, I do trust no one should ever dim the horizon that now shines in resplendent adoration in the mind's eye of your Katherine," he wrote. "Most appropriate was your conduct in going with her to the far east then carrying her safely back to the northern wilds that she might replenish the treasury."²⁹

The couple took a scouting expedition to Nome, which neither found enticing. Briefly they reopened the Orpheum, but the Greek entrepreneur had set his sights on creating a national theater chain, and he soon moved to Seattle to begin working on it. Various accounts give Kate's worth at $100,000, which was probably overblown, for she stayed in Dawson to work after Alexander left. Meanwhile, he sunk everything he had and sought investors for a tacky storefront on Second Avenue in Seattle, which he named the Crystal Theater.³⁰

In his letters to Kate during the winter of 1902-03, Alexander still appeared deeply in love. Dictating to friends or trusted employees because he was illiterate (although he'd just become a naturalized citizen), he begged her to write more often and also expressed frustration with her growing romance with alcohol.

"I fully expected to receive a letter from you today. I didn't and can say I felt hurt. Katie, I wonder if you will this time sincerely keep your promise and not drink anymore," he pleaded just before Christmas in 1902. "I can assure you, Kate, I am sincerely sorry [for] what happened the other day. But I assure you, Katie, it's your own fault as you provoked me to it. As you know full well my disposition and you should not have done it. I think the only way to keep you away from the booze is to have you with me. . . . Warm with love, Yours Sincerely, Alex."

Her response did not survive the years, but apparently Alexander's mounting business worries and the strain of trying to finance his theater chain were lost on her. When she finally did come south, it was to play in Victoria. Then she returned to Dawson. In later years Kate would claim it was Alex who deserted her, but during this period it appears he worked hard to keep their love alive.

"It is needless for me to say that I miss you, more in fact, to speak the truth, more than any time during our past relationship," he wrote on March 4, 1903. "I have begun to realize that you are speeding on your way, separating ourselves from each other by many wiles—I can assure you, my dear, I shall ever think of you, as I know you will me, and always hold you as dear to me as at any time during our life. Write to me often and let me know how you are progressing. Always think of Papa and kiss me in your dreams. I shall ofttimes think of your dear face wishing I might kiss it to satisfy my desire."

By the following summer, Alexander seemed resigned. "Even though we are parked many thousands of miles [apart] my thoughts are ever with you," he wrote. "I'm eager to know who your correspondent is in Seattle that reports to you as to my movements. Yes, my dear, it is true I'm getting fat as a pig—You see I have no one to fight and fuss with, and I'm only waiting until your return so as to scrap in order to reduce my weight.

"Business is quite good with me, but still always bear in mind that Papa is always in need of ready cash and ever willing to put your savings alongside of his so as to make a good showing."³¹

Kate was apparently focused on the nickelodeon in Victoria she had purchased in 1902 for $350. Alexander, who was battling to raise enough credit to open the Crystal, was angered by her investment. He insisted she was "throwing money away," but shared films and vaudeville bookings with her. When her nickelodeon began to make a profit, she sold it for $1,500, returning to star billing in Dawson where she could make better money.

It wasn't until 1904 that Kate finally quit the Yukon, giving her forwarding address and that of "Lotus" Rockwell as the Alcazar Theater in Seattle.³² The best guess is that "Lotus" was the child Kate claimed to have adopted. Although she often declared her life an "open book," Kate dismissed this subject in just five sentences. "I took the baby. I kept him until he was three, then I found him a home and foster parents in the States," she wrote in 1944. "I sent the money for his college education and he is one of the most successful engineers in the country today. I have never disclosed his identity. He perhaps has never known of me, but I like to think of him as my son."³³

At this point Kate apparently was reunited with Alexander, but performed at the Alcazar because he could not afford her high salary.

"People thought I was a Klondike millionaire. I didn't argue with them. I bought the picture house and spent $35,000 turning it into a cozy and beautiful place. I did it all on credit," he later recalled. "Before long we were putting on twelve to fifteen shows a day and jammed them in."³⁴

Encouraged, Alexander invested in a low-class burlesque called the Strand in the Skid Row District, while Kate played in Fort Worth and Galveston, Texas, which were enjoying a black gold rush. Many months later she returned to work at the Crystal with a new specialty, the Butterfly Dance. Then, ever restless, always in search of greener pastures, she was off again to more lucrative bookings in the Pacific Northwest while Alexander negotiated for another theater.

In March of 1905 Kate was performing in her hometown of Spokane when a friend told her that Alex Pantages had wed a violin-playing vaudeville performer named Lois Mendenhall.³⁵ Kate went into shock. Before Alex met her, he'd apparently enjoyed no serious romance, and he had remained too driven by business schemes to spend much time womanizing. Nor had Kate given much heed to Lois, with whom she'd shared billings in Texas, because the girl's act was based on genuine musical talent rather than looks and sensuality. But the slender, dark-eyed violinist was just seventeen, and Kate was fast approaching thirty. Lois's prominent Oakland family could be an asset to Alexander. While Lois was a seasoned performer, her success did not depend on drinking with male customers after the show. And the innocence that attracted Alex was genuine.

"It wasn't until I met Lois that I knew anything much about good women," Alexander declared flatly in a brief statement on the nuptial. And when first contacted by a Seattle Times reporter, he denied even knowing Kate Rockwell.

Kate filed suit, seeking $25,000 damages, not for money she invested in Alexander's enterprise but for breach of his promise to marry her. She claimed she had lavished $1,700 on him when he was out of work in Dawson, and that they had traveled across the country on her savings, returning to Seattle in 1902 to live as a married couple. She showed his net worth to be about $100,000. And she claimed that the plaintiff had injured, damaged, humiliated, and disgraced her, causing her to suffer anguish of mind.³⁶ The case was quickly settled out of court. Kate later said the settlement was less than $5,000; other sources peg the payoff as high as $60,000.³⁷

Whatever it was, the settlement was not enough to stop the pain. "For days I was despondent," Kate admitted. "Flossie [de Atley], a girl who had danced with me in Dawson [and had problems of her own with alcohol, domestic relations, and the law], wrote me a letter. She said, 'Don't throw your life away because of one man. Don't make yourself something he will always be glad he was rid of. Make yourself something he will wish he had kept.' The day I read her letter I felt better."

Briefly Kate returned to Dawson, then moved to the new Alaskan boomtown of Fairbanks where, at the suggestion of dance hall girl Edith Neile, she invested in a hotel. When the uninsured building burned in a fire that all but destroyed the city in 1906, Kate danced at the Floradora in Fairbanks to make ends meet.³⁸ Then she went on the circuit in the States, doing song-and-dance numbers with a performer named Arthur Searles and later with a roller-skating champion named Jimmy Ray, whom she may have married.³⁹ It was a rough life. She was often injured during the rigorous skating routines, and she came to rely increasingly on alcohol to dull both the physical and the mental pain.

Meanwhile, Alexander Pantages was rocketing toward success. "There is no circuit in the United States, if indeed there is in the world, of the magnate of the Pantages circuit owned by one man," the Seattle Argus boasted in 1910. "He owns outright or has interest in 26 theaters."⁴⁰

Alex's good fortune ate away at Kate. "I had a nervous breakdown and the doctors ordered me to get away and try to forget everything for a year or so. I was brooding too much," she said later.⁴¹ Martha Rockwell, who had re-established herself in the real estate business, swapped some Seattle waterfront property for a homestead site that required "proving up" near Bend, Oregon, and Kate bought it from her mother.

"I had about $3,500 in cash and $3,000 in diamonds then. I went to look at the place and found I owned a one-room shack in the middle of a 320-acre homestead. I never saw so much country in my life," she recalled. "Sagebrush as far as I could see. In ballroom gowns and high heels I started grubbing sagebrush and piling rocks. Several times I was ready to give up, and I guess if it hadn't been for the sheer beauty of the desert sunsets, I'd have quit. I found a new happiness, though, like having my soul cleaned. A perfect contentment and rest for the first time in my life. Money seemed so unimportant."⁴²

To amuse herself, she flirted with the local cowboys. Finally, at age thirty-nine, she married Floyd Warner, who was handsome, rugged, over six feet tall, and just twenty years old. She made him skittish by cheating on him, ultimately pushing him to retaliation and divorce.⁴³ Taking a series of increasingly menial jobs, she finally ended up broke in Los Angeles, where she badgered Alexander Pantages for money. On one attempt he gave her six dollars he happened to have in his wallet.⁴⁴ On another he suggested she was "not too old to go on the street," but Kate persisted, hiring a lawyer in the early 1920s.⁴⁵

By that time Alexander was sole owner of twenty-two vaudeville theaters and controlled interest in another twenty-eight, for which he had been offered $10 million. He was known as a man of integrity, conducting multimillion-dollar business deals on a mere handshake, and he was very much a family man, bent on protecting Lois and their two children from the bad publicity another lawsuit from Kate would bring.⁴⁶

Biographer Lucia suggests Kate may also have had some hold over the theater magnate through the child she had in Dawson, but whatever the cause, Alexander apparently made cash deliveries to her during this period. Oregon neighbors, calling her "Aunt Kate," suggested the fading showgirl may also have supplemented her income through bootlegging and procuring prostitutes for a bawdy house.⁴⁷ Paul Hosmer, a Bend author writing about her for the Oregonian, observed she was "an oldish woman who had not completely grown up."

In the fall of 1929 Alexander Pantages was charged with raping a seventeen-year-old actress who sought work with his theaters. Kate, subpoenaed as a prosecution witness, was shocked at his wan appearance and burst into tears when he spoke to her civilly in a court corridor.

"It's been a long time," he said awkwardly.

"Those must have been happy days in the north," a bystander interjected.

"They were," Alexander answered, gazing at the floor. "Maybe you think I'm not game. Look what I'm going through here."

"Maybe you think I'm not going through anything myself," Kate replied.

"See you again," he said when the bailiff beckoned him back to court. But that was the end of it.

Alexander Pantages was sentenced to fifty years in San Quentin before Kate was asked to take the stand. Although he was acquitted two years later, the ordeal caused him a heart attack and considerable financial loss, from which he never really recovered.⁴⁸ His wife, charged with drunken driving and manslaughter during his imprisonment, was later cleared but paid $78,500 to the family of the man whom she'd killed with her car.⁴⁹ Alexander lived only five years after he was released from prison.

Buoyed by what she may have considered retribution—and some heady national publicity generated by her trial appearance—Kate's spirits rose. After several unsuccessful attempts to land another husband, she suddenly had a choice of two. First on the scene was William L. Van Duren, formerly a successful Oregon accountant, whose wife had left him when cataracts destroyed his eyesight and he could no longer support her. Still bent on rescuing underdogs, Kate cared for him and negotiated expensive eye surgery which proved successful. And William, head over heels in love, purchased a sizable diamond to seal the match.⁵⁰

He was edged out, however, by Johnny Matson, a hopelessly shy Norwegian miner who had worshipped the dance hall queen from afar during the Klondike rush, without the funds or the command of English to press his suit. After reading about the Pantages trial a year or so after the fact, Johnny decided Kate might need help and wrote to her. Kate was intrigued, not only because she remembered his awkward shyness, but because he was soon enclosing money orders with his carefully penned letters.⁵¹

Their marriage on July 14, 1933, generated another welcome round of national publicity. He was about seventy, but in great shape from a lifetime of rugged outdoor living. Kate, silver-haired at fifty-seven, still had a fine figure, gorgeous legs, and a penchant for rolling her own smokes with Bull Durham. Columbia acquired her movie rights for an undisclosed sum,⁵² and she later made Esquire magazine. Despite the fact that Kate lived mainly in Oregon while Johnny remained in the Yukon—or perhaps because of it—the match lasted until his death in the wilds in 1946.⁵³

A HAPPY SURVIVOR
Despite the ravages of a broken heart and the loss of the great fortune she had amassed in Dawson, showgirl Kate Rockwell survived to marry at least three times and enjoy life no matter what fate handed her.
YA, Robert Ward Collection, #8775.

Two years later, Kate Rockwell and William L. Van Duren applied for a marriage license in Vancouver, Washington, requesting a waiver of the three-day waiting period.

"Time is of the essence," William, age seventy-one, assured the judge, hoping to outwit reporters.

"I was the flower of the North, but the petals are falling awfully fast, honey," Kate quipped.⁵⁴

In 1956, less than a year before her peaceful death, Kate told Rolv Schillios, who was writing her memoirs, that she had no regrets. The biographer said that Kate reminded him of Cherry Malotte, the heroine of Rex Beach's Silver Horde, and that he suspected the author, who had known Kate well, had used her as his model for the character. Schillios read Kate some passages from the book, including "Cherry's" introductory dialogue:

"You must know who I am . . . you know I had followed the mining camps, you know I had lived by the wits. . . . You must have known what people thought of me. I cast my lot with the people of this country, and had to match my wits with those of every man I met. You know the North. ... I have made mistakes—what girl doesn't who has to fight her way alone? But my past is my own, it concerns nobody but me. . . ."

Rex Beach also had written that Cherry Malotte was a "thoroughbred" and that any man who captured her heart won his derby.⁵⁵

Kate never claimed to be Beach's model, but the comparison pleased her. And her biographer was not alone in admiring her strong points, while ignoring the mistakes even thoroughbreds sometimes make.

In 1931, more than one thousand Alaska-Yukon Pioneers from the Klondike era had toasted Kate Rockwell at their annual stampede in Portland. "To us she was laughter and beauty and song," the master of ceremonies began. "She was forgetfulness of hardship and homesickness. But she was more than that, she was our friend—a square shooter."

Kate's face was lined, her complexion coarsened by too much Bull Durham, champagne, weather, and time. But her violet eyes still shone brightly as she rose to accept their tribute. She was dressed in the lovely ivory satin Worth gown with lavish silk fringes that she'd purchased from Paris for $1,500 to please Alex Pantages three decades earlier, and she still wore it well.

"Comrades, it is my honor and pleasure to present her again tonight," the emcee continued, "not Aunt Kate of Oregon, but our Kate, the Belle of the Yukon, Klondike Kate, the sweetheart of the sourdoughs."⁵⁶

And—one thousand strong—they gave her a standing ovation, spirited enough that even doubters would understand it came from the heart.