Then and Now: Alex Pantages and Klondike Kate

Alexander Pantages, born in Greece around 1867, ran away at age 9 while on a trip to Cairo with his father. He went to sea, working as a deck hand. He helped dig the Panama Canal and worked as a waiter in San Francisco before heading to the Yukon for the 1897 gold rush. There, the restless and ambitious waiter met and partnered with Kathleen Eloise Rockwell, a dancer and saloonkeeper better known as “Klondike Kate, Belle of the Yukon.”

Rockwell was born in Kansas around 1876 but was raised in Spokane after her mother married Francis Bettis, her divorce lawyer. Bettis would become a judge and Spokane city councilman. Their home on Third Avenue was one of the city’s finest, and the family had several servants.

But Kate was a tomboy and often in trouble. She would play hooky with friends and buy picnic lunches at the butcher shop on her father’s account. She would take out her father’s horses without permission and bring them back in a lather. She rolled her own cigarettes. Her parents sent her to boarding schools, but she was quickly kicked out of each one.

Bettis had financial trouble after the Panic of 1893 and blamed Kate’s mother and her extravagant spending. They divorced. Rockwell and her mother left Spokane. In a few years, she was the most popular act in Dawson City, Yukon. The “sourdoughs,”as the prospectors were called, flocked to the Flora Dora Hotel to see her flirtatious dancing, some tossing gold nuggets on the stage, or paying a hefty tip to sip Champagne with her.

Klondike Kate and Pantages had a tumultuous love affair. With money borrowed from her, Pantages moved to Seattle in 1902 and opened his first theater. Rockwell stayed on the vaudeville circuit and traveled the country. Pantages built a chain of vaudeville theaters and booked traveling acts on the “Pantages circuit” a year at a time.

He also married a young violinist in 1904 without telling Rockwell. She sued for $25,000, saying she invested based on a promise to marry, and settled for $5,000. The love affair was over. By 1920, he owned more than 30 theaters and controlled many more under contract.

Spokane’s Pantages Theatre was built in 1917. S.S. Moore, an African-American man, sued the Spokane Pantages in 1919 because he was told blacks could sit only in the balcony. He was awarded $200 in damages, and the theater chain retired its segregation policy.

In 1929, Pantages was convicted of raping an aspiring dancer in his office, but he was acquitted in a retrial. The case ruined him financially. He sold what was left of his businesses in 1931 and retired.

The Yukon’s most famous saloon girl danced into her 40s, then retired to Oregon. She visited Spokane, which she considered her home, several times over the years. Rockwell died in 1957 in Sweet Home, Oregon.

Pantages died in 1936 in Los Angeles.

– Jesse Tinsley