The Klondike & ‘Klondike Kate’ — 1897, the Last Great Rush

Summary

On July 17, 1897, the steamer Portland tied up at Schwabacher's Wharf in Seattle, and the Post-Intelligencer announced the line that would empty offices and farms across a continent: a ton of gold. There was nearer two tons aboard, hauled out of a Yukon creek almost nobody outside the North had heard of a year before. Two days earlier the Excelsior had landed the same news in San Francisco. Within weeks the last great gold rush of the century was on, and roughly 100,000 people pointed themselves toward the Klondike.

Most never got there. The country between the salt water at Skagway and Dyea and the goldfields at Dawson was a wall of mountains, lakes, and river, and the trip broke men by the thousand. Perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 reached Dawson City; of those only about 4,000 ever found gold, and those who got genuinely rich and kept it numbered in the hundreds. The good ground on Bonanza and Eldorado had been staked before the outside world even knew the rush existed, and the latecomers arrived to a townsite where the claims were gone and the only thing left to mine was each other.

This is the story told not through the lucky few who held a paying claim but through the ordinary stampeders who climbed the Chilkoot's golden stairs with a year of food on their backs — and through the dance-hall women, gamblers, and saloonkeepers who understood from the start that the surest gold in Dawson lay in the pockets of suddenly wealthy men, not in the gravel. Chief among them was Kathleen Rockwell, the vaudeville performer the North called Klondike Kate.

Kate mined the miners. With her flame dance she became the Queen of the Klondike, showered in nuggets across the footlights of the Savoy. She also bankrolled a young Greek waiter named Alexander Pantages, who took her money and her devotion and then took another woman to wife. The rush that minted theater magnates and Seattle fortunes left Kate, like most who ran to it, holding far less than she had given it.

Timeline

The Rush

The news traveled the way gold news always does — faster than reason. Gold had been found on Bonanza Creek the previous August, but the Yukon froze the world out for nine months; only when the spring ice broke and the first boats reached the coast did the proof get out. When the Excelsior and the Portland landed their miners and their canvas sacks and tin cans heavy with dust in July of 1897, a continent already three years deep in depression went briefly insane. Clerks quit, ministers abandoned pulpits, a Seattle streetcar conductor stopped his car and walked away. Outfitters and steamship lines made fortunes overnight selling passage and gear to people who had no idea what waited for them.

What waited was the worst country a stampeder could face. From Dyea climbed the Chilkoot, ending in the brutal final pitch the men called the Golden Stairs — some fifteen hundred steps hacked into the ice, up which a human chain shuffled in the line that became the most famous photograph of the rush. From Skagway ran the White Pass, lower but longer and bottomless with mud. So many overloaded pack animals were driven to death on it that it became the Dead Horse Trail; perhaps three thousand horses died there, and Jack London, who crossed it, wrote that the men 'did not shoot them, though, they let them suffer.'

And the trail did not end at the summit. The North-West Mounted Police, posted at the passes to keep the Yukon Canadian and the stampeders alive, turned back anyone without roughly a ton of supplies — close to a year's provisions plus tents, tools, and stoves. A man with a ton of goods and a hundred-pound back made the climb dozens of times, ferrying his outfit forward cache by cache. Then came the lakes, the boatbuilding at Bennett, and five hundred miles of the Yukon River with its rapids before a stampeder ever saw the smoke of Dawson.

The Diggings

Dawson City, where the Klondike met the Yukon, had been a moose pasture in 1896. By the summer of 1898 it held something like 30,000 people, briefly the largest city in the Canadian Northwest — built of green lumber, mud, and ambition, where flour and nails sold for sums that would have bought a house Outside, and where a man paid for a meal or a dance with a pinch of gold dust on a scale. The good claims, on Bonanza and its tributary Eldorado, were already in other hands. For the tens of thousands who arrived after the staking, Dawson was less a goldfield than a stage set, and the real economy ran on whisky, faro, and the company of women.

Into that economy walked Kathleen Rockwell. Born in Junction City, Kansas — the year is given variously as 1873 to 1876 — raised partly in Spokane and expelled from school after school, she had failed at show business in New York before the North drew her up the coast. She reached the Yukon in 1899, danced first at Whitehorse, then joined the Savoy company in Dawson, where her trademark flame dance made her a star: she whirled beneath the lights trailing two hundred feet of scarlet chiffon until she seemed to be on fire, and the miners answered with nuggets thrown onto the boards. They crowned her the Queen of the Klondike and the Flame of the Yukon, and on a good night she could clear hundreds of dollars, because she had grasped the rush's central truth: the dependable money was in the pockets of the men who had the gold, not in the frozen ground that still hid it.

The dance-hall performers were not, mostly, the lurid figures the dime novels made of them. They worked grueling hours, were taxed and watched by the Mounties, and many were, like the stampeders, simply trying to turn the boom into a stake before it collapsed. Kate did better than most and was generous with it. Some she handed to Alexander Pantages, a young Greek who had come north and was tending bar and managing a small theater. She believed in him, helped finance his early ventures, and expected to share whatever they built. It is the oldest story in the goldfields, with the genders of fortune reversed: the partner who supplies the capital is not always the partner who keeps it.

The Reckoning

The Klondike burned hot and went out fast. As quickly as it had risen, Dawson began to empty: in 1899 gold was found on the beaches of Nome, far down the Alaskan coast and reachable by ship without a single mountain pass. Thousands who had not made their fortune in the Yukon got on the next boat downriver and chased the new strike, and Dawson's population collapsed. The era of the lone man with a pan was ending everywhere; companies with dredges and hydraulic monitors moved in to work the gravels on an industrial scale, and the romance of the last great rush passed into photographs and memoir almost before its participants were old.

For the great majority the reckoning was simple arithmetic. They had spent their savings on an outfit, broken their bodies on the passes, and arrived to find nothing left to claim. Many turned back at the lakes or the summit; some died on the trail, in the rapids, of scurvy or typhoid or the cold. The lasting wealth of the Klondike flowed, as it nearly always does, to those who sold the shovels and the passage and the whisky — to Seattle, which made itself the gateway and outfitting capital of the North and never looked back.

Kate Rockwell got her own hard lesson. In March 1905, while she was on tour, Alexander Pantages — whose theater career she had helped to seed — secretly married a California violinist named Lois Mendenhall in Seattle, sending Kate word in a letter days after the ceremony. She sued him for breach of promise and settled out of court for a small fraction of what she believed she was owed. He went on to build one of the great vaudeville circuits in America; she drifted to Oregon. The flame of the Yukon had funded a fortune she would never share, which is as Klondike a fate as any miner's.

What Decided It

What Became of Them

The Klondike left a paradox behind it. As an economic event it was modest — total production never matched the hopes that drove it, and most participants lost money — but as a story it was enormous, the rush that gave the world Jack London and Robert Service and the image of a human chain inching up a frozen stair. Dawson, drained by Nome and then by the dredges, shrank to a few hundred souls and survives today as a heritage town, with the passes and Skagway protected on the American side by the U.S. National Park Service.

Kathleen Rockwell outlived the rush by half a century. After the Pantages affair she drifted to Oregon, married more than once, and settled at last in Sweet Home, where she became a beloved local character, trading on her legend as the last Queen of the Klondike. She died there on February 21, 1957, at 83 — the most famous survivor of a rush that had made her briefly the toast of the North and then, like nearly everyone, left her with the story instead of the gold.

Alexander Pantages, by contrast, built a coast-to-coast theater empire on a foundation Kate had helped lay — a reminder that the Klondike's fortunes ran to those positioned to keep them. The stampeders themselves mostly went home, and many said in old age that the trip had been the great adventure of their lives, which was, for most, the only return the Klondike ever paid.

Lessons

References

• Klondike Gold Rush Wikipedia
• Klondike Kate (Kathleen Rockwell) Wikipedia
• Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park National Park Service
• The Klondike Gold Rush (digital collection) University of Washington Libraries