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By Finn J.D. John
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Unfortunately for Kate, by the time she got to Seattle, Pantages’ roving eye had fallen upon a dishy violin player in one of his theaters. 
A circa-1900 souvenir portrait of “Klondike Kate” with a personal message from Kate herself, written late in life after her marriage to Bill Van Duren. (Image: Socotra House Publishing) (Image: Socotra House Publishing)This girl was a little wiser than Kate had been, and insisted that if Alexander liked it, he would need to put a ring on it. Which he promptly and secretly did. And then he coldly informed Kate — who at this time considered herself his fiancée — of his altered marital status in a letter four days later.
But as the years went by, it became harder and harder to do that, and it was increasingly clear that she was going to have to find something else to do. In Dawson she’d been in her early 20s, but by the late ’oughts she was in her 30s. She was still gorgeous, but like any athlete approaching middle age she was starting to be dogged with injuries — especially sprained ankles and knees. 
An old postcard image of the Pantages theater in Portland, a dozen or so years after the turn of the century. Rockwell pined after Pantages for years after he jilted her, and displays like this in all major Western cities may have been part of the reason she chose to retreat from city life. (Image: Postcard)Adding insult to injury was the fact that Pantages, the ex-fiancé who had jilted her in the ugliest way imaginable, had gone on to build a huge empire of Vaudeville theaters all over the West, with his name on them and her money in them. Presumably he repaid her her initial stake, after his business was up and running and he no longer needed the liquidity it afforded; otherwise she no doubt would have sued him for it. But, of course, her money had helped build it. Every time she passed one of those theaters it reminded her of how badly she had gotten taken advantage of. The only thing that made it feel better was performing, and she toured and performed frenetically for a few years, trying to lose herself in her work. 
Kate Rockwell as she appeared in her 50s, when she was living in Bend, years after leaving the Vaudeville stage. (Image: Oregon Historical Society)Finally, after an especially bad ankle sprain brought on a sort of nervous breakdown, a doctor told her bluntly that she’d have to quit, or she’d die. She needed a place to get away from the Vaudeville scene, a place far away from the nearest Pantages Vaudeville theatre, a place to renew her soul. Central Oregon would be that place. “KLONDIKE KATE” ROCKWELL had visited Central Oregon before, and been deeply impressed by the beauty of the high desert. Now it seemed like just the place to get away from all things Vaudeville, to forget Pantages, to re-center herself. And she had friends there — although actually she had friends almost everywhere, among the former sourdoughs of the Klondike gold rush. And, the Oregon High Desert country at that time (circa 1910) was one of the last parts of the continental U.S. in which you could still file a homestead claim. Of course, the claimable lands still available by then were few and unappealing. All the good land had been claimed up years before, and all that was left was dusty rangeland. The government had tried to compensate for the poor quality of the land by offering a lot of it — 320 acres instead of 160. But even so, most of these late-arriving homesteaders had a very hard time “proving up” their claims by living on them for the five years necessary to claim title. Most ran out of money and drifted away, leaving their abandoned buildings and fixtures to bleach in the high desert sun. You can still see some of these today. But Kate thought she was up to the challenge. So with $3,500 in cash, $3,000 worth of jewelry, and several large trunks full of dresses, gowns and hats, she moved onto a dry-land claim near the town of Brothers. Kate did almost everything dressed as if for a show. Folks would see her walking into Brothers in a dusty but fabulous (and fabulously expensive) evening gown about once a week. And there may have been another homesteader somewhere in the American West who regularly wore Vaudeville ball gowns, big floral hats and dancing slippers while grubbing sagebrush out of the kitchen garden, but it doesn’t seem likely. She joked about the odd footprints she left while doing chores around the place. “Those holes are not the tracks of prehistoric bobcats,” she once said, according to Ellis Lucia’s account in his book about her. “I made ’em with my dancing slippers.” She also became an avid rockhound, one of Central Oregon’s first ever. She fell in love with and married a local man, Floyd Warner. Kate Rockwell beat the odds and became one of only a tiny handful of dry-land homesteaders to prove up a claim that didn’t include a water source. But it still didn’t make sense to stay, especially for a social creature like Klondike Kate. She and Floyd sold out soon after getting title. The marriage didn’t last much longer than the homestead. By the early 1920s Kate was single again, and living in Bend. There, she became something of a municipal celebrity. Her home was a half block from the fire station, and she became a one-woman fire auxiliary, bringing hot coffee to the boys during fire calls. She was a fund-raising dynamo, able to shake down almost any business or person for a contribution to a social cause; during the Great Depression she made gallons and gallons of soup to help out the hobos. She became known as “Aunt Kate of Farewell Bend.” Less charitable voices in Bend labeled her “our destitute prostitute”; it’s pretty unlikely she was ever either of these things, although there were a few times her finances came pretty close to destitution. In 1929 she was called to testify in a criminal prosecution of Alexander Pantages — her ex-fiancé, remember — when he was accused of raping a 17-year-old girl. He was found guilty, though acquitted on retrial, and died in 1936. There were those who thought the entire case was trumped up by a group of Yukon soudoughs angry about how he’d treated Kate; but that opinion might have reflected 1930s society’s attitudes toward rape victims more than the merits of the case itself. She got married two more times, the first time to an old sourdough named Johnny Matson — who’d carried the torch for her since 1901, and still lived and prospected in the Yukon much of the time — and, after his death, to an old friend named Bill Van Duren. The two of them moved to Sweet Home, where, in 1957, she died.
But by then she lived in Sweet Home. A Salem funeral home took care of the arrangements, and that’s where the ashes ended up. Her husband, Bill Van Duren — himself in bad health — moved directly to Seattle to be close to family. So her ashes lingered in the storage room of the funeral home for several years. Finally, in 1960, three years after her death, someone took care of Kate’s last request: “An innocent bystander,” Lucia writes coyly, “who held a deep appreciation for things historical and, because of his own religious faith, was able to perform final rites.” “He’s clearly hiding something,” historian Nathan Pederson told Bend Bulletin writer Beau Eastes, referring of course to Lucia. “He clearly knows who it is and is purposely hiding that from his readers.” But Pederson — a former president of the Deschutes County Historical Society, and a historian with a particular interest in the Klondike Kate story — decided to dig into the mystery. Was it a long-lost relative, he wondered? There always had been a rumor that Kate Rockwell and Alexander Pantages had had a love child in Alaska, who had been informally adopted out; nobody really believed it, but could it actually be true? Or was it an old Klondike sourdough who’d carried the torch for the “flame dancer” since they were both 22, now grown old and grizzled but still young enough to do an old friend a special favor? Or was it Ellis Lucia himself? — Lucia was an old-school journalist who might not like to admit to being involved personally in a story. But no, it was none of these. Pederson tracked down the truth, and it was somewhat mundane, actually. It was David Duniway, the head archivist at the Oregon State Library and grandson of the legendary journalist and suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway. A true innocent bystander, Duniway learned of the unfulfilled bequest and took it upon himself to see to it that this legendary Oregon original had her last wishes acted upon. His grandmother would be proud.
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