Was she a lady? Hell no. She definitely chose not to be, unless you think dancing in front of a crowd of rowdy miners in a tin foil hat lit with fifty candles is a particularly well bred thing to do. What she lacked in gentility, though, she made up for in coolness, we feel. And by that we don’t mean the tin hat so much as the fact that she made it up to the last frontier all alone, tap dancing along the way to support herself, and prospered in that lonely, harsh territory where life was hard and only the toughest men survived. Tough men who would then melt at the sight of pretty Klondike Kate and shower her with their newfound gold nuggets to show their appreciation when she performed.
Did she break the rules? Hell yeah. She made the most of her post performance dancing-with-the miners-earning-commission-on-drinks duties by getting the men drunk and reselling them their champagne empties, filled with water. Okay, so while that’s an inventive way of making money, it’s not exactly making trouble on behalf of women. But it’s hard to overestimate how groundbreaking (no mining pun intended there) her mere presence in Alaska was. She had flown in the face of convention to get there. Rumour has it she even had to dress as a boy because women weren’t allowed on a boat that rode the Yukon River rapids. Klondike Kate and all the other women adventurous enough to join the gold rush were true sisters doin’ it for themselves.
And while other dance hall girls preferred to forget their colourful past, Klondike Kate remained very proud of her early exploits. She handed out postcards of herself, like this one, for the rest of her life. So this is us helping her keep up that tradition and handing out her postcard to you. Cause we’re proud of her too.
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