Her mother took her to New York City for a change of scenery and so she could keep a close eye on her. But it didn't work. Kate took the name Kitty Phillips and got a job as a chorus girl in a variety theater. Shortly afterward, her mother took her back to Spokane.
She did not finish school. She soon made the rounds of box houses around lumber towns in Oregon and Washington. A box house was a theater for variety stage acts, but the second- and third-tier cubicles were reserved for the hired girls to engage the men. Kate liked to perform but working the floor was more profitable. She eventually ended up in Seattle, where she worked for Big John Considine in his famous People's Theater.
In 1898, gold was discovered in the Yukon, so Kate followed the miners to Dawson City. She was just 20 years old but she was grossing $30,000 a year. The men called her Klondike Kate, Queen of the Yukon. Soon she fell in love with a Greek waiter, Alexander Pantages. She grubstaked him for five years while he worked his way up in the theater. When he got high enough up he dumped her and married a girl "from the right side of the tracks."
After this she gave up the theater. She worked with her mother in a Seattle real estate office. There she learned of some property in Oregon that a wealthy customer wanted to swap for some Seattle property they owned. Kate took the offer and relocated to the Oregon property, located near Prineville, Oregon. She opened a restaurant on Main Street, where she entertained friends from the gold rush days. She was known to the locals as Aunt Kate. In 1914, when 37, she married Floyd Warner and they moved to a one-room shack on Salt Creek. They fought constantly and eventually he left her. She moved to a homestead near Hampton Butte.
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