Yosemite’s Daredevil Dancing Waitresses

Kitty-Tatch and Katherine Hazelston at Yosemite
Kitty-Tatch and Katherine Hazelston at Yosemite

Instant death from falling off of precipices at Yosemite National Park is a long-standing tradition at that park. One time, at Yosemite, time melted away as I found myself mesmerized by the Yosemite installment of the “Death In…” series of national parks books about all of the ways visitors meet their demise in our country’s most beautiful public lands. Yet for every person who hurtles off the edge of Nevada Falls, there are countless thousands who gleefully tempt fate and survive. What about these two waitresses?

From the National Park Service:

Kitty Tatch was a maid and waitress at the Sentinel Hotel in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Dressed in long wide skirts identifying her clearly as a woman, she danced and did high kicks at Overhanging Rock, 3,000 feet above the Valley, on Glacier Point with her friend Katherine Hazelston as George Fiske photographed them. (View famous photograph.) These pictures were later made into postcards, autographed by Tatch, and sold for years.

And that’s that for Kitty Tatch and Katherine Hazelston; I’ve lost their trail.

In the 1980s, horse owner Sharon Maloney named a horse Kitty Tatch, and it ran successfully for many years. But that’s pretty much it. What happened to them?

Kitty-Tatch and Katherine Hazelston at Yosemite
Kitty-Tatch and Katherine Hazelston at Yosemite

By Lee Wallender

Deception, influence, fakes, illusions, themed environments, simulations, secret places, secret infrastructure, imagined places, dreamscapes, movie sets and props, evasions, camouflage, studio backlots, miniatures.

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