Bessie Couture

Quick Facts

Significance:

First known black* business owner in Alaska

Place of Birth:

Charlotte Co., Virginia

Date of Birth:

1869

Place of Death:

Seattle, Washington

Date of Death:

April 29, 1959

Cemetery Name:

Greenwood Crematory

What did life look like for respectable women in the Skagway of 1896? What professions were available? Even though Skagway was a male-dominated society, there were economic opportunities for reputable women.

Often these opportunities would be in traditional settings as a cook or housekeeper, catering to men’s domestic needs.

And one thing Skagway had plenty of was men.

But, what about women who looked beyond traditional roles. Women who possessed an entrepreneurial spirit and sought out a better or different life for themselves?

In 1890’s America, African American women were restricted primarily to jobs in domestic service. Bessie Couture had other plans. She was the owner and operator of two restaurants in Skagway.  Her first restaurant, The Kitchen, was open between 1897 and 1900 during the Klondike Gold Rush.  Bessie co-owned her second restaurant, the Broadway Restaurant and Bakery, with her husband in the 1920s. There are some reports that Bessie owned another restaurant called The Black and White Restaurant, in Skagway. While this may be true, it also could have been a nickname for The Kitchen**.

Bessie was the first known black* business owner in Alaska.  Despite this achievement, we don’t know much about her. We do know that Bessie was married three times. The first marriage ended in divorce and the second in tragedy. Bessie’s second husband was A.W. Kendall, born in Vancouver and employed as a deckhand aboard the steamboat Selkirk owned by the White Pass & Yukon Route Railroad. Kendall was one of the over three hundred sixty people who died when the Vancouver bound Princess Sophia sank in the Lynn Canal near Juneau in October of 1918.  Bessie remarried in 1920 to French Canadian William Couture. They both worked as cooks in Skagway and opened the Broadway Restaurant and Bakery.

Of note, in the Skagway census of 1930 and 1940, Bessie is listed as the head of household and owning her own home, an achievement for a woman at this time.  While the head of household listing is not unusual for African American women during this period, owning their own home was.

As Bessie grew older, she divided her time between Skagway and Seattle. She died in Seattle, Washington at the age of ninety.

*The term African American is typically used to describe ethnicity while ‘black’ often describes race. Bessie was an United States citizen, but we don’t know her country of origin. For this reason, we do not refer to her as African American.

**The Black and White Restaurant and The Kitchen may, very well, be one and the same.  History is a science, and like all sciences, our understanding and interpretations change as new information is discovered.