Cecilia Rasmussen: Gold Rush Lured Quirky Women To California
Women were a rarity in Gold Rush California, but the ones who got here and prospered were doozies -- formidable women -- as well as a few floozies.
They hauled freight and mined for gold. They lobbied to get equal pay and the vote. They were missionaries, writers, madams and mavericks. Some even passed themselves off as men to avoid the inevitable harassments that women endured.
* Eliza Farnham, a widow and former matron of Sing Sing Prison in New York, came to California in 1849, donned overalls and built her own ranch house in the gold country. She wrote books and ran the women's wards at the Stockton Insane Asylum.
* Charlotte "Charlie" Parkhurst, a drinking, tobacco-chewing, dice-playing stagecoach driver, arrived in 1851 and, living as a man, prospered near Watsonville. Still in male guise, she voted in the election of 1868, decades before women were granted suffrage. She almost went to her grave as a man -- until an autopsy revealed her secret.
* Elsa Jane Forest Guerin of New Orleans was another cross-dresser. She was married at 12, a mother at 13 and a widow with two babies at 15. Afterward, she disguised herself as a man and headed west to track down her husband's killer, making her way to the Sacramento Valley in the 1850s. There, she mined for gold, ran a saloon and a pack-mule station and bought a ranch near Shasta, becoming known as Mountain Charley. Eventually, her secret came out and she wrote a book.
* Los Angeles physician Mary P. Sawtelle, who condemned corsets and advocated exercise for women, turned Gold Rush characters into a novel about a maiden in the mining camps, "The Heroine of '49."
* Mary Ellen "Mammy" Pleasant, a former slave, reputedly made $225 a day as a cook and boarding-house operator. She invested in mining stock and a string of bordellos, lent money at high interest and, when she was ejected from a streetcar because of her color, went to court. Her victory in 1866 established blacks' legal right to ride streetcars.
* Adah Isaacs Menken, an actress and poet, brought her own kind of sexual freedom to the wide-open town of San Francisco. She wooed newly rich miners and men about town with a daring horseback act in which she appeared in flesh-colored tights to simulate bare skin.
* Ah Toy, the second Chinese woman in San Francisco, joined the ranks of prosperous immigrant prostitutes who had such professional names as Bowlegged Mary and Squirrel Tooth Alice (who got her moniker posing for photographs with her pet squirrel). After a few years in the Bay Area, Toy departed San Francisco in 1854, leaving litigation in her wake. In one suit, she accused a client of trying to pay her with brass filings instead of gold dust. She left before it came to trial.
The Gold Rush era was a sellers' market for feminine companionship. Women constituted only 2% of the passengers on the overland '49ers' prairie schooners, according to historian Gloria Ricci Lothrop, who wrote "California Women: A History." But by 1857, they constituted half of the passenger lists.
They were lured west by more liberal laws and opportunities, including the right to own businesses and property and take jobs that some Eastern cities reserved for men.
[Editor's Note: The original article is much longer. Please see the LA Times for more coverage.]
They hauled freight and mined for gold. They lobbied to get equal pay and the vote. They were missionaries, writers, madams and mavericks. Some even passed themselves off as men to avoid the inevitable harassments that women endured.
* Eliza Farnham, a widow and former matron of Sing Sing Prison in New York, came to California in 1849, donned overalls and built her own ranch house in the gold country. She wrote books and ran the women's wards at the Stockton Insane Asylum.
* Charlotte "Charlie" Parkhurst, a drinking, tobacco-chewing, dice-playing stagecoach driver, arrived in 1851 and, living as a man, prospered near Watsonville. Still in male guise, she voted in the election of 1868, decades before women were granted suffrage. She almost went to her grave as a man -- until an autopsy revealed her secret.
* Elsa Jane Forest Guerin of New Orleans was another cross-dresser. She was married at 12, a mother at 13 and a widow with two babies at 15. Afterward, she disguised herself as a man and headed west to track down her husband's killer, making her way to the Sacramento Valley in the 1850s. There, she mined for gold, ran a saloon and a pack-mule station and bought a ranch near Shasta, becoming known as Mountain Charley. Eventually, her secret came out and she wrote a book.
* Los Angeles physician Mary P. Sawtelle, who condemned corsets and advocated exercise for women, turned Gold Rush characters into a novel about a maiden in the mining camps, "The Heroine of '49."
* Mary Ellen "Mammy" Pleasant, a former slave, reputedly made $225 a day as a cook and boarding-house operator. She invested in mining stock and a string of bordellos, lent money at high interest and, when she was ejected from a streetcar because of her color, went to court. Her victory in 1866 established blacks' legal right to ride streetcars.
* Adah Isaacs Menken, an actress and poet, brought her own kind of sexual freedom to the wide-open town of San Francisco. She wooed newly rich miners and men about town with a daring horseback act in which she appeared in flesh-colored tights to simulate bare skin.
* Ah Toy, the second Chinese woman in San Francisco, joined the ranks of prosperous immigrant prostitutes who had such professional names as Bowlegged Mary and Squirrel Tooth Alice (who got her moniker posing for photographs with her pet squirrel). After a few years in the Bay Area, Toy departed San Francisco in 1854, leaving litigation in her wake. In one suit, she accused a client of trying to pay her with brass filings instead of gold dust. She left before it came to trial.
The Gold Rush era was a sellers' market for feminine companionship. Women constituted only 2% of the passengers on the overland '49ers' prairie schooners, according to historian Gloria Ricci Lothrop, who wrote "California Women: A History." But by 1857, they constituted half of the passenger lists.
They were lured west by more liberal laws and opportunities, including the right to own businesses and property and take jobs that some Eastern cities reserved for men.
[Editor's Note: The original article is much longer. Please see the LA Times for more coverage.]