Life in the Old West

Women prospectors in the gold fields of the Old West were few, but they were there. Modern portrayals in Western fiction of the 49ers and other well-known gold rushes work pretty hard at getting the gold prospecting supplies and other period details correct — but they leave out the women who worked at the backbreaking labor along side men, all of them caught up in the gold rush, all suffering from gold fever!

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I don’t think I’ve ever shared a joke here on the Old West site, but this one about an Old Prospector and Young Gunslinger was just to priceless to pass up. Be sure to read the whole thing for the “moral” at the end. Enjoy a little “Old West” humor — with no particular effort to be historically authentic!

An old prospector shuffled into town leading a tired old mule. The old man headed straight for the only saloon in small desert town to quench his parched Throat. He walked up to the saloon and tied his old mule to the hitch rail. As he stood there brushing some of the dust from his face and clothes, a young gunslinger stepped out of the saloon with a gun in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other.

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Women who traveled to the gold fields often found creative ways to profit in the mining camps of the Old West. In many cases, these were practical, hardworking wives and mothers who brought order to the chaos of the camps and turned hardship into gold of their own.

One such woman, written of in Lillian Schlissel’s wonderful book “Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey,” was Luzena Stanley Wilson. She and her husband and three children arrived in Nevada City, California, in 1849, finding two rows of tents lining two steep gulches, the gulches “alive with moving men.”

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Mining claims lay at the heart of the prospectors’ dreams and schemes in the days of Old West gold rushes. Fundamentals of organizing the gold fields (and regions rich in other precious metals) were pretty much the same. Prospectors wisely knew that mining claims were fundamental, but organizing into recognized districts run by elected officials and even lawmen chosen and empowered by voters (usually) were crucial to everyone’s well-being and success.

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Tiny abandoned or nearly abandoned villages are everywhere, but the ghost towns of America abound throughout the West. History of the Old West often focuses on the country’s westward expansion; but many who are most interested in the West are more interested in ghost towns than growing Western towns and cities.

(One of our merchant partners, Blackcat Mining, offers a variety of books which focus on ghost towns in the West, some of them detailing abandoned mining towns in specific Western states.)

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One of my favorite research and reference sources is the Western History Collection at the Denver Public Library in — of course! — Denver, Colorado.

The beauty of their collection is that a great deal of material, especially some incredible images, is accessible online now. And their collection doesn’t deal only with Colorado and Colorado Territory, but has material from a huge variety of sources all over the U.S. West.

As a kid, I lived for five years in Denver. And, no, that was NOT during Old West times. Sure, it was the ’50s and ’60s, but it was the 1950s and 1960s. Being just a “young’un” at the time — from the time I was 10 until I was 14 — I never really knew about the library’s wonderful Western History Collection. I only discovered it in the 1990s through college classes and acquaintances who are Western novelists. In 1993, when the collection was only starting to be digitized and the Internet was only a fledgling connection of various BBS’s and not really the Internet, I had the pleasure of spending a week in Denver researching a novel I never finished writing.

Read more on Enjoy Denver Public Library’s Western History Collection…

You can’t watch too many old Westerns or read a few Western novels without running into these two words somewhere — “grub” and “grubstake.”

The first was used most commonly as sling for food, “grub” — but it didn’t get that meaning from the Old West. According to Winfred Blevins’ “Dictionary of the American West” (which I reference a lot around these parts), “grub” started as a cattle term. It was “an earmark that consisted of cutting off the whole ear of the critter.” The use of it for food came form slang dating from mid-17th century Britain, according to Blevins.

Read more on Prospectors needed grub, they looked for grubstakers…

“Float gold” or “floated gold” livened up life in the Old West with the ability to turn any man or woman rich — or turn any man or woman into a pauper. As the name implies, it was gold which had washed (floated) down from the mines in mountains into the streams and creeks. Mining float gold was done by “placer mining”: Using dredges, pans, sluices and other hydraulic methods to separate the grains and nuggets of gold from the sand and gravel along and inside of streams and rivers throughout the West.

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I was just playing around and found a great way to combine love of the Old West with modern, high-tech Google Maps functions for some fun and useful information.

If you haven’t used Google Maps, especially the new “Street View” function, you really need to give it a try. I just looked up “Gold Hill, Colorado” on Google Maps. One of the options I saw was “Street View.” I clicked on that and suddenly found myself traveling along Gold Hill Road at road level, looking through the trees and roadside rocks as I approached Main Street in this little Colorado “ghost town.”

Read more on Combine love of Old West with modern Google Maps for fun, information…

If you’ve read all the tales of gold rushes, prospectors, and gold panning along rugged mountain streams, maybe you’ve thought about trying your luck at finding some of the gold “in them thar hills”?

I just added a new, rather long page to the site with the complete line of gold prospecting supplies sold by one of our merchant partners, Black Cat Mining.

Check out the great selection of gold panning kits, maps, how-to prospecting and mining books, and even a couple of good deals on metal detectors. One word of explanation: The page is pretty long so you can see all the gold mining supplies available from Black Cat Mining, so it’ll take a minute or two to load completely in your browser.

Read more on Care to try your hand at panning or prospecting for gold?…