By Old Hoppy Feb 19, 2010 in Prospecting and Mining, Women of the West | 0 Comments
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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By Old Hoppy Dec 31, 2009 in Prospecting and Mining, Women of the West | 0 Comments
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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