Making a Living in the West - Woman's Style

In the hills of Idaho and Colorado were two women who came to the mining camps where men were digging for gold and silver. Contrary to what tales came out of the Wild West, not all women were notorious...

Mrs. Theodore Schultz was the first white woman in the mining camp.  She started a boarding house
and charge $3.00 per meal.  On Sundays, she writes, "I often got 200 extra men.  I worked 18 hours a day.  We had little provisions but bushels of gold dust.  I had gold dust everywhere, in everything, I threw it on the wood box, under the beds..." 

Mrs. Fowler ran a boarding house in Pueblo, Colorado.  She only charged $1.00 a meal and had all the men she could cook for.  Space was at such a premium that men paid for the privilege of sleeping on the ground outside the boarding house.

For women who provided a semblance of home with a warm meal and a clean bed, there were fortunes to be made in the mining camps.  These were just two examples...

Next - Afro-American pioneers

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Today in Pioneer History:  On June 4, 1876,  the Transcontinental Express train arrives in San Francisco, a mere 83 hours after leaving New York City,

Gold Rush Fever

Starting in 1849 a disease called "gold rush fever" began to rule the West.  California was the first and most spectacular of the mining frontier.  From 1849 in California, to 1858 in British Columbia, to the Pacific Northwest in the 1860s, and the Black Hills of Dakota in the 1870s...miners followed the smell of gold.
gold.  Women's Periodicals of the time condemned this "gold fever" because it "unhinged men, making them free as a bird as they flew from many a cheerful fireside, and many a happy home".

Because women were so few in these mining camps, their appearance was quite noteworthy.  In Nevada in 1853, the arrival of a group of women caused quite a sensation..."The men stood and gazed at us with mouth and eyes wide open every time we went out" wrote one of the women.

Not all women who were part of the mining camps were of the "less than respectable variety".  Many went for the same reason men went, some accompanied their husbands and some, well, they followed the miners from camp to camp for the men's pleasure.

So how did women shape the mining frontier? Or did the mining frontier shape them?

Next time...