"If You Act Like a Lady, Men Will Always Treat You As One:" Gold Rush Queen, Nellie Cashman

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Look for CoverGirl's Lash Blast Volume Mascara Limited Edition at your favorite retailer today while supplies last. Easy, breezy, beautiful CoverGirl. This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories and we tell stories about everything here on this show and we love to tell stories about our own history and always are this day in histories and our historical segments are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College. Here's Roger McGrath to tell us the story of a mining woman who sought her fortunes in a man's world and became one of the greatest women of the Old West. Dr. McGrath is a professor in Southern California and the author of Gunfighters, High Women, and Vigilantes, Violence on the Frontier.

Here's Roger. Known as the frontier angel or the saint of the sourdoughs, Nellie Cashman was one of the greatest women who helped make America's conquest of the frontier a Homeric era. She ranged far and wide on every mining frontier from Arizona and Mexico in the south to Alaska and the Klondike in the far north.

She is not forgotten. She's an inductee of the Alaska Mining Hall of Fame, the Arizona Women's Hall of Fame, and Arizona Women's Heritage Trail. There's also a Nellie Cashman day in Tombstone.

She was a character in the 1950s TV series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp and the US Postal Service honored her with a stamp in 1994. Born in County Cork, Ireland in 1845, Nellie is only a teenager when she, her sister Frances, and her widowed mother leave Ireland and sail to Boston in 1860. When the Civil War erupts, a shortage of young men allows Nellie to find work as a bellhop in a hotel.

Not many bellhops look like Nellie, a beautiful and finely featured young woman with waist-length brunette hair, flawless fair skin, and sparkling expressive eyes. Here's Jane Baker, author of the Nellie Cashman biography, Tough Nut Angel, the tale of a real-life adventurous of the Old West. There's a legend that says that Nellie met General Ulysses S. Grant and had a conversation with him that ended in him suggesting that she go to the West because she would fit better there. With the end of the Civil War, the Cashman decide it's California for them.

They arrive in San Francisco after sailing on steamships and crossing through the jungles and mountains of Panama on burrows. Frances, or Fanny as she's called, marries Irishman Tom Cunningham and starts a family. Nellie is off for mining strikes in Arizona, Nevada, and Idaho. In each new mining camp, she establishes a boarding house and a restaurant, builds it into a profitable enterprise, then sells out and moves on. Any miner down on his luck eats for free at Nellie's, and Nellie is always ready to grub-steak a prospector. She also has a talent for the healing arts and nurses many and injured or ill miner back to health.

Here's a story near the Old West, Marshall Trimble, otherwise known as the Will Rogers of Arizona. Nellie took great pride in the fact that she never turned away a hungry miner who had no money to pay for his meal or board. And when there was a need to raise money, whether it was for churches and schools or hospitals or a family of a miner killed in a mining accident, well, Nellie would head downtown for the saloons or the brothels with her hat turned upside down, and she always left with a hat full of money. The source of those donations never bothered her.

She said one time, whether the money comes from an upstanding citizen or a member of an outlaw faction makes no difference to me, and the money doesn't know the difference either. In 1874, Nellie joins a party of 200 Nevada miners headed for the Cassiar Mountains in Northern British Columbia, near the border of the Yukon. The region is practically unknown and all but inaccessible, but the miners, including Nellie, the only female, reach their destination and strike gold on the upper reaches of the Stikine River and along its major tributary, Dease Creek. It's only fall when winter comes to the Cassiars. The miners are caught unprepared for the heavy snowfalls and severe cold.

As their supplies dwindle, dozens begin falling ill with scurvy. Their beloved Nellie is not among them. She left earlier for a vacation in Victoria on Vancouver Island. When word reaches Victoria, the miners are entrapped by snow and ice and suffering terribly. Nellie purchases 2,000 pounds of supplies, including plenty of lime juice, hires six men and heads for Dease Creek. At Wrangell, Alaska, U.S. customs officers try to dissuade her from what they term a mad trip, but Nellie pushes on. When the commander of Fort Wrangell hears that a woman is headed into the Cassiars, he dispatches a lieutenant with a squad of soldiers to rescue her. They don't catch up with Nellie until high up on the Stikine River. Nearly exhausted and suffering greatly from the cold, the soldiers find Nellie camped comfortably on the ice of this frozen Stikine. The lieutenant says she is cooking her evening meal by the heat of a wood fire and humming a lively air.

The soldiers greatly accept her offer of hot coffee and food and return without her. The winter weather is so severe that people in coastal settlements think Nellie must have died. Here again is Jane Baker. There was a small avalanche and Nellie's tent was buried 10 feet deep in the snow. Now when I heard about this, I wondered how did she figure out how to get out of there?

Well, if you spit, your spit will go down. So what she did was spit and climb the opposite directions and she climbed out of the hole. She does herself up out of it. After 77 days on the trail and digging herself out of a snow slide, Nellie reaches Dease Creek. Upon hearing of Nellie's trek, a newspaper called it an extraordinary feat by an indomitable female who possesses all the vifacity as well as the push and energy inherent to her grace. With lime juice and good food, Nellie nurses every one of the 200 snowed-in miners back to good health.

She is called the angel of the Casiars. And when we come back, we'll continue with the story of Nellie Cashman here on our American stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country. Stories from our big cities and small towns, but we truly can't do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot.

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Save more at cheap Caribbean.com. And we return to our American stories and continue with Roger Graff and the story of Nellie Cashman. Nellie stays in British Columbia for another three years, operating her businesses and raising money to build Saint Joseph's Hospital in Victoria. In 1878, Nellie returns to San Francisco to visit her mother in the Cunninghams.

Fanny and her husband now have three boys and two girls who love their Aunt Nell and are fascinated by her many adventures. A new mining strike soon sends Nellie to Tucson in Arizona Territory. She opens the Delmonico Restaurant, the first business in Tucson owned by a woman. But in 1880, she heads for the new Silver Strike at Tombstone. She takes over operation of the Russ House Hotel and within weeks becomes part owner.

One of the prospectors she feeds for free in grub steaks is Edward Doheny, who later becomes one of America's great oilmen. Not long after Nellie begins operating the Russ House Hotel, her sister's husband dies of tuberculosis. Nellie rushes to San Francisco and brings Fanny and her children to Tombstone to live in a home immediately behind the Russ House. In 1883, Fanny dies of tuberculosis and Aunt Nell finishes the job of rearing the Cunningham Children. When Nellie arrives in Tombstone, there is no Catholic Church.

Here again is Marshall Trimble. In 1880, there was an article in the Tombstone Epitaph that said Nellie Cashman, the year repressible, started out yesterday to raise funds for the building of a Catholic Church. We don't know what success attended her first effort, but there's going to be a Catholic Church in Tombstone before many more days if Nellie has to build it herself.

She convinces the owners of the Crystal Palace Saloon. One of the owners is Wyatt Earp to allow Sunday services to be held there until the church is built. Nellie leads the way in fundraising for what becomes the Sacred Heart Church. Nellie also helps build the first school in Tombstone and the first non-military hospital in Arizona, Saint Mary's in Tucson. She also establishes a fund for prospectors injured in mining accidents and serves as Treasurer of Tombstone's Chapter of the Land League of Ireland. Nellie becomes one of the most influential and respected figures in Tombstone.

Here again is Jane Baker. During the time she was raising those kids in Tombstone, the gunfight at the OK Corral happened and Nellie knew all of those players, Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, all his brothers. She knew the mayor of Tombstone named John Klum, who thought she was absolutely wonderful and wrote glowing reports of her. John Klum, the publisher of the Tombstone Epitaph and Tombstone's first mayor, said of Nellie, her frank manner, her self-reliant spirit, and her emphatic and fascinating Celtic brogue impressed me very much and indicated that she was a woman of strong character and marked individuality.

Here's Marshall Trimble with another story exemplifying Nellie's servant's heart. During the Christmas season of 1883 in Bisbee, five men pulled a robbery, killing four people, including a pregnant woman. They were caught, tried, and convicted, and sentenced to hang. Nellie took it upon herself to be their mother confessor, and just before the hanging, an entrepreneur had built a grandstand outside the high walls of the Tombstone courthouse and was selling tickets to watch the hanging. The outlaws pleaded with Nellie not to let their hanging become a public spectacle.

So the night before the event, Nellie and some friends arrived late late in the evening with tools in hand, and they tore it down. After the five men were hanged, the authorities had planned to donate their bodies to medical science, but the condemned men protested to Nellie, so she saw to it that they were given a proper burial and hired a guard to protect their graves for several days. One day, a dying Mexican stumbles in the Tombstone and collapses at the entrance to the Russ House. Nellie has him carried inside and put on a bed. Before he dies, he mutters to her, Moolay, go to Moolay.

Gold nuggets are found in his pockets. Nellie and some twenty Tombstone miners are soon exploring the desert inland from Moolay in Baja, California. The party runs out of water and several of the men are on the verge of death from dehydration. The Phoenix Herald newspaper reports that Nellie and two others have died of thirst.

Actually, Nellie is in better shape than any of the men. She volunteers to go off on her own, assuring her fellow prospectors a good angel will guide her to water. She crosses miles of scorching desert and miraculously comes upon an isolated mission. Not pausing to rest, she organizes a rescue party and helps drive burrows loaded with goatskin sacks of water back to the miners.

She arrives just in the nick of time. In 1895, at the age of fifty, Nellie is still going strong when she arrives in Tucson. A newspaper reports, yesterday, Tucson was visited by one of the most extraordinary women in America, Nellie Cashman, whose name and face have been familiar to every important mining camper district on the coast for more than 20 years. She rode into the town from Casa Grande and horseback, a jaunt that would nearly have prostrated the average man with fatigue.

She showed no sign of weariness and went about town in that calm business-like manner that belongs particularly to her. When news of the great strike in the Klondike reaches the states, Nellie is off for the far north immediately. She arrives in Dye, Alaska during March 1898 and becomes one of the first women to take the steep Chilkoot Pass Trail. At the summit on the Canadian border, the Mounties required each stampede to pack 2000 pounds of supplies or they wouldn't let them in.

I guess they didn't want American citizens to perish on Canadian soil. Well, 54-year-old Nellie had to make several trips up the snowpack trail, but she was able to pass inspection. And then while waiting for the eyes to thaw, she built a raft and then floated 500 miles down the Yukon River to reach Dawson, braving a series of fierce rapids along the way. Nellie soon opens a restaurant and a grocery store, which includes a small library that becomes known as the Prospector's Haven of Rest.

A newspaper reports her entrance into a saloon or dance hall is the signal for every man in the place to stand. Nellie has always done well, but she really strikes it rich in the Klondike. Her claim on Bonanza Creek pays her more than $100,000, equivalent to 3 million in today's money. Nellie continues living and prospecting in the Yukon and Alaska for another 25 years. She becomes an expert musher more than once driving teams of dogs through the snow for hundreds of miles.

Here's Marshall in 1923 at the age of 78. She mushed a dog sled team 350 miles in just 17 days. Newspapers all over Alaska carried the story of that intrepid lady named Nellie Cashman. During the fall of 1924, her fabled health finally begins to fail. She dies at age 79 in January 1925 in Saint Joseph's Hospital, which she had helped build nearly 50 years earlier.

Nellie was single all her life. She had several proposals. She was very pretty woman, but she never married and when asked if she ever feared for her safety being the only woman amongst the many rough hewn men, she replied sweetly, if you act like a lady, men will always treat you like one. Shortly before she dies, a reporter asks her if she ever feared for her virtue while living in all male mining camps or prospecting on wild frontiers. She replies, bless your soul. No, I never have had a word said to me out of the way.

The boys would sure see to it that anyone who ever offered to insult me could never be able to repeat the offense. And thanks to Roger McGrath for that storytelling and he's told so many good ones here on this show. Also, thanks to Greg Hengler, Nellie Cashman's story here on Our American Stories. Learn more at T-Mobile.com slash now. The radio's songs of the summer radio. Discover new shows and movies for free.

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