The Intrepid Females of Forty-Nine

JoAnn Levy

Note, historic photos are randomly placed and are not associated with any person or persons in this article. The two actresses: Lola Montez, and Lotta Crabtree are correctly depicted.

    In 1849, by conservative estimates, 25,000 people crossed the plains to California . The number arriving that year by sea, from around the Horn and across the Isthmus, exceeded 30,000 . This immense migration traveling beneath the canvas of covered wagons and the canvas of sails included many surprisingly adventurous women.

One of them was Mary Jane Megquier who crossed the Isthmus early in 1849, and wrote this of her Chagres River journey:

    “The birds singing monkeys screeching the Americans laughing and joking the natives grunting as they pushed us along through the rapids was enough to drive one mad with delight.”
She cheerfully described the sights, including the church at Gorgona, which was “overrun with domestic animals in time of service…. A mule took the liberty to depart this life within its walls while we were there, which was looked upon by the natives of no consequence.”

Mrs. Megquier took to travel like a duck to water. On a later trip, after visiting family in Maine, she returned to San Francisco via Nicaragua, without her husband, but in company with two women. She breezily wrote from Nicaragua:

    “We spent three days very pleasantly although all were nearly starved for the want of wholesome food but you know my stomach is not lined with pink satin the bristles on the pork, the weavels in the rice and worms in the bread did not start me at all, but I grew fat upon it. Emily, Miss Bartlett and myself had a small room with scarce light enough to see the rats and spiders…”
Lucilla Brown, a more critical traveler, crossed the Isthmus late in 1849, in a company that included “seven females.” She intentionally did not write ladies, “for all do not deserve the name.”

Among those acceptable to her was John Sutter’s family. Since they were Swiss, Mrs. Brown could converse little with them, but of the remaining women passengers Mrs. Brown had decided opinions:

    “There is a Mrs. Brayner, an upholsterer by trade, going on to meet her husband in San Francisco. A Miss Scott, about fifty years old, going independent and alone, to speculate in California – of course, no very agreeable person. Then there is a Mrs. Taylor, whose husband left her some years ago—is said to have a father in California, whither she purports to be bound. She is young and has some pretentions to beauty, and at first commanded sympathy and attention from the gentlemen; but they all left her except the keeper of the hotel at Chagres, a low fellow, who retains her at his lodgings there, and it is to be hoped she will proceed no further.”
Women who crossed to California by land also noted the presence of other women. Catherine Haun, whose party took the Lassen route in 1849, wrote that her caravan had “a good many women and children.”
Among forty-niners traveling the southern route through present-day New Mexico and Arizona into San Diego was a woman with the wonderful name of Louisiana Strentzel, who met eight families in just one party on this road.
No stranger to gold fever, Mrs. Strentzel wrote from San Diego to her family back home that the latest news from the mines was that “gold is found in 27-pound lumps.” She also wrote that her husband hadn’t been sick a day since they left, and their two children were red and rosy and outgrowing their clothes. She, herself, she wrote, never enjoyed better health in her life.
Good health was noted by many women on the trails, who enjoyed the invigorating exercise.

Lola Montez Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, born in Grange, County Sligo, Ireland on February 17, 1821 was better known by her stage name Lola Montez. the Irish-born dancer and actress became famous as the mistress of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. In 1846, she traveled to Munich, where she was discovered by Ludwig I of Bavaria. Ludwig made her Countess of Landsfeld. During the Bavarians’ revolt, Ludwig abdicated, and Lola fled Bavaria for the United States. From 1851 to 1853 she performed as a dancer and actress in the eastern United States, then moved to San Francisco in May 1853, where she married Patrick Hull and moved to Grass Valley, California. Lola contracted pneumonia and passed away on January 17, 1861, one month short of her fortieth birthday.

Others noted the novelty of the landscape, like Harriet Ward, a grandmother:

    “The scenery through which we are constantly passing is so wild and magnificently grand that it elevates the soul from earth to heaven and causes such an elasticity of mind that I forget I am old.”

And Lucena Parsons wrote in her diary:

    “At the bottom of this valley are some very singular rocks. It appears sublime to me to see these rocks towering one above the other & lifting their majestick heads here in this solitary spot. Oh, beautiful is the hand of nature.”

Lucena’s journal was not otherwise a happy record. Lucena was a grave counter. Few of her journal entries failed to mention at least one. In all, she counted more than 380 graves while crossing the plains. So commonplace was the face of death by the time her party reached Fort Laramie that she sandwiches mention of it casually between other observations:

    “It seems like home again to meet so many on the road. We did not look for it in this wild country. I found the skull of a man by the roadside. I took it on & buried it at the point. There is a blacksmiths shop here for the accomodation of emigrants kept by a French man.”
Death was far less a casual matter by the time overlanders reached the dreaded desert. The especial cruelty of the long trek west was that the easy part came first. The rolling grasslands of the prairies, encountered in the springtime when people and stock were fresh, should have come last, not mountains to climb when food, animals, and spirit were exhausted. These mountains, the rugged Sierra Nevada, formed the final obstacle to California’s golden promises. They took their toll in wagons smashed and abandoned. There were accidents. But, unless trapped by snow, emigrants had little fear of failing to cross the Sierra. Not so, the hot, dry 40-mile gauntlet of desert lying between the Humbolt River and the Carson or Truckee rivers flowing from the eastern Sierra.
By the time overlanders approached this final desert, they and their animals had plodded and slogged and climbed and descended nearly 2,000 miles. In a meadow near the Humboldt River’s sink, the travel-weary emigrants cut grass for their worn and thin mules and oxen, dried as much as they could carry, and hurried on. There was no forage on the desert’s final 40 miles

Few passages of women’s diaries and letters are more poignant than those recording this desert crossing. Sallie Hester’s 1849 diary entry is eloquent testimony to the hardship:

    “Stopped and cut grass for the cattle and supplied ourselves with water for the desert. Had a trying time crossing. Several of our cattle gave out, and we left one. Our journey through the desert was from Monday, three o’clock in the afternoon, until Thursday morning at sunrise, September 6. The weary journey last night, the mooing of the cattle for water, their exhausted condition, with the cry of “Another ox down,” the stopping of the train to unyoke the poor dying brute, to let him follow at will or stop by the wayside and die, and the weary, weary tramp of men and beasts, worn out with heat and famished for water, will never be erased from my memory. Just at dawn, in the distance, we had a glimpse of the Truckee River, and with it the feeling: Saved at last!”

Another 49er family, Josiah and Sarah Royce, with their two-year-old daughter Mary, crossed the Carson River in October. To avoid the heat, they traveled the desert at night. In the dark, they missed the fork to the meadows and its precious grass. Far upon the desert, they realized the mistake. Sarah’s recollection of that moment never faded:

    “So there was nothing to be done but turn back and try to find the meadows. Turn back! What a chill the words sent through one. Turn back, on a journey like that; in which every mile had been gained by most earnest labor, growing more and more intense, until, of late, it had seemed that the certainty of advance with every step was all that made the next step possible. And now, for miles, we were to go back. In all that long journey no steps ever seemed so heavy, so hard to take, as those with which I turned my back to the sun that afternoon of October 4, 1849.”
Most overland emigrants on the California Trail kept to the tried and true Carson and Truckee routes, but every rumor of a faster, easier way found an ear anxious to believe. At the Humboldt especially, with the dreaded desert ahead and the high mountains beyond, even the most conservative travelers considered a convincingly proposed alternative. In 1849, thousands succumbed to the temptation. Either through argument or the example of the wagon ahead, much of the tail end of that year’s migration turned north from the Humbolt for Peter Lassen’s ranch. They succeeded only in exchanging one desert for another, while adding 200 desperate and dangerous miles to their journey—traveling north nearly to the Oregon border.

Lotta Crabtree Charlotte Mignon Crabtree was born in 1847 in New York City to parents John Ashworth Crabtree and Mary Ann (Livesey) Crabtree. In 1851, her father left for San Francisco looking for gold, Lotta and her mother followed in 1852. The family reunited in Grass Valley, California to run a boarding house for the miners. It was here, Lotta met actress Lola Montez and became her protégé. Lotta made her first professional appearance at a tavern owned by Matt Taylor. Lotta began traveling to all of the mining camps performing ballads and dancing for the miners. In 1856, the family moved back to San Francisco where Lotta toured Sacramento and the Valley, and became frequently in demand. By 1859 she had become "Miss Lotta, the San Francisco Favorite". Lotta retired in 1891. The profits from her career, wisely invested in real estate all over the country during her tours, allowed her to lead a comfortable life. At her death in 1924 she left an estate of four million dollars.

Catherine Haun’s party took that road. She remembered well the hardships

    “The alkali dust of this territory was suffocating, irritating our throats and clouds of it often blinded us. The mirages tantalized us; the water was unfit to drink or use in any way; animals often perished or were so overcome by heat and exhaustion that they had to be abandoned, or in case of human hunger, the poor jaded creatures were killed and eaten…. One of our dogs was so emaciated and exhausted that we were obliged to leave him on this desert and it was said that the train following us used him for food.”
No one can measure the fear and suffering endured by these people on the Lassen route, or by those on the desert crossings to the Truckee and Carson rivers, or on the southern trail into San Diego. But the fear and suffering of emigrants on another route into California could not have been surpassed.
In October of 1849, from a camp south of Salt Lake City, more than 300 people followed Jefferson Hunt, a guide familiar with the Old Spanish Trail to Los Angeles. A pack train overtook them, and in it was a man with a map showing a cutoff from this trail. The tantalizing prospect of short-cut immediately danced in the minds of impatient emigrants. The temptation was too much for a Methodist minister named John Brier, who fired others with his zeal for the cutoff. Although Jefferson Hunt refused to take it, on November 4, 1849, approximately 27 wagons did. Among them were four families, including the Briers. Their path took them into a vast and desolate desert, a hellhole they would name Death Valley.
Thirty-four men, mostly young and mostly from Illinois, calling themselves Jayhawkers, entered the desert valley. Three of them died there. The Rev. Mr. Brier, his wife Juliet, and their three young sons followed the Jayhawkers in a desperate search for a way out.

When one young man suggested to Juliet that she and her children remain behind and let them send back for her, she adamantly refused:

    “I knew what was in his mind. “No,” I said, “I have never been a hindrance, I have never kept the company waiting, neither have my children, and every step I take will be toward California.” Give up! I knew what that meant: a shallow grave in the sand.”
Juliet Brier earned the Jayhawkers’ great respect and affection, one recalling that in walking nearly a hundred miles through sand and sharp-edged rocks that she frequently carried one of her children on her back, another in her arms, and held the third by the hand. At Jayhawker reunions she was spoken of as a heroine for caring for the sick among them.

Her own recollection was modest:

    “Did I nurse the sick? Ah, there was little of that to do. I always did what I could for the poor fellows, but that wasn’t much. When one grew sick he just lay down, weary like, and his life went out. It was nature giving up. Poor souls!”

Care for her own family consumed most of Juliet’s strength. In one 48-hour stretch without water, her oldest boy Kirk suffered terribly:

    “The child would murmur occasionally, “Oh, father, where’s the water?” His pitiful, delirious wails were worse than the killing thirst. It was terrible. I seem to see it all over again. I staggered and struggled wearily behind with the other two boys and the oxen. The little fellows bore up bravely and hardly complained, though they could barely talk, so dry and swollen were their lips and tongue. John would try to cheer up his brother Kirk by telling him of the wonderful water we would find and all the good things we could get to eat. Every step I expected to sink down and die.”
The Brier family, with much suffering, reached safety on February 12, 1850. The other three families lost in Death Valley also survived. The Wade family celebrated deliverance on February 10. The Bennett and Arcan families, heroically rescued by two selfless young men, escaped the valley of death on March 7….four months and three days after their fateful decision to take the cutoff.
The Brier family made a home in Marysville, the Wades in Alviso, the Bennetts at Moss Landing, and the Arcans in Santa Cruz. Captivated by the beautiful redwoods there, Abigail Arcan announced to her husband: “You can go to the mines if you want to. I have seen all the godforsaken country I am going to see, and I’m going to stay right here as long as I live.”
And she did. Her first necessity, of course, like all women new to California, was a home. California offered few comforts, however, and almost nothing homelike.

Forty-niner Anne Booth came around the Horn in a ship she continued to live aboard for more than a month in San Francisco’s Bay, and wrote:

    “…it is true, there are many disadvantages and privations attending life in California; but these I came prepared to encounter, and by no means expected to find the comforts and refinements of home….”
In mining camps, many forty-niner women continued to live in the wagons that brought them, which Mrs. John Berry found “very disagreeable.”
“The rains set in early in November, and continued with little interruption until the latter part of March and here were we poor souls living almost out of doors. Sometimes of a morning I would come out of the wagon and find the…shed under which I cooked blown over & my utensils lying in all directions, fire out & it pouring down as tho’ the clouds had burst. Sometimes I would scold and fret, other times endure it in mute agony…”

And how she yearned for a comfortable bed

    “Oh! you who lounge on your divans & sofas, sleep on your fine, luxurious beds…know nothing of the life of a California emigrant. Here are we sitting on a pine block…sleeping in beds with either a quilt or a blanket as substitute for sheets (I can tell you it is very aristocratic to have a bed at all)”….
In towns, of course, were hotels – if one stretched the definition. The celebrated St. Francis Hotel of San Francisco opened in 1849 and was so high class even then that it boasted it offered sheets on its beds. No other hotel did.

A reminiscence of a lady guest from those early days confirms that her bed there was “delightful.” Two “soft hair mattresses” and “a pile of snowy blankets” hastened her slumbers, which were soon interrupted:

    “I was suddenly awakened by voices, as I thought, in my room; but which I soon discovered came from two gentlemen, one on each side of me, who were talking to each other from their own rooms through mine; which, as the walls were only of canvas and paper, they could easily do. This was rather a startling discovery, and I at once began to cough, to give them notice of my interposition, lest I should become an unwilling auditor of matters not intended for my ear. The conversation ceased, but before I was able to compose myself to sleep again…a nasal serenade commenced, which, sometimes a duet and sometimes a solo, frightened sleep from my eyes….”
A 49er woman living in Santa Cruz knew about thin walls, too. She was Eliza Farnham, a widow who had come round the Horn with two children and a woman friend to claim property left by Eliza’s late husband.

She described the ‘casa’ she inherited on her Santa Cruz ranch, as:

    “Not a cheerful specimen, even of California habitations—being made of slabs, were originally placed upright, but which have departed sadly from the perpendicular in every direction….”
Mrs. Farnham focused her initial housekeeping wants on simply getting a stove installed. During the three-day period that Eliza called the ‘siege of the stove,’ a hired man failed at the task, as did her friend Miss Sampson. Then Eliza tackled it:
“On the third day, it was agreed that stoves could not have been used in the time of Job, or all his other afflictions would have been unnecessary.”

Not afraid of labor, Mrs. Farnham set herself the task of building a new house:

    “My first participation in the labor of its erection was the tenanting of the joists and studding for the lower story, a work in which I succeeded so well, that during its progress I laughed, when I paused for a few moments to rest, at the idea of promising to pay a man $14 or $16 per day for doing what I found my own hands so dexterous in.”
Eliza Farnham, who conquered a stove, built a house, and put her Santa Cruz land to growing potatoes, quickly recognized that women in California would have to work.
And indeed 49er women did work. Some even mined. A newspaper editor saw a woman at Angel’s Creek dipping and pouring water into the gold washer her husband rocked. The editor reported that she wore short boots, white duck pantaloons, a red flannel shirt, with a black leather belt and a Panama hat.

Louise Clappe tried her hand at digging gold, too:

     “I have become a mineress; that is, if the having washed a pan of dirt with my own hands, and procured therefrom three dollars and twenty-five cents in gold dust…will entitle me to the name. I can truly say, with the blacksmith’s apprentice at the close of his first day’s work at the anvil, ‘I am sorry I learned the trade;’ for I wet my feet, tore my dress, spoilt a pair of new gloves, nearly froze my fingers, got an awful headache, took cold and lost a valuable breastpin, in this my labor of love.”
An easier and more profitable avenue to gold, for most women, was the selling of familiar domestic skills, like Abby Mansur’s neighbor at Horseshoe Bar: “she makes from 15 to 20 dollars a week washing…has all she wants to do so you can see that women stand as good chance as men.”

Mary Jane Caples made pies

    “My venture was a success. I sold fruit pies for one dollar and a quarter a piece, and mince pies for one dollar and fifty cents. I sometimes made and sold a hundred in a day, and not even a stove to bake them in, but had two small dutch ovens.”

One woman boasted:

    “I have made about $18,000 worth of pies—about one third of this has been clear profit. One year I dragged my own wood off the mountain and chopped it, and I have never had so much as a child to take a step for me in this country. $11,000 I baked in one little iron skillet, a considerable portion by a campfire, without the shelter of a tree from the broiling sun.”

Another woman wrote, from San Francisco

     “A smart woman can do very well in this country—true, there are not many comforts and one must work all the time and work hard, but there is plenty to do and good pay. If I was in Boston now and know what I now know of California I would come out here – if I had to hire the money to bring me out. It is the only country I ever was in where a woman received anything like a just compensation for work.”

Running a boardinghouse was the commonest money-maker for women. One woman earned $189 a week after only three weeks of keeping boarders in the mines. She shared with her boarders accommodations decidedly minimal, as she wrote her children back East:

     “We have one small room about 14 feet square, and a little back room we use for a storeroom about as large as a piece of chalk. Then we have an open chamber…
divided off by a cloth. The gentlemen occupy one end, Mrs. H and daughter, your father and myself, the other. We have a curtain hung between our beds but we do not take pains to draw it, as it is of no use to be particular here.”

Luzena Wilson set herself up in the boardinghouse business, too. Despite its rustic beginnings, she had grand plans for her Nevada City enterprise, which she elevated with the title ‘hotel’:

    “I bought two boards from a precious pile belonging to a man who was building the second wooden house in town. With my own hands I chopped stakes, drove them into the ground, and set up my table. I bought provisions at a neighboring store, and when my husband came back at night he found 20 miners eating at my table. Each man as he rose put a dollar in my hand and said I might count him a permanent customer. I called my hotel ‘El Dorado.’”

But running a boardinghouse was hard work, as Mary Jane Megquier attested from San Francisco:

    “I should like to give you an account of my work if I could do it justice. I get up and make the coffee, then I make the biscuit, then I fry the potatoes and broil 3 pounds of steak, and as much liver, while the hired woman is sweeping and setting the table. At 8 the bell rings and they are eating until nine. I do not sit until they are nearly all done…after breakfast I bake 6 loaves of bread (not very big) then 4 pies or a pudding, then we have lamb, for which we have paid $9 a quarter, beef, pork, baked turnips, beets, potatoes, radishes, salad, and that everlasting soup, every day, dine at 2, for tea we have hash, cold meat, bread and butter, sauce and some kind of cake and I have cooked every mouthful that has been eaten excepting one day when we were on a steamboat excursion. I make 6 beds every day and do the washing and ironing and you must think I am very busy and when I dance all night I am obliged to trot all day and if I had not the constitution of 6 horses I should have been dead long ago but I am going to give up in the fall, as I am sick and tired of work.”
In full agreement was Mary Ballou, who kept a boardinghouse in the mines. Her complaints included the additional inconvenience of unwelcome animals.
“Anything can walk into the kitchen and then from the kitchen into the dining room so you see the hogs and mules can walk in any time, day or night, if they choose to do so. Sometimes I am up all times a night scaring the hogs and mules out of the house. I made a blueberry pudding today for dinner. Sometimes I am making soups and cranberry tarts and baking chicken that cost $4 a head and cooking eggs at $3 a dozen. Sometimes boiling cabbage and turnips and frying fritters and broiling steak and cooking codfish and potatoes. Sometimes I am taking care of babies and nursing at the rate of $50 a week but I would not advise any Lady to come out here and suffer the toil and fatigue that I have suffered for the sake of a little gold.”

One woman determined to get her gold the old-fashioned way, by marrying it. She placed what must have been the first personals ad in a California newspaper, under the head:

    A Husband Wanted... By a lady who can wash, cook, scour, sew, milk, spin, weave, hoe (can’t plow), cut wood, make fires, feed the pigs, raise chickens, rock the cradle, (gold rocker, I thank you, Sir!), saw a plank, drive nails, etc. These are a few of the solid branches; now for the ornamental. “long time ago” she went as far as syntax, read Murray’s Geography and through two rules in Pike’s Grammar. Could find 6 states on the atlas. Could read, and you can see that she can write. Can—no, could—paint roses, butterflies, ships, etc. Could once dance; can ride a horse, donkey or oxen…Oh, I hear you ask, could she scold? No, she can’t you _____________good-for-nothing _________!
Now for her terms. Her age is none of your business. She is neither handsome nor a fright, yet an old man need not apply, nor any who have not a little more education than she has, and a great deal more gold, for there must be $20,000 settled on her before she will bind herself to perform all the above. Address to Dorothy Scraggs, with real name. P.O. Marysville.”

    Of course there were all kinds of ways women could earn a ‘little gold,’ and they did. Catherine Sinclair managed a theatre. A French woman barbered. Julia Shannon took photographs. Sophia Eastman was a nurse. Mrs. Pelton taught school. Mrs. Phelps sold milk. Mary Ann Dunleavy operated a 10-pin bowling alley. Enos Christman witnessed the performance of a lady bullfighter. Franklin Buck met a Spanish (“genuine Castillian”) woman mulepacker. Charlotte Parkhurst drove a stage for Wells Fargo. Mrs. Raye acted in the theatre. Mrs. Rowe performed in a circus, riding a trick pony named Adonis.
And some women danced, some sang, some played musical instruments, some dealt cards, some poured drinks. What readily comes to mind with the subject of gold rush women are these saloon girls and parlor house madams. And who were these so-called soiled doves? They were Chilean, Mexican, Chinese, French, English, Irish, and American. No stereotype encompasses them all, for they and their experiences were as diverse as the population. A few were phenomenally successful, most merely survived. Despite popular 19th century assumption that women were driven into prostitution by seduction and abandonment, most pursued the profession for economic reasons.
Among the first, believed to have arrived in San Francisco in 1849, was a Chinese woman named Ah Toy. She was a ‘daughter of joy,’ the Chinese expression for prostitute, but she was more than that. She was an extraordinary woman. First, she was independent of any man, Chinese or Caucasian, remarkable for an Asian woman. Second, she spoke English, also most unusual for a Chinese woman. Third, she was assertive and intelligent, for she quickly learned to use the American judicial system, regularly taking her grievances to court.
Obviously, she was adventurous, determined, hardworking, bright, independent, aggressive—the very qualities of a successful 49er.
She shared those qualities with thousands of pioneering women who demonstrated the courage and determination required by the unique circumstances of gold rush California.
And yet when most people think about 49ers, they think of them as men. And yet, women – women with gold fever like Louisiana Strentzel, suffering overlanders like Sarah Royce and Juliet Brier and Catherine Haun, the boardinghouse keepers like Mary Ballou and Luzena Wilson and Mary Jane Megquier, potato growers like Eliza Farnham, the pie makers, the washerwomen, the seamstresses, prostitutes, actresses, circus riders, nurses, teachers, wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters – women were 49ers, too.

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To Learn more about the author and her books click on a book below...

About the Author
JoAnn Levy has been writing about California’s gold-rushing women for more than twenty years and is the author of the now-classic They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush. Her first fiction, Daughter of Joy, A Novel of Gold Rush San Francisco, won the 1999 Willa Award for Best Historical Fiction. A second novel, For California’s Gold, captured the prize in 2001, after debuting at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., where Levy spoke in honor of Women’s History Month and California’s statehood sesquicentennial.
Just released is a “biographical gem,” Unsettling the West: Eliza Farnham and Georgiana Bruce Kirby in Frontier California, in which Levy recounts the lives and adventures of two remarkable women, pioneer reformers who touched history and made history.
A frequent speaker on behalf of the gold-rushing women she discovered in nearly a decade of research, Levy has been featured in numerous TV documentaries.

Visit JoAnn's webstie at: http://www.goldrush.com/~joann/index.html

Unruh, John D., Jr., The Plains Across (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), p. 85.
Holliday, J. S., Rush for Riches (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 94.
Megquier, Mary Jane, Apron Full of Gold: The Letters of Mary Jane Megquier from San Francisco, 1849-1856, ed. Robert Glass Cleland (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1949), Letter dated Panama, May 14, 1849.
Ibid., Letter dated November 4, 1855. Brown, Lucilla Linn, “Pioneer Letters,” ed. Gaylord A. Beaman, Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly (March 1939), pp. 18-26. Haun, Catherine, “A Woman’s Trip Across the Plains, 1849.” In Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey, by Lillian Schlissel (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), p. 170. Strentzel, Louisiana, “Letter from San Diego, 1849.” In Covered Wagon Women, Vol. 1, ed. Kenneth L. Holmes (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1983), p. 250. Ward, Harriet S., Prairie Schooner Lady: The Journal of Harriet Sherrill Ward, 1853, eds. Ward G. and Florence Stark DeWitt (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1959), p. 132. Parsons, Lucena, “The Journal of Lucena Parsons.” In Covered Wagon Women, Vol. 2, ed. Kenneth L. Holmes (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1983), p. 247. Hester, Sallie, “The Diary of a Pioneer Girl.” In Covered Wagon Women, Vol. 1, ed. Kenneth L. Holmes (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1983), p. 244. Royce, Sarah, A Frontier Lady: Recollections of the Gold Rush and Early California (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 248. Haun, op. cit., p. 182. Journals of Forty-Niners: Salt Lake to Los Angeles, ed. LeRoy R. and Ann W. Hafen (Glendale, Calif.: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1954), p. 38. Wheat, Carl I., “The Forty-Niners in Death Valley: A Tentative Census,” Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly, December 1939. Belden, L. Burr, Death Valley Heroine: And Source Accounts of the 1849 Travelers (San Bernardino, Calif.: Inland Printing & Engraving Co., 1954), p. 21ff. Ibid., p. 27. Latta, Frank, Death Valley ‘49ers (Santa Cruz, Calif.: Bear State Books, 1979), p. 200. Ibid., p. 306. Ibid., p. 260. Booth, Anne Willson, “Journal of a Voyage from Baltimore to San Francisco…, 1849.” Ms. diary, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, p. 234. Mrs. John Berry, “A Letter from the Mines,” California Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. V (1927), p. 293. “Reminiscence of San Francisco, in 1850,” by Francesca, in The Pioneer, ed. F. C. Ewer, Vol. 1, January 1854. Farnham, Eliza W., California In-Doors and Out (New York: Dix, Edwards & Co., 1856), p. 42. Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 107. Alta California, December 14, 1850. Clappe, Louise Amelia Knapp Smith, The Shirley Letters from the California Mines, 1851-1852, ed. Marlene Smith-Baranzini (Berkeley: Heyday Books), p. 68. Mansur, Abby. “Ms. Letters Written to Her Sister, 1852-1854,” in Let Them Speak for Themselves: Women in the American West 1849-1900 ed. Christiane Fischer (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977), p. 56. Caples, Mrs. James. “Overland Journey to California,” unpublished ms., California State Library, Sacramento. California Emigrant Letters, ed. Walker D. Wyman (New York: Bookman Associates, 1971), p. 149. Letter to Catherine Oliver, 1850. Manuscripts collection, California Historical Society, San Francisco. California Emigrant Letters, op.cit., p. 147. Wilson, Luzena, Luzena Stanley Wilson, ‘49er (Oakland: The Eucalyptus Press, Mills College, 1937), p. 27. Megquier, op.cit., Letter dated June 30, 1850. Ballou, Mary B., “I Hear the Hogs in My Kitchen – A Woman’s View of the Gold Rush” in Let Them Speak for Themselves: Women in the American West 1849-1900 ed. Christiane Fischer (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977), p. 43. Quoted in: Jackson, Joseph H., Anybody’s Gold: The Story of California’s Mining Towns (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1941), p. 101. Gagey, Edmond M., The San Francisco Stage: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), p. 38. Alta California, April 3, 1851. Alta California, January 29, 1850. Eastman, Sophia, Letters. Maria M. Eastman Child Collection, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Farnham, op.cit., 275. Ferguson, Charles D., California Gold Fields (Oakland: Biobooks, 1948), p. 103. Comstock, David A., Gold Diggers & Camp Followers: The Nevada County Chronicles 1845-1851 (Grass Valley, Calif.: Comstock Bonanza Press, 1982), p. 322. Christman, Enos, One Man’s Gold: The Letters & Journal of a Forty-Niner, ed. Florence Morrow Christman (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1930), p. 198. Buck, Franklin A., A Yankee Trader in the Gold Rush (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1930), p. 126. Curtis, Mabel Rowe, The Coachman Was a Lady (Watsonville, Calif.: The Pajaro Valley Historical Association, n.d.). Davis, W. N., Jr., “Research Uses of County Court Records, 1850-1879, And Incidental Intimate Glimpses of California Life and Society,” California Historical Quarterly Vol. LII, No. 3, p. 255. Rowe, Joseph A., California’s Pioneer Circus: Memoirs and Personal Correspondence Relative to the Circus Business Through the Gold Country in the ‘50s, ed. Albert Dressler (San Francisco: H. S. Crocker Co., 1926). Sanger, William W., M.D., The History of Prostitution (New York: Eugenics Publishing Co., 1937), p. 488. Alta California, March 6, 8, 1851; July 1, 1851; December 14, 24, 1851; December 11, 1852