By Kathryn Doré Perkins
Bee Staff Writer
Published Jan. 18, 1998

Historians have painted colorful Gold Rush landscapes peopled with scruffy, flinty men and a sprinkling of easy, frowsy women.

But something is wrong with that picture. Missing are the wives, daughters, sisters and single women who with awesome courage and a high sense of adventure joined thatarmy of men and carved out lives with their ingenuity and perseverance.

"These are women who are quite the opposite of the stereotypes we have been led to believe were there," said Jo Ann Levy of Sutter Creek, who has researched the role of women in the Gold Rush era.

Levy writes of Luzena Wilson, who with her husband, Mason, and two young sons endured a perilous overland journey and terrible hunger and thirst crossing the desert and ascending steep Carson Pass. They reached the mines 50 miles east of Sacramento "in rags and tatters" in September 1849.

That night, as Luzena was cooking dinner over a campfire, a miner approached, lured by his longing for bread baked by a woman."I'll give you five dollars, ma'am, for them biscuits," he said. Luzena was speechless; $5 seemed a fortune. The miner, misunderstanding her silence, doubled the offer and slipped a $10 gold piece in her hand. Luzena had discovered her gold mine.

The Wilsons moved on to Sacramento and prospered, running a hotel with Luzena in the kitchen, only to lose everything in the 1849-1850 floods. Hearing of a gold strike near Nevada City, she persuaded a teamster to transport her, her children and stove, promising to pay him $700 when she could.

Luzena installed her kitchen under a pine tree, bought two boards, set them on stakes she chopped, and offered meals for $1. When her husband returned from mining that night, he found 20 miners eating at the table.

Not only did Luzena earn enough money to repay the teamster, she took her husband into partnership, replaced
the family's brush house with a frame one and opened a hotel and store. But in 1851 they again lost everything
when a fire roared through town.

Undaunted, they leased wheat land between Sacramento and Benicia from Emmanual Vaca and Luzena set up her
stove once more. She bore two more children, established another inn and watched the town of Vacaville emerge around them.

Like Luzena, most women mined their gold by working for others. "Aunt Maria," a former slave in Sonora,
earned $100 a week cooking for a family and managed her own boardinghouse.

Mary Jane "Jenny" Megquier, a 40-year-old woman of spunk and endurance, and her husband, Thomas, came
to California in 1849 intending to stay two years, "make a pile" and return to Maine, where they had left their three teenagers with relatives.

Jenny and Thomas, a physician, envisioned getting rich by opening a pharmacy and medical practice in remote mining towns. When that plan failed, they moved to San Francisco, where Jenny ran a boardinghouse.

She gave this account of her day: Upon arising made coffee, biscuit, fried potatoes, broiled three pounds each of steak and liver. Baked six loaves of bread, four pies, cooked all day for dinner, made beds, washed, ironed.

"If I had not the constitution of six horses I should have been dead long ago," she wrote.

Jenny Megquier loved her new life, penning: "The very air I breathe seems so  very free that I have not the least desire to return (to Maine)."

Life was exhilarating for women cut loose from the social constraints of the East. One wrote: "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. ... It is the only country I ever was where a woman received anything like a just compensation for work."

In the mining towns, women earned as much or more than miners by baking pies, sewing, cleaning, ironing, washing, running hotels, dealing cards or pouring drinks in gambling houses. At Sutter Creek, to earn money for food,
Charity Hayward carried her cracked washboard to the creek each day and washed other miners' shirts, unbeknownst to her proud miner husband.

Women worked in unconventional roles, as well. Levy's research revealed a photographer, a French woman barber, a Mexican woman who ran a string of mules and brought flour to the camps, a woman bullfighter who was showered with gold dollars for her performances, and a stagecoach driver who for years disguised herself as a man.

In fact, Anglo American women were not the first women to prosper in the mining towns, said Susan L. Johnson, an assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado. Miwok Indian women were the first of their gender to pan for gold.

Mexican, Chilean and Peruvian women initially worked in the boardinghouses and in the "leisure sphere of dance halls and gambling saloons," Johnson said. Isabel Ortiz, for example, managed two dance halls, in Calaveras and Amador counties.