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Gold Rush Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Nellie Cashman
Reviewed by Charlene Porsild
*
Thora Illing's Gold Rush Queen presents the life and times of Nellie Cashman, an Irish-American businesswoman and entrepreneur with strong links to British Columbia.
Cashman first visited B.C. in 1873 and 1874, during the Cassiar gold rush, and a year later helped raise funds to start St. Joseph's Hospital in Victoria.
Reviewer Charlene Porsild places Cashman in the context of the mining booms and communities of the western Cordillera between the 1850s and the first decade of the twentieth century, from California to the Klondike and many places in between. - Ed.
*
This new biography of Ellen (Nellie) Cashman is an attractive volume that offers the casual reader a well-written and engaging overview of the story of Cashman's life and career. It begins with Cashman's immigration from Ireland to Boston with her mother and sister in 1852 and follows her coming-of-age in California.
The author chronicles Cashman's working class background, and follows her as she helps her mother operate a San Francisco boarding house.
When the California mining boom waned, Nellie packed up her mother and her belongings and began a life-long pattern of following the gold and silver booms around the West.
The story is familiar: from San Francisco she journeyed to Virginia City in Nevada, the Cassiar district of British Columbia, then back south to Tucson, Tombstone, and Nogales in Arizona.
In 1898 she headed to the Klondike and spent the rest of her life in the Yukon, Alaska, and finally Victoria.
In these mining camps, Cashman established boarding houses and/or restaurants and invested in her customers' mining ventures.
She never married; in fact, she seems to have been that exception to the standard of nineteenth century life: she remained the lone spinster with impeccable morals and no male protector.
Cashman lived a long and unusual spinster's life, earning her own living by operating boarding houses and restaurants. In this line of work she met and befriended mining men and became a shrewd investor. Though she didn't often work her own claims, she purchased many in her life, and she was a partial owner of many more.
Many are the stories of miners who owed Nellie a portion of the gold they produced in exchange for her up-front cash or grubstake for their claims.
Cashman was by turns highly successful and dismally broke. Such was the mining camp life, and Nellie seemed to thrive on it.
As Illing shows us, the gamble of whether "the next big strike"; would bring a fortune or prove a hoax was exactly what kept Nellie investing and wandering from 1854 until her death in Victoria in 1925.
While Illing offers us little information about Cashman's life (her sources are largely secondary and the story is familiar), the volume is perfect for its market: summer travellers to British Columbia, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and the Yukon.
Gold Rush Queen is short, lively, and highly readable. The author offers good insight into the life and work of a fascinating working class, single, Irish immigrant woman who chose a life of adventure and business under harsh and unusual conditions.
Her tombstone at Victoria's Ross Bay Cemetery reads in part:
"Nellie Cashman 1844-1925. Friend of the sick and the hungry and to all men. Heroic apostolate of service along the western and northern frontier miners. Miners' angel, 1872-1924. In Nevada. In the Cassiar. In Arizona. In the Yukon. In California. In Alaska. Born in Ireland. Died with the sisters of Saint Ann at St. Joseph's Hospital, Victoria, B.C. January 4, 1925. Requiescat in pace."
This is a book that, like Cashman herself, will find a welcome home on both sides of the international border and in half a dozen provinces and states.
*
Born in the Yukon and raised in northern Alberta, Charlene Porsild received her Ph.D. in history from Carleton University in 1994. Her dissertation was published in 1998 by UBC Press as Gamblers and Dreamers: Women, Men, and Community in the Klondike. A granddaughter of the Danish-Canadian botanist Erling Porsild (see Wendy Dathan, The Reindeer Botanist: Alf Erling Porsild, 1901-1977), Charlene taught Canadian and American history at the University of Nebraska and is now President and C.E.O. of the Montana History Foundation.
*
The Ormsby Review. More Readers. More Reviews. More Often.
[BCBW 2017]
*
Thora Illing's Gold Rush Queen presents the life and times of Nellie Cashman, an Irish-American businesswoman and entrepreneur with strong links to British Columbia.
Cashman first visited B.C. in 1873 and 1874, during the Cassiar gold rush, and a year later helped raise funds to start St. Joseph's Hospital in Victoria.
Reviewer Charlene Porsild places Cashman in the context of the mining booms and communities of the western Cordillera between the 1850s and the first decade of the twentieth century, from California to the Klondike and many places in between. - Ed.
*
This new biography of Ellen (Nellie) Cashman is an attractive volume that offers the casual reader a well-written and engaging overview of the story of Cashman's life and career. It begins with Cashman's immigration from Ireland to Boston with her mother and sister in 1852 and follows her coming-of-age in California.
The author chronicles Cashman's working class background, and follows her as she helps her mother operate a San Francisco boarding house.
When the California mining boom waned, Nellie packed up her mother and her belongings and began a life-long pattern of following the gold and silver booms around the West.
The story is familiar: from San Francisco she journeyed to Virginia City in Nevada, the Cassiar district of British Columbia, then back south to Tucson, Tombstone, and Nogales in Arizona.
In 1898 she headed to the Klondike and spent the rest of her life in the Yukon, Alaska, and finally Victoria.
In these mining camps, Cashman established boarding houses and/or restaurants and invested in her customers' mining ventures.
She never married; in fact, she seems to have been that exception to the standard of nineteenth century life: she remained the lone spinster with impeccable morals and no male protector.
Cashman lived a long and unusual spinster's life, earning her own living by operating boarding houses and restaurants. In this line of work she met and befriended mining men and became a shrewd investor. Though she didn't often work her own claims, she purchased many in her life, and she was a partial owner of many more.
Many are the stories of miners who owed Nellie a portion of the gold they produced in exchange for her up-front cash or grubstake for their claims.
Cashman was by turns highly successful and dismally broke. Such was the mining camp life, and Nellie seemed to thrive on it.
As Illing shows us, the gamble of whether "the next big strike"; would bring a fortune or prove a hoax was exactly what kept Nellie investing and wandering from 1854 until her death in Victoria in 1925.
While Illing offers us little information about Cashman's life (her sources are largely secondary and the story is familiar), the volume is perfect for its market: summer travellers to British Columbia, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and the Yukon.
Gold Rush Queen is short, lively, and highly readable. The author offers good insight into the life and work of a fascinating working class, single, Irish immigrant woman who chose a life of adventure and business under harsh and unusual conditions.
Her tombstone at Victoria's Ross Bay Cemetery reads in part:
"Nellie Cashman 1844-1925. Friend of the sick and the hungry and to all men. Heroic apostolate of service along the western and northern frontier miners. Miners' angel, 1872-1924. In Nevada. In the Cassiar. In Arizona. In the Yukon. In California. In Alaska. Born in Ireland. Died with the sisters of Saint Ann at St. Joseph's Hospital, Victoria, B.C. January 4, 1925. Requiescat in pace."
This is a book that, like Cashman herself, will find a welcome home on both sides of the international border and in half a dozen provinces and states.
*
Born in the Yukon and raised in northern Alberta, Charlene Porsild received her Ph.D. in history from Carleton University in 1994. Her dissertation was published in 1998 by UBC Press as Gamblers and Dreamers: Women, Men, and Community in the Klondike. A granddaughter of the Danish-Canadian botanist Erling Porsild (see Wendy Dathan, The Reindeer Botanist: Alf Erling Porsild, 1901-1977), Charlene taught Canadian and American history at the University of Nebraska and is now President and C.E.O. of the Montana History Foundation.
*
The Ormsby Review. More Readers. More Reviews. More Often.
[BCBW 2017]
Submitted on April 11, 2017 in By David.
