Dubbed, sadly, in the LAT's headline as "quirky" :eyes:, many should be
revered for their courage and strength.
Says the LAT:
Women were a rarity in Gold Rush California, but the ones who got here and prospered were doozies — formidable women — as well as a few floozies. (again with the eye thingy for "floozies")
Here are a few...
•
Charlotte "Charlie" Parkhurst, a drinking, tobacco-chewing, dice-playing stagecoach driver, arrived in 1851 and, living as a man, prospered near Watsonville. Still in male guise,
she voted in the election of 1868, decades before women were granted suffrage. She almost went to her grave as a man — until an autopsy revealed her secret.
•
Elsa Jane Forest Guerin of New Orleans was another cross-dresser. She was married at 12, a mother at 13 and a widow with two babies at 15. Afterward, she disguised herself as a man and headed west to track down her husband's killer, making her way to the Sacramento Valley in the 1850s. There, she mined for gold, ran a saloon and a pack-mule station and bought a ranch near Shasta, becoming known as Mountain Charley. Eventually, her secret came out and she wrote a book.
•
Los Angeles physician Mary P. Sawtelle, who condemned corsets and advocated exercise for women, turned Gold Rush characters into a novel about a maiden in the mining camps, "The Heroine of '49."
•
Mary Ellen "Mammy" Pleasant, a former slave, reputedly made $225 a day as a cook and boarding-house operator. She invested in mining stock and a string of bordellos, lent money at high interest
and, when she was ejected from a streetcar because of her color, went to court. Her victory in 1866 established blacks' legal right to ride streetcars. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-then9oct09,1,7311225.story?coll=la-headlines-california
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