|
When she was born on
June 22nd, 1912,
in Washington
D.C.,
her army surgeon father and Iroquois Indian mother dubbed her Mary
Elizabeth White. At 12 years old, Mary missed the fateful airplane
trip that killed her mother and sister because she was grounded for
riding a motorcycle around the army base where the family lived. Her
devilish behavior and disregard for what was considered acceptable
behavior of the day, was beginning to set tone for her future. From
her mother and sister’s death she learned that she was a survivor
because she was “a stinker.” When she decided a few years later
that she wanted to follow her fathers footsteps into the medical
field and become a doctor, she was told that women were not allowed
to be doctors, but she could pursue a career as a nurse instead. Not
one to compromise, Mary Elizabeth White chose to do things her way
or not at all.
 |
| A
Joshua tree grows near Panamint Annie's grave in the
cemetery at
Rhyolite, Nevada. |
Mary’s stubbornness and determination to do things her own
way led her to an early marriage at 15 years old, and the birth of
her first two children followed. The first child died in infancy,
the second she left with her husband in Boston
while she found a career driving bootleg liquor from
Canada
to Chicago.
When she tired of that she moved west and found herself cooking for
dudes at ranches in the states of Texas,
New
Mexico
and Colorado.
Tuberculosis, which she had contracted in her late teens, soon
forced her to even drier country. Mary Elizabeth White moved to the
lowest and driest part of the
United States,
where she would earn a whole new name and identity.
Long soaks in the hot springs of Shoshone outside
Death
Valley, seemed to provide the cure for the tuberculosis
that Mary struggled with in her youth. Once her health and beauty
was restored, Mary took to the surrounding barren hills in search of
the rich minerals they bore. The peace and beauty of the desert
struck her as she prowled the hills, with hammer, pick and shovel
from the wee hours of the morning until long after dark. The motto
of the old prospectors “Listen and the mountains will talk to you.
They will tell you where gold is if you listen”, became
hers as well. When the mountains revealed their hidden wealth, Mary
learned to timber, blast and muck, as well as any man.
Her underground work was lit with candles she made herself
instead of spending money on kerosene. Other prospectors began
comparing her with the legendary woman prospector of the old days,
who also came from back east, prospected, left a child behind, and
was known as a rough gal. The Mary Elizabeth White originally from Washington
D.C.
was fast disappearing, and a new Panamint Annie, was born.
In 1936, five years after a 21-year old Mary Elizabeth White
showed up at the Shoshone Hot
Springs, she felt her tuberculosis was
cured, and she returned to
Colorado
to marry a cowboy named Bryant. Unfortunately, Bryant died when she
was seven months pregnant with their daughter. She came back to her
beloved desert and
Doris
was born in the year of 1938.
Doris
spent the school sessions with her father’s sister in San
Bernardino, but she never forgot the life
she lived with Panamint Annie in the back of a 1929 Model A truck. Taking her cue from the original old prospectors who used
wagons as living quarters, Annie outfitted the flatbed of the truck
with beds and tent and other living necessities. Over the years other women prospectors would follow her
tradition. As a young Doris and her mother, Annie, roamed the higher
elevations of the Panamint
Mountains
to work on various mining claims, they tried to keep the hot water
bottle used to warm their beds from freezing on the colder winter
nights, and survived on snake or rabbit stew. If pickings were lean,
Annie would go to bed without eating herself, but she never felt
hungry enough to sell her favorite treasure, a vial of the first
gold she had mined.
Panamint Annie and Doris often teamed up with other
prospectors. There were 12 to 14 women prospectors that worked the
hills primarily with their husbands, but Annie as an only woman,
joined a prospector “family” of eight to 10 prospectors and no
romantic intentions. They camped in the mountains, sending in to
town every two to four weeks for supplies, if there was money
amongst the lot of them to do so. The prospector family lived an
isolated life, depending on radio to keep them abreast of world
events such as the second World War. Cooking chores were shared by
everyone, over a communal campfire.
Annie was particularly noted for her cinnamon rolls and the
potato chips she fried up after a traveling salesmen talked the
family into a 50 pound sack of potatoes. As men “hated to wash”,
she served as laundress, which earned her extra food and water in
return for her services. She was also nurse and doctor to those who
needed it, healing deep cuts, mending broken bones, and helping
women birth babies. The primary family business of prospecting was
done by everyone individually, not as a whole, but as
lucky strikes were made, one would “come in dancing”
& celebrating. Claims
were not discussed with outsiders no matter where the family was or
how drunk they got. So far away from any real form of law, the
family members were careful to “watch each other’s back” for
claim jumpers.
Eight uncles with names such as "Old Man Black" and
"One-Eyed Jack", doted over
Doris
during their time with the prospecting family. Even though Annie
herself was noted for “language that would blister the ears of a
drill sergeant” she and the eight uncles kept their mouths clean
in the presence of her daughter. The uncles did all they could to
insure that Doris also learned to keep her body clean as well as her
language, and would go without coffee to ensure the young girl had
water for her nightly sponge bath.
Doris
learned many lessons from her prospector mother over the years.
Panamint Annie’s golden rule for desert survival was drilled into
her daughter’s head over and over again, “Anything that looks
like a rope coiled, stay away. Never put your hand on a rock without
looking. So many people
get disoriented. Fix your stationary block wherever you’re going.
Whether it’s this mountain or this rock, always remember that if
you pass it more than twice you’re going the wrong way. Never
leave a vehicle, because the distance is so vast that you can’t
comprehend it.” When
Doris
proclaimed she hated the desert, Annie told her “When you’re in
a city, everyone does things for you. You got people taking care of
running water, electricity, picking up trash for you. When you’re
out on your own by yourself, there’s no one to do it for you. You
have to learn to do it yourself”. When she went to pick
wildflowers, Annie pronounced them “God’s decoration for the
desert.” and told her to only take two or three instead of an
entire handful so others could enjoy as well.
In the course of her years, Panamint Annie gave birth to
eight children. Only four survived. She had a variety of husbands
and live-ins who daughter
Doris
said “would live, sleep and die mining.” and “Some of them
treated her nice. Some of them didn’t.”
Annie took the attitude “I do whatever I want to do when
the mood is on
me.”
and didn’t let the men in her lives get in the way. Her babies
would be strapped on her back and taken into the mines with her or
left in her oldest daughter’s care. As they each reached school
age she would send them to family in
Southern
California
where they could get an education. At age 37, Annie
gave birth to her youngest child, Bill. When Bill was ready for
school she settled the family into a shack near Beatty,
Nevada,
as there was no family to send them to at this time. She made up for
what her prospecting didn’t bring in by money by selling homemade
jellies, crocheted hats, and jewelry of her own design. She was
noted as an excellent mechanic, and often took on car repair jobs,
as well. Her prospecting was now done on a gold mine she owned with
a woman partner, Mrs. Frederica Hessler, the heiress of Rhyolite
which had already become ghost town by this time.
When fortune came Annie’s way and her prospects brought her
large amounts of money, she was known to blow it as fast as she made
it. After her children
were taken care of, she would pay her debts, then put money towards
the next prospecting venture, buy a few necessities such as tires
for her truck. What was
left went into shoes and food for Indian friends that she looked
after. When she turned
45, some of the money went towards drinking. She would go on three day
binges that were well known in and around
Death Valley.
One drive to Las Vegas
for medical attention for a broken back, took her three days because
she had drug herself into every bar along the way.
A trip to town for supplies turned into a drinking spree with
the men. As she came
back in to reality following her binge, she found she could no
longer remember where she had found the gold that she had come in to
town to spend. “I know it’s up there,” she would say.
“I’ll find it. You
wait.” She never did find it, but had she done so she would have
gambled it away in a game of blackjack or keno.
Panamint Annie was known as fiercely honest and independent.
If she didn’t like someone she just didn’t talk about them, it
was as if they didn’t exist to her. For the most part she lived
her life with the attitude “Tomorrow will take care of itself.”
Even long after she was gone people remembered “She wasn’t
afraid to tell you, no matter how bad it hurt.”
If she had an opinion on something she wasn’t afraid to
voice it. She even was
known to telephone the governor of Nevada
with her advice when she saw fit.
She believed in equality for women, and strongly felt that a
woman could do any job a man did, the only difference being in the
strength they had to carry a heavy load, and she believed that women
should be paid the same for the same job men did. She firmly
believed that women should be independent and equal in all ways.
Her attitude even on sexual behavior, and her own choice to
have many lovers “It’s no big deal. Men do it all the time.”
Her thinking and attitudes were way ahead of her time in many ways.
 |
| Panamint
Annie's headstone
in the
Rhyolite
Cemetery
reads "Mary
Elizabeth Madison known as 'Pannimint Annie'
1910-1979." |
Once in the last years of her life, Annie appeared dirty,
unkempt, strangely clothed,
and ready to mouth off her opinions to anyone whether they wanted
them or not, and was known as a woman who would “bum around with
anyone who had the price of a bottle and didn’t much care what was
in it.” The middle-class female tourist who saw her warmed to her,
anyway. Annie’s captivating personality seemed to win people over
in spite of everything else. One admirer even declared Panamint
Annie as one of the last immortals of the West, along with John
Wayne. Arthritis and cancer took over Annie’s body in the very
end. Until it completely overtook her, she would still talk of
heading into the mountains and striking rich and dreamed of
exploring new places unknown to man. Her grave in the Rhyolite
Cemetery
reads
"Mary Elizabeth Madison known as 'Pannimint Annie'
1910-1979."
Bibliography
A
Mine of her Own: Women Prospectors in American West, 1850-1950
by
Sally Zanjani
University
of
Nebraska
Press
Panamint
Annie
by Claudia Reidhead
http://www.rhyolitesite.com/annie.html
|
