Mexican Nell
and her girls may have been able to quench the sexual thirst of the
early miners that came to Goler and Garlock, but the men still hankered
for a respectable woman like the girl they had left back home, to settle
down with. A few of those girls from back home actually braved the harsh
desert environment to set up camp with their prospector husbands. Those
that did quickly learned that they had skills they could provide for the
lonesome miner as well, and by providing those skills they were able to
help supplement the family income when pickings were lean in the gold
fields.
The Gold Digging
Proprietor
Polly Duke was one of the first decent women to come to the
mining camps. She and her husband became known as Aunt Polly and Uncle
Tom. As soon as they arrived they set up much needed boarding houses for
the miners of Goler. The men often gave Aunt Polly a gold nugget or two,
but she also spent some time gold digging on her own. The smaller
nuggets that Polly discovered in her spare time were carried home in her
mouth. Once there she would find an empty sugar bowl, Vaseline jar, or
tobacco can to hide her finds. Polly Duke was known as a good Mormon, so
more than likely she tithed one-tenth of her gold finds to her church.
Room & Board For
the Miners
Mrs. Freeman and Mrs. Archie Martin also set up boarding houses
in Goler, but were quick to move to Garlock as prospects began looking
better there. Mrs. Freeman set up in a long narrow tar paper-covered
frame building. After a hard days work, a miner had the choice between
the boarding houses as to where he could sit down and have a home cooked
meal. Mrs. Freeman was a widow, and her cooking enabled her to support
her family. Her 12 year old son, Bob, also helped by driving wagon teams
carrying barrels of water from Cow Wells to Goler and Randsburg. He
earned a dollar for each 50 gallon barrel.
Mrs. Martin’s sons were friends with Bob. When the boys
weren’t busy helping their mothers they found time to play with each
other. Mrs. Martin was particularly noted for her good food, and was
also always willing to help nurse anyone in camp that was sick.
Moving boarding houses from one camp to the other seemed to be
the vogue of the day. Mrs. Kerns had a wooden building with a boarding
house in Goler, also. When Rand Camp began to boom, she simply pulled up
the building and took it up the hill and it became the Miners Hotel
which opened for business July of 1896. In 1897 freighter John Cuddeback
built a rock house in Randsburg and brought his wife and children to
live and work with him. After building a store in Fiddler’s Gulch, he
took wooden buildings from Garlock and moved them through the deep sand
and up the hill to Randsburg, as Mrs. Kerns had. Mrs. Cuddeback rented
the houses as fast as Mr. Cuddeback could build them.
The Lillard Hotel
Nancy Jane Lillard came with her husband and son to Garlock in
1898. While her husband worked hard in the mines she set up a camp
kitchen in their wagon and made doughnuts which the miners quickly
bought up from her. With the
money she made from the doughnuts she was soon able to buy a stove and
began baking and selling fresh bread and pies. Before long she had
enough money for a one room shack, which quickly grew to more rooms,
including a kitchen.
Nancy
soon had enough
money to turn her kitchen
into a hotel where she and two daughters, known as “Tom” and
“Dick” served home-cooked meals. Her husband ran the front desk and
enjoyed talking about mining investments, while he smoked cigars.
Working the kitchen was long hard work in extreme heat, with the
fire in the wood cook stoves running all day.
Nancy
cooked 300 meals a
day to at least 100 regular miners and mill hands. Each morning before
breakfast, she packed lunches for the men to take to work with them. She
filled traditional tin lunch pails with sandwiches and pie in the
bottom, and coffee in the double lid. In addition to the meals for the
regulars, she also fed the transients who were just passing through.
When a pumping station was built at the well east of Garlock at
Goler
Canyon
, and water was sent
from there to the new 100 stamp mill at the Yellow Aster Mine in
Randsburg, miners went there to work and abandoned Garlock. Business at
the Lillard Hotel dropped off and the family discussed closing the
hotel. One of the owners of the Yellow Aster Mine felt badly about
taking business from the Lillards, and asked them to move to Randsburg
to run the company hotel there.
The Prankster
Proprietor
In 1905, the pumping station in Goler provided work for 18-20
people. Scott Seals was hired as overseer, and brought his family to
live with him. Mrs. Seals
cooked for the 17 employees that were stationed there.
The boarding house was a block away from the pumping station and
sleeping quarters were provided in a bunkhouse on a hill opposite from
it.
Mrs. Seals was a fun loving person who enjoyed a good joke and
was well known for the pranks she played on her boarders. One April
Fools day she baked cupcakes, some of them with cotton in them.
She made sure that a big man known as “Doughbelly” got the
one loaded with the most cotton. One by one the men discovered the
cotton, but never let on that anything was unusual, other than placing
an unchewable piece of the cupcake back on their plate. “Doughbelly”
couldn’t even get his teeth through his cupcake, and wound up putting
the whole thing in his mouth. He
chewed and chewed, but still had a mouthful. When offered another
cupcake, he accused Mrs. Seals of trying to kill them all. Since he was
always the first to load up his plate and go back for seconds before the
other men were served, anything that slowed him down was fine with them.
Another boarder of Mrs. Seals, was quick to let her know that she
would have to cook something different for him when beans were on the
menu, as he claimed beans nearly killed him. Long after the conversation
was forgotten, Mrs. Seals baked a vegetable loaf, and the man who had
complained about the beans wound up eating as much or more than the
other men had. Over the next few days, she realized her mistake, and
kept inquiring about the poor man’s health. He finally asked her why
she was concerned, and admitted that he had never felt better in his
life. Mrs. Seals explained that she had forgotten and fed bean loaf to
him, and was worried that he would die from it. Not long after, it was
reported he handed in his resignation from the pumping station because
”You can’t trust the food you get here.”
In addition to her pranks, Mrs. Seals enjoyed a good all night
game of poker with the men. However, if the games were on a night before
a working day she was known to put a stop to them by turning the table
over and scattering the cards and money everywhere. The tongue-lashing
she gave them afterwards, always sent the men off to the bunkhouse for
the night.
Mrs. Seals not only cooked, played pranks, and enjoyed a good
game of poker, she managed the horses. When she needed groceries she
thought nothing of driving any animal to Randsburg, even if she was
warned it could run away. She was stern with the teams, but never hurt
them nor would she put up with others that would abuse the pump station
stock. One day she observed a tenderfoot forcing a team and oil tank the
wrong way around the circle drive. The lead animals knew the route and
refused to listen to him. As she observed him beating the animals with a
hammer, Mrs. Seals ran out of the kitchen and beat the driver with the
broom she had in her hand. On his way back to
Johannesburg
, the man requested a
new type of work, claiming there was a crazy woman at the pump station
where he hauled oil. Mine owner Charles Burcham drove to Goler himself
after he found out what the problem was and made sure the tenderfoot was
fired, as he too did not tolerate abuse of animals any more than Mrs.
Seals did.
School Days
As more women and children arrived in Randsburg a school was
needed. The Wolfskill store building that Cuddeback had built upon his
arrival was moved from Fiddlers Gulch to the center of town and the head
of
Butte Avenue
. Many schoolteachers
came and went. Among the
first to arrive were a Miss Mite and Miss Williams. They didn’t last
long in the classrooms though, which included students the same age as
they were. Some of the boys
were as large or larger than the teacher, and took advantage of the
fact. When a woman named Miss Witters arrived in town to teach, she had
problems with the bigger boys as well. She surprised one large boy by
flipping him to the ground and holding him down with one foot while she
whipped him.
There were two classrooms. Mrs. Higgins was remembered as one of
the teachers for the younger children, and Mrs. Rader taught the older
ones. Redwood desks were lined up for six students in a row. The boys
sat on one side of the room and the girls on the other, so the boys
could not tease the girls.
Miss Orsavella Long came to teach in the school in
Johannesburg
. She was very young,
and she was very tiny. Many of the 7th and 8th
grade boys were larger than her. She managed to teach all 8 grades of
the school, and she enjoyed playing with her students as well. After
school she spent her time correcting the children’s papers. During
school she made it interesting and her students enjoyed her. At recess
she would join in games of tag and baseball. The children used a small
miners shack to toss a ball over, and Miss Long was often seen joining
in with them. She would kick her tiny slippers over the roof as she
kicked the ball. When the children built a homemade wagon without
brakes, Orsavella joined them as they rode down the steep mountain road
behind the school.
Miss Long’s students often enjoyed a prank or two, which she
quickly handled by helping the girls play a prank on the boys in return.
The boys put garlic inside the girls desks, so she to provided the girls
a bottle of perfume, which nearly made the original prankster ill. A
snake placed in the teacher’s desk drawer didn’t even cause her to
blink. She just reached in and pulled the garter snake out, as if were
perfectly normal for it to be there.
In the middle of Miss Orsavella Long’s school term, she went to
LA and eloped. She sent a wire to the school board saying she would come
back and finish the school year, if she was given a two week honeymoon.
She was such a good teacher, her request was granted, and she happily
returned to
Johannesburg
with her new husband
after the honeymoon. The students were equally happy to work extra hard
for the two weeks they lost during her honeymoon, because they loved her
so much.
Women Property Owners
By 1913, an area along Cuddeback dry lake known as
Golden Valley
, was opened to
homesteaders. Families began arriving with dreams of ranches and farms.
Locals who knew the area wondered how a dry lake bed out in the middle
of the desert could produce anything worthwhile.
They took Sunday drives to observe what the settlers were
accomplishing. Within two months a list appeared in the Randsburg Miner
telling who owned what and how things were going. Amongst the list were
Mrs. Ostrander and Anna Kreidt, both with 160 acres, and land being
cared. Anna already boasted a house. Imagine in April when the winds
began blowing as they always do. The sands of the dry lake blew the
plowed land, barley shoots were twisted off or blown completely out of
the dry loose ground. Trees had to be hand watered and more often than
not died before wells and irrigation could be set up. Many families
left, or went to look for jobs in the mines or elsewhere. One can only
wonder if these two women persevered in desert farming or moved on to
something else.
Granny Slocum
A woman named Sarah Slocum came to Garlock in 1914.
The town was dead then, and land was cheap.
Granny, as she became known, came in from
San Francisco
via
New York
and had accumulated
$14,000 along the way. She
purchased most of Garlock and began leasing out buildings to the lonely
miners who were still left. Her boarders jokingly called her place
“Hotel de Puke”. During
WWI, Granny saw the opportunity to make money once again. The mills of
Garlock no longer had gold to process so she dismantled them and sold
the metal for scrap.
Those who knew Granny Slocum remembered her as a “chatty little
lady with pretty strong language.” She talked all the time, but said
nothing. She smoked cigarettes which she rolled “neater than most
men”, and she was known to put camphor in her liquor so her two sons
wouldn’t touch it. The men
that she fed when they were down and out thought of her as the most
helpful and understanding person in the desert. Anyone questioning her
ownership of Garlock was quickly persuaded otherwise, by her threatening
manner.
Railroad Express
Agent
As the automobile became popular in the 1920’s, the desert was
more accessible and with it came more crime. Randsburg Railroad Express
agent, Sue Reeves realized more shady people were hanging around her
office. As an extra precaution she began leaving the light of her office
on all night, and the safe door wide open, so people could see inside.
When a gold brick arrived too late to go on the train, Sue and her
husband decided to take it home and put it under their bed, and slept
with a gun at their side that night. Sixteen places in town were robbed
that night, but the Railroad Express office remained untouched thanks to
the light and the open safe door so everyone could see it was empty.
The
Waitress
As news got out that Rand Camp had employment opportunities for
women workers, one young woman left home to make the vast desert trip
all by herself. As soon as she stepped off the stage, a restaurant owner
approached her. She would receive not only pay, but a place to live in a
boarding house if she accepted his job offer. By day, Kate Pfadenhover
waited tables. She enjoyed the bustling noises of the busy mining camp
with the sounds of wagon traffic going up and down the street, and the
laughter and shouting of children. Night time, however, the laughter and
shouting she heard was the voices of the ladies of the evening and the
men that patronized them, combined with the occasional sound of gunshots
and fighting. A frightened Kate, would cower in her boarding room behind
doors and windows barricaded with pieces of furniture. The day she woke
up to find metal shutters over all of the windows of the boarding house
and every other place in town to protect them from flying bullets, she
packed her bags and headed out on the stage.
Ida Kelly
Ida Kelly showed up at Rand Camp in the early days with her
husband John. They were just in from
Shasta
County
and heard about the
camps of Mojave while stopping in
Bakersfield
. Instead of going to
Mexico
, they decided to try
their luck in the mining camps. The barren brown desert was a stark
contrast to the green forests of Shasta, and Mrs. Kelly was disheartened
when she arrived on
Rand
Mountain
. She was sure the
sagebrush wouldn’t support a jackrabbit, let alone she and her
husband. They wound up settling at Cow Wells where there was water and a
better place for them to set up business. Cow Wells, however, was even
starker than Rand Camp, with only the old Borax road to link them to the
rest of the world. The only settlers around were men, and the nearest
woman was a mile or so away at Goler.
The Kelly’s set up a tent and opened up a feed and grain
business for the miners and teamsters that came through. They had
nothing with them, but the belongings they had brought down in the
covered wagon from
Shasta
County
. Eventually, Mrs.
Kelly wound up cooking for those miners and teamsters who were hungry
and tired from their desert travels. She cooked in a large Dutch oven
over an open fire outdoors, with creosote for fuel. Sometimes the men
would bring in mesquite or other firewood from the
Tehachapi Mountains
.
John Kelly eventually brought a real cook stove in to his wife
from Mojave. The couple moved from their tent and covered wagon to a one
room cabin with dirt floors. The quilts Ida had worked on during the
long trip down from
Shasta
County
were now displayed
on the beds inside the cabin. Cupboards and shelves were made of fruit
crates.
As the only woman in the mining camp, Ida became known as Mother
Kelly. She looked after the miners, cooked meals, and mended clothes for
them. If a miner came in with a firearm that they “might take to usin’
for celebrating”, Ida would hide the gun until their stay was over.
April 10, 1896
, Ida Kelly became
postmistress of Cow Wells and another room was added to the Kelly cabin
to accommodate both their business and the post office. As Cow Wells
grew and became known as Garlock, John Kelly became the first constable
of the area. They eventually moved to Randsburg where John became
constable. In later years they became famous for the Kelly Silver Mine.
Alone in the Mining
Camps
Some women came to
the Western Mojave Mining Camps with their husbands only to find
themselves alone after a period of years. Mrs. Johnny Arnold took over
her husband’s job as muleskinner when he died from a gunshot wound.
Mrs. Arnold donned men’s clothing and drove the freight wagons back
and forth from Skidoo to
Johannesburg
with the help of a
young male relative. Her
freight business ran successfully between the two towns for many years.
Army nurse Ruth Wadsworth came to live in a dugout with her new
husband, Clarence Wadsworth. Life was lonely and harsh, isolated 10
miles from Randsburg. When mining was slow there was nothing to do and
little money for supplies. They never struck enough gold to improve upon
their life or move on elsewhere. Mr. Wadsworth came down with silicosis
and Ruth nursed him until he died. As a widow, she was anxious to move
home to her old friends and city life. The outside world was strange
however, and she soon came back to the desert she knew and loved.
To be continued…….
Bibliography
Desert Bonanza
by
Marcia Rittenhouse
Wynn
The Arthur H. Clark
Company
Glendale,
California
Out of Print
Gold Gamble
by
Roberta Martin
Starry
Engler Publishing
George N. Engler
& Associates
Now available
through www.amazon.com
Garlock
Ghost Town
by
Roberta Martin
Starry
Roberta's
Desert Shop
Out of Print
Special thanks to
Roberta Martin Starry for the artwork and Daphne Worsham, Robin Flinchum, and David A. Wright for helping with
research and inspiring me.
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