By Vicky Kaye

On a lonely stretch of the Richardson Highway near Paxson, Alaska, is a highway historical marker that gives tribute to the "gold rush women." With a backdrop of the Alaska Range, Prescottonian Melissa Ruffner and I (a recent transplant to Alaska) discovered quite by accident that one of our heroines from our home state of Arizona had a much more exciting life than we had imagined.

We found our very own bit of Arizona history deep in the heart of Alaska. Ellen "Nellie" Cashman's photo stared back at us from the display, older and wiser-looking than the classic photo of the younger woman we were used to seeing displayed throughout historical Arizona mining districts where she was known as the "Angel of the Gold Camps," or the "Miner's Angel." Melissa and I looked at each other and said almost in unison, "What in the world was Nellie doing up here?"

We set our sights at finding out more about Nellie. As providence so often occurs, within two days on our road trip we would find our answer quite by accident. Stopping at the Independence Mine State Historical Park north of Palmer, Alaska, we found a small collection of books for sale on mining history in Alaska.

We were both surprised to see the very same photo of an elderly Nellie Cashman staring back at us from the cover of a book titled, "Nellie Cashman: Prospector and Trailblazer," by Suzann Ledbetter. We scraped up the money between us and purchased one copy. For the next week during our adventures throughout Alaska, we enjoyed the saga that is Nellie. Hers was a most unusual life during a more conventional age, especially for a woman.

What a gem this little volume turned out to be. Our previous knowledge of Nellie didn't even begin to scratch the surface of her adventurous life. Most of the accounts of which we were aware made her out to be a compassionate single woman who ran restaurants and/or boardinghouses in various mining towns.

She had a special interest in mining and often set up her establishments specifically to serve miners. She moved frequently, would invest in claims and partner with miners to develop them. Wherever she went, she spent much of her time working for charities and promoting the well-being of the town she called home at the time.

In 1877, Nellie was the first and only white woman to enter the Cassiar District in British Columbia with 200 miners. She was "dressed in a mackinaw, men's trousers, boots, and a fur hat." It was also during this time that Nellie was instrumental in a famous rescue of miners stranded in the area without proper food and suffering from scurvy. More than any other incident, this one rescue mission of her friends and fellow miners, stranded and ill in the dead of winter, elevated her standing among Western miners as an "angel of the camps."

The trip took 77 days by snowshoe and dogsled for Nellie and a handful of miners who volunteered to help her. They delivered 1,500 pounds of life-saving supplies. Miners were no longer just her friends and co-travelers; they became her protectors and admirers. They may have referred to her as an angel, but they treated her like a saint.

Nellie decided to try her luck farther south and spent nearly two decades in Arizona. She opened restaurants in Tucson and Tombstone during the 1880s. She was a devout Catholic, remained single all her life and, at one point, cared for her widowed sister who was sick with tuberculosis. When her sister passed away in 1883, "Aunt Nell" became the sole support of her five children while living in Tombstone.

This was the history Melissa and I knew, but it was just a small example of the large heart that Nellie had for her family and her fellow man. In the 1890s, she lived in Jerome, Globe, Yuma and Prescott, where she owned and operated the Arizona Silver Belt Restaurant.

The book took us through the entire span of Nellie's 75 years. Beginning in Ireland, it is believed she was born in Queenstown in 1845, immigrating with her widowed mother and sister to Boston before moving to California.

Nellie was "bitten" by the gold bug while her sister ended up marrying shortly after their arrival in San Francisco. Nellie's future was boomtowns and goldfields, beginning her adventures in Nevada near the Comstock. She always managed to make a good living. While prospecting was her first love, she was cautious and "wherever her search for gold led her, she established a boardinghouse, a restaurant, or both."

Nellie was nonconforming in her role as a woman of the times. She did not follow the conventions of marriage and motherhood, nor did she fall into the trap of a "fallen" woman. She made her own way in the world using the skills she had, and she possessed a good sense for business with an innate common sense. She never let circumstance overwhelm her, but looked at everything as an adventure and a chance to help her fellow man, most of whom were the miners with whom she shared so much of her time.

Nellie never once lost respect from those around her. She was a prospector who pulled her own weight and, according to one man who knew her in Arizona, "She was unique, though she seemed to prefer to associate with men, there was never a spot on her moral character."

Nellie, at 53, left Arizona for Alaska in 1898 to strike it rich in the Klondike. Many adventures awaited her there, to be shared in Part 2 next week.

Photo courtesy of Vicky Kaye
Melissa Ruffner photographs the roadside marker near Paxson, Alaska, honoring gold rush women including the “Miner’s Angel,” Ellen "Nellie" Cashman, a resident of Prescott in the 1890s.