By Vicky Kaye
Ellen "Nellie" Cashman was a mere five years-old when she immigrated to America in 1850 with her mother and sister. Today, she is remembered as a pioneer, miner, entrepreneur, businesswoman, organizer, leader and "angel" throughout the West, Canada and Alaska. She was always searching for opportunities related to her first love - mining. She always paid her own way in the mining boomtowns by establishing businesses, buying and selling mines and actual hands-on mining. With any excess funds, she supported charities (and encouraged fellow miners to do the same), established hospitals, churches and schools, grubstaked other miners and helped the poor or needy from Arizona to Alaska, wherever she happened to call "home" at the time.
By 1898, she had tried her mining luck in such places as Tucson, Globe, Yuma, Jerome, Prescott, Tombstone, Bisbee and several other mining camps in Arizona Territory. She also prospected in New Mexico, Nevada, Baja California, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. When she would hear of a new "strike," she would pack up and move on to the new camp and establish a grocery store, or restaurant or boardinghouse to aid the miners and grant herself an income while searching for her El Dorado.
In Arizona, Nellie is more often linked to Tombstone, having spent most of 1880-1887 there with the likes of the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday. There she had a booming restaurant business (The Nellie Cashman Restaurant is still in operation in Tombstone!), gained the reputation as an "angel of mercy" and was an influential and prominent citizen.
It was not until the Klondike gold rush in 1897-98 that she once again found her place in a community long-term. At age 53, Nellie joined the thousands who would cross into Canada through the Chilkoot Pass and head for Dawson in the Yukon Territory. Many were amazed at the stamina of this middle-aged woman who barely reached 5 feet tall and averaged 100 pounds! Where fully half of those stampeding to the Yukon gold fields failed to make it, Nellie never doubted her ability to get to her destination.
For Nellie, Dawson was a panacea of opportunity. She ran businesses, prospected, bought and sold mining claims and grubstaked others, often at a loss to herself. Nellie was an anomaly in the age of the American gold rushes. She expected to be treated like an equal and with respect because that is the way she treated others. She never exploited her femininity; she pulled her own weight, and then some. Nellie spent seven years in the Klondike in and around Dawson before moving on to Alaska.
By 1907, Nellie was an experienced miner. She aimed for the headwaters of the Koyukuk River and settled in the Wiseman/Coldfoot Gold Camp area about 75 miles north of the Arctic Circle that today is along the famous Ice Road Truckers route to Prudhoe Bay. According to Cashman's biographer Don Chaput, "Every person on the Koyukuk could do practically everything. One had to be a blacksmith, a mechanic, steam engineer, logger, geologist, carpenter, baker, cook, dog musher and laundryman. A shirker was out of it, not respected, not tolerated." If there were any skills Nellie lacked, she would hire a fellow miner to help her. Here there would be no boardinghouses and restaurants, but serious mining where she would spend the rest of her life looking for that elusive pay streak. She developed her own company, The Midnight Sun Mining Company, and sold shares to help raise money to buy the needed heavy equipment for more in-depth operations. Her own family, friends, and often the miners she had known, who owed so much to her generosity in the past, now stepped up to make sure that Nellie had the money and supplies to follow her dream. It was a hard life for a solitary person mining north of the Arctic Circle, but Nellie delighted in the wilderness and her fellow prospectors.
Even as age caught up with her, she often became a "snowbird," still capable of mushing her dogs hundreds of miles in and out of the mining camp to spend harsh winters visiting friends and family, including her nephew, Mike Cunningham, who, by 1893, had moved to Prescott and worked for the Yavapai County District Attorney. In 1923, newspapers all over Alaska carried the story of 78-year-old Nellie Cashman mushing her dogs 17 days and 750 miles from Koyukuk to Seward across the frozen tundra.
In the summer of 1924, Nellie became ill and was diagnosed in Fairbanks with pneumonia. She spent the last several months of her life at the hospital of the Sisters of St. Anne in Victoria, B. C. where she died in January of 1925. St. Anne's had been one of her special charities since her days in the Cassiar District in the early 1870s. Her fame had grown over the decades to such a degree that "she was eulogized in newspapers as far away as New York and Los Angeles as a grand old dame who staked a lasting claim on the hearts of miners throughout the West."
Biographers have stopped short of describing Nellie as a nun without a habit but this may well have been a good description of the way she led her life. An unshakable faith in God and good works, love and respect for her fellow man (especially the miners), an avid hunger for adventure and the elusive big gold strike provided the impetus to lead a most interesting and non-conventional life.
Nellie Cashman was inducted into the Arizona Women's Hall of Fame in 1984.
In March 2006, she was inducted into the Alaska Mining Hall of Fame.
The role of Nellie Cashman, represented as a saloon keeper in Tombstone, was played by actress Randy Stuart in the 1959-60 season of the ABC TV series "The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp," with Hugh O'Brian as Wyatt.
USPS Commemoratives/ Courtesy image<br>Nellie Cashman is immortalized on a 29-cent stamp issued by the U.S. Postal Service on Oct. 18, 1994. She is also remembered in Tombstone on annual “Nellie Cashman Day.”