This documentary offers a panorama of Nevada County and California frontier life, profiling women across medicine, gambling, railroading, music, writing, teaching, and abolition, who navigated gender, race, and class to shape local history from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries. It foregrounds suffrage activism, led by Ellen Clark Sargent, its strategies, fractures, reunification, and landmark lawsuits, alongside legal shifts like the Sole Trader Law expanding women's economic agency. Interwoven are broader social and cultural histories (brothels, Depression-era tragedy, Chinese settlements, Indigenous advocacy) and East–West exchanges, including literary influence (Mary Hallock Foot) and West Coast performers. The piece also sketches contrasts among actresses—Lola Montez and Laura Keane—plus a controversial Victorian star, highlighting divergent reputations and the transcontinental theater world.

Full Transcript of the Video:

I'm Debbie Chapman, Luckinville.

I am the great granddaughter of Nellie Chapman, who is the first registered woman dentist
in California.

Nellie came to Nevada City in 1856 across the isthmus of Panama with her mother to meet
up with her father here, who had come to do some mining.

Nellie met her husband, Alan Chapman, here in Nevada City, and they married in 1861.

Nellie had two children.

One was Sergeant Alan, who was born in the ranch that is out by the willow, and then
she had another son, Chester Warren Chapman, who was born here in the house in the front
parlor.

As a matter of fact, all my uncles and my father were born in this house.

Nellie began practicing dentistry under her husband, and I have to think that Alan Chapman
was very advanced.

He marries a woman that's 13 years old, and he's 37 years old, and he allows her to read
the dentistry books and apply medications to some of the parents' patients.

He had to have been very advanced to allow that, although she took up the study of dentistry
under him, and practiced here in the house, in what we now call the front room.

He eventually went to Virginia City because he had incurred some debts by signing promissory
notes for people, and so when they went back and forth from Virginia City, eventually she
took up the practice here.

Well, I'm not sure that we would appreciate the dentistry of that time.

One of the things that Nellie was was a very petite woman, and so consequently pulling
teeth was very difficult for her.

As a matter of fact, in 1853 she talks about going to get her dental certificate from the
University of Pennsylvania.

She says in a letter, if we sell the mine, I'm going to Philadelphia to graduate in dentistry.

I can be ready by the time easily.

I'm going to study hard now, and I want to pull teeth too.

There must be some way to purchase besides mainstream.

I want that China medicine that loosens them, but most of all she's writing her husband
to tell him that she wants dental equipment sent to her here in the house.

She says, and most of all, I want a clasp adjustment.

I have had a terrible time to get the clasp on, but manage it twice with your pliers.

I have to use both hands with it for it's too wide for my hands.

But she not only was a dentist.

One of the things she was was also a, she was involved in the Shakespeare Society.

She was in the Literary Society.

She started writing prose and poetry about the age of ten.

She wrote under the nom de plum of Inez.

She also wrote music with a professor, Mueller, who was living in Nevada, Nevada City.

He taught music in German and French.

He had come originally to mine.

But very flowery music, ashes of violets only, forget me not.

What I found also really interesting is that not only was she passionate about music, but
also politics.

She was a member of the Woman's Suffrage Society up here in Nevada County.

I'm sure she was in it with Mrs.

Sargent, who lives off the street.

I know at some time, Stanton came to talk up here in Nevada City regarding women's ability
to vote.

This must have happened.

Obviously, she died in 1906, and we didn't get the vote until 1920, so quite advanced
for her age, for the ages, I think.

My name is Chris Sents, and I write books about women of the Old West.

I would like to share with you some of the wonderful stories about women of Nevada County.

I want to begin by telling you about Eleanor Dumont.

Eleanor Dumont was here in the Gold Country in the early 1850s.

She was one of the first women to run her own saloon.

She set up a tent in 1851 on the streets of Nevada City.

It was a rarity because women didn't do that, but she was trained at the Barbary Coast and
knew exactly what to do to bring men into her saloons, her gaming parlors.

She was just very good at playing the game of 21, or as they called it, vignettes.

She was exceptionally good at that.

Not only was she good at the game, but she was beautiful.

She had a stable of other beautiful women that worked at the house with her.

She also served free sandwiches.

You could get the miners to come in and spend some time at the saloon and to gamble and maybe
visit with some of Eleanor Dumont's wonderful women that she had there.

They would just stay.

You would come for the gambling, stay for the food, and then you could stay all night
and visit with whoever, whatever woman you would like to visit with all night.

Then the next day, they would just start gambling.

After the men would get paid, she knew exactly where to keep them.

If they found any kind of strike, they would lose a lot of their money at her place.

Nevada City was very popular at that time.

The Gold Country as a whole at that time, Grass Valley, Nevada City combined was the
third largest combined city in California.

She had a huge following, a woman running a saloon.

Everybody wanted to come and visit with her.

They wanted to come and visit with her because she was an exceptional gambler.

Men would come in and they would challenge her to a game of 21.

She would play against them and they would always lose.

They would come in boasting that this time for sure they were going to beat her.

She would entertain them and always beat them.

When she did beat them, she would make sure that the bartender served them only milk because
she indicated that if you were not smart enough to beat a woman at the game of 21, you couldn't
drink anything stronger than milk.

Eleanor Dumont though had a personal life.

She was in love with the editor of the Nevada Journal.

His name was Wait and she just thought he was wonderful.

The editor, Editor Wait would spend lots of time with Eleanor at night but he would not
be seen with her during the day because he was someone in business and it wouldn't do
for him to be seen with a gambling or a sporting woman.

He made sure that he only was around her when the sun went down so nobody really saw him
scalking around with Eleanor Dumont but she was terribly in love with him.

She was convinced or had convinced herself that eventually they would get married, that
he would be so much in love with her that he would not care that she was a public woman
but such was not the case.

He did marry someone else and she was heartbroken.

She ends up associating herself with three or four other men between I think it was about
1856 by this time to 1869 associating herself with a number of men who take advantage of
her, take her money that she has stockpiled and abscond with it, just leave her alone.

When she turns near late 30s, early 40s, she has no money left so she has to go back to
gambling.

She cannot be this woman that lives off of the money that she has saved and the horses
that she has bought or the ranch that she has bought, she has none of that left so she
has to go back to work and she goes back to work in Bodie, California.

By this time in her life she has a dark layer of hair above her lip and people are calling
her Madame Moustache which at first, she is known as Madame Moustache and at first
that does not bother her but I would imagine like anybody being called a name it does hurt
you after a while so she is a lonely woman and she becomes a pitiful sight there in Bodie
and a lot of men just allow her to win, she is not as sharp as she once was and has no
money, has this moustache, I mean I don't know why she didn't shave, she could have shaved
but lots of men were shaving, I don't know why the shaving wasn't a part of it but anyway
Eleanor Dumont has a bottle of poison, it decides that she is not going to be able to
continue on with her life and two miles outside of Bodie, she drinks down this poison and
she expires there on the road leading into Bodie.

And the authorities come and find her in her pocket is a note that asks that they please
bury her in Nevada City next to editor Waite who she'd always loved.

They could not raise enough money to send her back to Nevada City but they did raise
enough money for her to have a proper burial and to be buried not in outcast cemetery but
in the regular cemetery with everyone else.

I'm Mimi Simmons and I'm fifth generation native so I'm sharing today the story about
Sarah Kitter, she was married to John Kitter and they came to Grass Valley in 1875, he
was a politician and a civil engineer and became the president of the Nevada County
Narrow Gauge Railroad, he was the president, the treasurer and the secretary and they also
own four mines and by the 1880s they were multi-millionaires.

As a member of the high society of Nevada County Sarah and John would host these wonderful
lavish parties at their wonderful Kitter mansion which is over by the train depot and if you
were lucky enough to be invited you would be rubbing shoulders with politicians and
governors and even a most famous Mark Twain who was a good friend of John and Sarah's
and Sarah had these beautiful gardens and this amazing house, the Kitter mansion, had
big ballroom rooms and it was just absolutely stunning, you can only imagine back in those
days.

Besides throwing a lot of lavish parties all the time Sarah donated a lot of her money
for free time to orphans that were created by this perilous mining industry and she
also adopted a wonderful daughter named Beatrice and she really made something very grand of
Nevada County when this was kind of a crazy gold rush time.

In 1901 John died and he was
eulogized as one of the most influential people for Nevada County in creating business and
bringing commerce here and Sarah who was just a homemaker stepped into the business.

She
took over three quarters of the stock of the railroad and was president, the only female
president within the first thirty days of taking over her ownership.

In fact it was
known as the twelve golden years while Sarah ran the business and she made more money for
the rail business than any other subsequent owner of the railway.

I'm pretty fascinating
to see.

Sarah sold her stock in 1913 and she retired down to San Francisco.

During World
War II the railway closed down and the mansion started to get very dilapidated because it
wasn't in, no one was caring for it, it wasn't in good condition.

Then there was an asphalt
truck that caught on fire and destroyed most of the Kidder mansion and it was very sad to
see because it just kept going down and down and when they built the freeway the remains
of what was left of the Kidder mansion were either pulled apart or dissembled and distributed
elsewhere or thrown away.

So the interesting part is that Sarah is this woman who doesn't
have any experience and she launches into this male society and takes over the railway
and makes an absolute fortune far beyond what they already had.

The profits were far greater
than anybody else that had ever subsequently worked for her but she just did so well and
it's just amazing and inspiring to see a woman that had no background or no training to be
able to step into a man's world and take the railway to the highest level that she could.

During the gold rush there were a number of wonderful entertainers right here in the
gold country, one of whom was a young woman by the name of Emma Nevada.

She was born Emma
Wixom in 1859 in the Alpha Mine area which we now know as the Alpha Omega Mine area where
they did hydraulic mining.

An exceptional talent, by the time she was four she could
just sing like a bird and so her father who was Dr. Wixom, he took her to the Baptist
Church in Nevada City and had her sing some hymns and men would come out from everywhere
to hear this child sing.

She just had a lovely voice and it's just hard to imagine how many
children that lived in Nevada County had such talent.

There was first lot of Crabtree who
men would come out and just want to watch her do her little irish jigs because it made
them remember their own children that they left back east and Emma fall in the same category.

The men had left their families and they came out here to mine and they didn't have a whole
lot of people and so when they would see children like Emma who had talent it just made them
weep and so you have little Emma singing at church and people would come out to hear her
sing and what a coup that was for any of the ministers there who were preaching when you'd
have this little four year old come out and sing hymns and people would come to church
to hear her sing.

But her talent wasn't one that was going to necessarily be relegated
to the Nevada County area.

She was discovered, she did travel all over Europe, she performed
in Vienna, she performed in Paris, she was classically trained.

She would return to the
gold country when she was performing in San Francisco, she would make a little journey
in this area to sing.

The last time that she was in Nevada County was 1902 and she stopped
at the national hotel and stood on the balcony and sang home sweet home to the crowd below
and the people cheered and they were so happy to have their beautiful soprano opera star
home again and she always cited this as the place that she loved the most.

Her mother
had a house in Nevada City, actually it's the Emma Nevada bed and breakfast and she
lived there with her daughter and I think that they eventually moved to San Francisco
too but everybody who wants to come to Nevada City wants to see the Emma Nevada house and
so you just know that Emma was there practicing in the parlor her songs and I just, it was
hard for people to really get used to the fact that she was such a famous entertainer
because they only remembered her as the chubby, cheap little girl who used to sing at the
Baptist church.

My name is Linda Jack.

I'm the executive secretary with the Nevada County
Historical Society.

I'm going to be introducing you to a woman by the name of Jenny Carter
who was a black writer and activist who lived here in Nevada County.

Jenny was an African
American woman who lived in Nevada City from about 1860 to 1881.

She was a writer, a journalist,
that very rare creature, a black woman journalist in the West.

In 1867 and July 5th Jenny decided
to write a letter to a man by the name of Phillip Bell who was the editor of a black
newspaper in San Francisco called The Elevator.

San Francisco was the largest black population
west of the Mississippi River at that time and it had at various times two, even three
black newspapers.

Jenny just decided to write a letter to the editor and he responded and
that began a series of letters that she wrote to the newspaper called Letters from Nevada
County.

Jenny wrote on a variety of subjects, mostly political concerning race and gender,
suffrage, temperance, one of her big subjects and she had a very distinctive voice.

Jenny
decided to write under a pen name.

She started out writing under Mrs.

Trask and later moved
to use Semper Fidelis, which means always faithful.

She also had a byline and she decided
to write from Mud Hill.

Now Mud Hill didn't really exist but she was I think commenting
there on the seven hills of Nevada City which were both racially and economically segregated
and so she was getting a little dig in there.

It's not clear whether her readers knew about
the seven hills of Nevada City but I think ultimately what she was saying is that in
the rainy season during the winter in Nevada City all the hills were equally muddy and
her byline therefore was kind of a stab at making that point.

I think Jenny ultimately
confessed that Mud Hill was a prettier place than its name intended.

She offers us a very
rare opportunity to see Nevada County, specifically mostly Nevada City, through the eyes of a
black woman who was enduring the reconstruction and Civil War eras which were full of difficulty.

She was insulted in the streets.

She was jostled by drunks in the road.

She had plenty
of criticism for white officials and white politicians but she also had criticized members
of her own race if she thought they were not living up to her expectations which were
quite high I must say.

She consistently respected people that stood up for their principles
and one of the people she respected was Aaron Sargent and I would dislike to read a quote
that she wrote about him.

She said people who dare to speak what they believe to be the
truth regardless of the world's opinion like Sargent bless the world much more and smooth
tongue polished ladylike gentlemen.

Above all I think Jenny expected America to live
up to its promises of freedom and equality and she held everybody to that standard and
when she was disappointed she let you hear about it.

Her background prior to coming
to California is a bit vague and not well documented.

We know that her given name was
Mary Jane and that she had an early marriage to a Mr. Correll who was a preacher of some
kind.

What happened to Mr. Correll is not clear but when she had moved to Nevada City
in 1866 she married Dennis Drummond Carter.

Jenny did have an illness likely rheumatism
which restricted her activities but did not entirely prevent her from working in her garden
which she loved and she was working there on August 10th 1881 when she fell ill she
rushed into the house to her husband and died there.

She was buried in Pine Grove Cemetery
Nevada City where there her husband put up a substantial marker there.

He died 13 years
later in 1894.

Grass Valley especially was known for its racist attitudes and the town
was frequently referred to as the Charleston of California Charleston being a hotbed of
secessionism and pro-slavery activity during the up to and after the Civil War.

Although
it appears that the Carter's were genuinely well regarded by their white neighbors Jenny
recognized that their relationships with white associates were limited.

They did not include
personal socializing or really as far as I can tell true friendships and I think that Jenny
Carter's work is largely now known in academic circles certainly as one of the most significant
contributions to African-American women's writing during the Reconstruction and Civil
War era and more generally to black writing in the West.

Most phenomenally I think her
writing gives us a window into the black West that there was a black West and that that
of county was a home to a small and vibrant community in which African-Americans strolled
on a daily basis with the politics of race and gender of equality that dominated American
society nationally and in California and although Jenny's work and Nevada County's black community
are not well known still today her story and her writings are now available through a publication
of a book by professor Eric Gardner called Jenny Carter a black journalist in the early
West which was published in 2007 and now her writings are actually available online many
of them in the California digital newspaper collection which has copies of the original
elevator newspaper in which she published available online.

I'm Rosemary Freeland-Cristillius
and I am the great granddaughter of Julia Sengel-Fippen her father John Sengel who was
my great great grandfather he came from Germany with his first wife Julia's mother Juliana
Mosbach they came from well Juliana was a native of Bodden and she's up on the hill
in rough and ready in that cemetery there's a single plot up there.

Anyway they came from
Germany to Boston were my great grandmother Julia Sengel-Fippen was born and they had
four children and then Julia's mother died when she was about seventeen and then John
remarried and I went to the also did a lot of research and I found my great great grandfather's
will which was drafted about 1884 and he was sixty four years old and in that will it stated
that he was of sound mind etc but he had the eight children and his first wife Juliana
had died but he willed the blacksmith shop and the land that is sitting on and half of
the tools in that blacksmith shop to Julia because she had a hard way to go not that
he loved her any more than any of his others but that her husband already owned half of
the tools in the blacksmith shop and my grandfather was born about the time he passed away so
and John and Julia had ten children so she had a hard road to hoe and so he wanted her
to have that blacksmith shop.

I think one of the interesting things about women in this
early part of California was that the gold rush population was very transient people
came and went men who had wives came to mine and they would disappear into the foothills
for weeks months at a time they would go back east planning to return or not return and
women were left with the challenge of feeding and caring for their families without the
presence of a wage earner so the California legislature took it upon itself which was
quite remarkable to pass what they called a sole trader law this allowed women to own
property, own businesses and operate them without their husbands oversight and it was
really intended for women to be able to support their families it wasn't I wouldn't call it
a liberation move at all but it was a recognition that women needed to take care of their families.

Sarah Royce was one of the first teachers in Nevada County.

Sarah Royce was born in
England, moved to New York, married a gentleman from in the New York area and then they moved
to Iowa to become farmers and in 1849 he was struck with gold fever and decided they needed
to come west so she goes from being this woman who maintains this cute quaint little farm
house and takes care of her two year old daughter Mary to now being on this trek west and they
leave the independence area in May of 1849 to begin the trip and that was really pretty
late in the year for them to begin this journey west and as they're traveling she is keeping
a journal about how difficult the travel is.

One of the things that strikes me about Sarah
Royce is in her journal she writes about camping at night on the prairie and it not occurring
to her that there wouldn't be any other farm houses around you couldn't look for miles
and see a light from another farm house and she talks about setting up camp and how lonely
and desolate it was and how quiet and how she ached for just conversation with another
woman just to be able to chat with someone about how they raised their child and there
weren't a lot of women coming west so Sarah was a unique one and as I said she kept this
journal about her trek west which later she parlays into a book called a frontier lady.

She and her husband do come to the gold country they spend quite a number of years here and
they move from gold camp to gold camp they never find any riches they're very poor.

One
of the things though that she has found on the way west that she also writes in her journal
and brings with her to the gold country a lot of people on the way west they realize that
they were carrying way too much in their stagecoaches so they would have to disavow themselves of
their possessions they'd have to pull some of that out and they would leave it and other
people would come by and they would see this and they would think wow why would anybody
get rid of this.

Well Sarah Royce was one of those people who solved this little book
called little Ella and she thought my daughter would love this and little Ella was a book
that had the alphabet and numbers in it and so she took that book and not only did she
use it to teach Mary to read but when they got to the gold country she and her husband
Sarah had another child named Josiah and she taught Josiah how to read as well and other
children in this area she taught how to read and Josiah grows to be one of the foremost
philosophers and historian of his day they lived at the exact spot in which the grass
valley library stands and there is a placard out there will sign out there for Josiah Royce
but it had not been for Sarah his mother who had picked up the little Ella book on her
trek west and taught him and his sister how to read I don't know that we would have had
such an incredible philosopher and historian as he did with Josiah it's interesting to
read through Sarah Royce's journal because she talks about the many different kinds of
men that there were here at the time and she talks specifically about frontiersmen and
it reminds me an awful lot of the movie the Revenant about how rough and uncouth they
were and how they would chew their food with their mouths open and spit on the floor and
how she longed for some refinement to be around men who didn't do that and she would seek
those out and she taught Josiah to not be like that to have manners so he really had
an incredible background with that and she did so with all the other children that she
taught it wasn't a formal school like what we think it was any other minor who had come
west with their children and their wives might have passed away on the route and so they
had these children and wanted to teach them how to read right and they would send them
to Sarah.

Okay so my name is Lynn Wenzel so I'm going to talk about Ellen Clark Sargent who was
not a native of Nevada County but was born in Massachusetts in 1826 and when she was
just a teenager in Massachusetts she met her future husband Aaron Sargent she was born
Ellen Clark and they fell in love when they were young and he was an abolitionist very
active and she shared his views on politics, on abolition and on women's rights so he promised
her that he wanted to go to the goal fields and try and find some luck and so he promised
her though that after he did he would come back they would be married and so he came
to Nevada County in 1849 and he did some prospecting found some gold but mostly he became interested
in the newspaper business and he became partners in a newspaper here so in 1852 he returned
to Massachusetts as he had promised and he and Ellen were married and in the spring he
took a little honeymoon period and then they returned to the goal fields in Nevada County
in October of 1852 and Ellen obviously a very good sport and also a pioneer of her own was
very much looking forward to all of this not worried about it at all and she did talk about
in the very brief writings that we have of hers that she remembers coming into Nevada
County in October on a moonlit night on the stagecoach going through miles and miles and
miles of forest and seeing the moon up above and smelling the wonderful air and the pines
and that was her memory of arriving in Nevada County.

For the first few years that they were
married they just she lived fairly quietly and she had children and was part of the community
and very well liked by the way.

In 1869 though having been affected by the speeches of Elizabeth
Katie Stanton and Susan B.

Anthony with whom she was to become very close friends she got
involved in the woman suffrage movement and in 1869 she founded the first woman suffrage
group in Nevada City called the Woman Suffrage Association of Nevada County and she was also
president seven times of the California Equal Suffrage Association and head of the Susan
B.

Anthony Club in San Francisco later on.

She was extremely involved and she was an integral
part of the connection of the woman suffrage suffrage just between the east coast where
most of the activity was taking place in New York State, in New England and in Washington
D.

C.

and here she was out in California and she was a conduit through which all this information
passed back and forth back and forth.

So also in 1869 it was a huge year in woman suffrage
the movement split into two parts.

There was the more conservative group of women who
felt that they shouldn't talk about any other issues that affected women that they should
only concentrate on getting the vote.

Then there was the other group which was the one
that Elizabeth Katie Stanton, Susan B.

Anthony, Lucretia Mott and those women were in and
Ellen which was the more fiery side of it.

They felt that the vote wasn't just the thing
that women needed to work for equal pay, equal rights against domestic violence and they
engaged in acts of civil disobedience.

This was called the National Woman Suffrage Association
and this was the organization that Ellen was a part of.

In 1872, Erin was elected to the
House of Representatives and so Ellen was going to go to Washington and went to Washington
with him.

Before that in 1871 Susan B.

Anthony had come out to the west coast to do speaking
which is how she made her living actually and she had become very close friends with
Ellen.

She stayed with Ellen at their home and when they returned, when the agents returned
to Washington D.

C.

so he could start his work, in 1876 which was the centennial of the Declaration
of Independence, there was to be a big event in Washington D.

C.

There were 50,000 people
there, the Vice President Ferry was going to read the Declaration of Independence.

Well
the women felt, these suffrage women felt that it wasn't really a Declaration of Independence
for them because they didn't have the right to vote so they decided on a plan of action
which was to draw up something called the Declaration of Rights of Women and they did
it on a big scroll and they tied it up with red, white and blue ribbons and they requested
that they be able to read this, be allowed to read this at the celebratory event on July
4th.

Well they were denied of course.

I believe they were told that there just wasn't enough
time for them.

So they went anyway and they were a phalanx of women, Ellen included, and
they went right up through all the people, past the police, past the Washington D.

C.

at arms soldiers, all the way up to Vice President Ferry, handed him the Declaration, their Declaration
of the Rights of Women and then proceeded to walk past him, up a ramp and right out
a window, all of the women and then when they got outside the window they passed out copies
of their Declaration of the Rights of Women.

They made a big stir with this and Ellen was
part of this whole, I guess you would call an act of civil disobedience so she was part
of that.

In 1878 her husband Aaron introduced the suffrage amendment.

We know that he was
the one who introduced it in Congress, but we also know that it was Ellen's words and
Susan B.

Anthony's words and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's words who helped him form the wording
of this even though he was the one who presented it.

So Aaron died in 1887, in 1890 the two
arms of the women's suffrage movement, the American Women's Suffrage Association and
the National Women's Suffrage Association, those two organizations I spoke about earlier
decided they had to join together in order to get this suffrage passed, that there was
more power in numbers, so they rejoined in 1890.

Ellen remained active, she remained
on the board of many suffrage associations across the United States.

In 1900 she, like
Susan B.

Anthony, attempted to vote and was denied the right to vote.

She went anyway
and voted and then sued the state for taxation without representation.

She said, I am not
paying my taxes if I can't vote because I am not being represented.

She went to, she
took this to court and she was represented in court in this case by her son George who
had become a lawyer.

So this was a big event, it got a lot of write ups and so forth in
the newspaper.

Unfortunately Ellen did not live to see the passage of the 19th amendment
because she died in 1911 at the age of 85, so that which she had worked so hard for,
she never saw it to pass.

But in that same month of July, right after she died about
10 days after she died, there was a massive event in Union Square in San Francisco to
honor her.

There were 2,000 people at this event to honor her.

There were bands and speeches
and flags and because of the work she had done for the women's movement, she was honored
this way.

Soiled doves such as Rose Ellis or Texas Tommy as she was known in the Grass
Valley area, ran sporting houses that had amusing names.

For example, Rose's place or Texas
Tommy's place was known as the Golden Gate Amusement Company.

Lest anybody think that
they are going to go there and get on a teacup ride, that was not going to be the thing that
happened but Rose was definitely someone in the 1920s, that's how late some of these cat
houses go in the Nevada County area.

She would entertain a lot of men.

There they could play
cards, they could have a meal, they could visit with whatever women Texas Tommy had
about her.

Texas Tommy was known in this area in the 20s not only for running a cat house
but she was very generous.

She was the quintessential harlot with a heart of gold and so she gave
a lot of money to schools.

She supported a lot of homeless benefits.

She just was a giving
generous woman and people liked her.

She had a sister by the name of Buena and Buena had
Down syndrome and had heart condition.

She had a number of things wrong with her but
Texas Tommy and Buena's parents had died when they were very young and Rose had taken
care of Buena all of these years and she would take Buena out with her when they would go
to parades, when they would go to the fairground and everybody liked Buena too.

She was very
outgoing, very charming but as I said Texas Tommy took care of her and she stayed at Texas
Tommy's place.

She was not one of her sporting women, she was her sister and she watched over
her.

Now as Texas Tommy aged, she eventually moves to San Francisco and as she ages she
puts herself into a rest home with her sister and she realizes especially at that time in
history which now we're talking about the 30s when the economy is really bad, you have
the depression coming on.

Texas Tommy realizes she's not going to have any money and there's
going to be no way to care for Buena and so she decides that she's going to have to take
care of both of them and she does so with a revolver.

She first shoots Buena and then
she shoots herself but Texas Tommy's place was located over Frank's Pizza here in Grass
Valley.

As a matter of fact that entire over Cane's restaurant and on the other side those
used to be cat houses as well.

They say brewery on the side which I'm sure that at some time
they were, there was brew served there but it was in large part cat houses.

That's where
a lot of your money was made.

There were more than 150 saloons in Grass Valley alone along
Mill Street and if you were a smart businessman you had somebody like Texas Tommy who helped
run the other aspects of your business because it ensured that you were going to get a lot
more money.

Hi, I'm Kathleen Smith.

I'm an author and historian of places in Nevada and
Yuba County.

There were a lot of Chinese people here during the Gold Rush times.

In Smarts
Philanthropy 2 there on the census I'd say maybe like half the population were Chinese.

Most of them were men who were minors and a lot of them left the area when the labor
started for the railroads.

But some stayed in mind and more families began to develop
I'd say in the Smartsville Timbuktu area.

In Timbuktu which was on the decline at that
point Smartsville had kind of taken over as the nicer place to live.

IU rented what we
now call the Wells Fargo building.

It was the Stewart Brothers store so it was a store
and exchange for you could take your gold and it would be sent to the Mint in San Francisco.

I'm not sure they were doing that at the time.

He was there but it was like a Chinese market.

It was geared towards the Chinese people who lived there to buy the products they wanted.

He also started a Tong.

A Tong I like to equate it to a social organization like say the Masons
or the you know a Lodge.

It was a way of gathering people together for a purpose.

Protection and altruism and you know just whatever reasons they had for wanting to be.

He started this Tong which was also located in the store in Timbuktu.

At one point one
of the minors Mr. Handley had some kind of a dispute with A Tong and he decided he was
going to go and after he had some drinks and was fortified he was going to go and settle
this thing with A Tong.

So he goes to A Tong's house and A Tong's wife sees him.

Tong Yu
she sees him and she says oh this guy is no good.

He's all fired up and he's going to
kill us or something.

So she hits him over the head with a pole and knocked him out and
actually he ended up dying of his injuries.

So well this was not really good for a Chinese
person in those days.

They were going to be blamed for murdering this white guy so they
had an inquest.

Well at the inquest the wife was exonerated and said that no she was just
protecting her family.

So that was kind of an interesting tidbit of gold rush justice
I guess.

Anyway but they ended up not staying there very long.

They went back to Marysville
to the new Chinese Chinatown that was developing in Marysville and lived there and took his
Tong, his club with him to Marysville.

My name is Sans Hall and I'm here to talk about
Mary Halleck Foote and I have to say it's quite a thrill to be sitting in the house in
Grass Valley where she lived.

She and her husband live for the last 20, 30 years of their lives
before they went east to stay with their daughter.

I am fascinated by Mary Halleck Foote.

She was
born in 1847 in a town in upstate New York called Milton.

She was raised to Quaker amongst
her family friends were people like Frederick Douglass and Susan B.

Anthony.

They came to
dinner.

She was, their family was remarkable enough that they sent her to the Cooper Union
School of Design in New York City.

Very unusual for a woman at the time to get an education
especially a college education, but her family was just determined to do that.

So she studied
art there and she was incredibly accomplished artist.

By the time she was, even before she
graduated, she was illustrating books by people like Longfellow did his skeleton and armor
and a beautiful version of the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

She illustrated stories
by Louisa May Alcott.

She had quite an illustrating career.

Then she met Arthur Foote and they decided
to get married and he was a very brilliant and somewhat eccentric but brilliant minor and he
had graduated from Yale and she moved with him to New Almedin, California where he was a
mining engineer and they stayed at a lovely little time there but eventually had to leave
and then began some nomadic years.

They were in Leadville, Colorado where they had a fabulous
life there on their cabin on the ditch.

They went down to Mexico and did a big long trek
through Mexico.

All these were mining concerns and in the process right through this period of
time, Mary began to write.

She kept up her illustrating as best she could but more and more
she was writing letters to her very dear friends back east, the Guilders.

Richard Guilder was
the editor of Century Magazine at the time, extraordinarily well read by everybody and published
everybody from Henry James to Grant to Mark Twain, I mean published everybody and so they were so
beguiled by these letters she was writing that they asked if they could turn them into an essay
and thus began her literary career and then she went on to publish 12 novels, many of them
serialized in Century Magazine.

So eventually they wind up in Boise, Idaho and my own feeling
about this is that Arthur had begun to feel that he didn't want to make his money on the back
of miners toiling away underground.

So he had this great vision about bringing water to arid
places which in the 1880s and 90s was sort of becoming something that people were thinking
about that water was kind of a gold which of course we've come to see is very true.

So they moved
he had this vision of harnessing the Snake River creating a large canal called the Big Ditch
that's what he called it and then making lots of irrigation canals off of it and he poured money
he had lots of founders and backers from back east but then the 1890s recession hit and all that
water dried up and it was the driest year on record in the Boise, Idaho area and the whole thing
went belly up so they didn't know what to do and Mary spent all of her time writing, writing,
illustrating but also writing she worked like a fiend to support the family while Arthur was
wandering the nation taking jobs and offering his stuff and eventually his brother-in-law J.

D.

Hague who had with partners taken over the North Star Mine tapped him.

J.

D.

Hague knew that Arthur
was a really brilliant engineer and he brought him out here but Mary writes in her in her
reminiscences that there was no talk of bringing the wife and the kids that he was here on
sufferance and there was some very shaky years there but eventually he had he predicted where
a shaft should be sunk and where gold could be found and gold was so then Mary Hallock
Foot and their three children were moved out here and then this house the very one we're
sitting in here was built designed by Julia Morgan and Mary writes in her reminiscences
that it was a little tricky because it really wasn't her house it belonged to the company
so to speak but eventually you can see they just made it their own so there was a very
Hague created a beautiful family thing here which is in terms of mining you don't think about
but they really did she writes that you could hear the stamp mill going and you didn't ever
want it to stop because it meant a disaster would have happened at the mine because it's
not that far away the mine while she was here she continued to write though there was a big
lull created from grief her youngest daughter Agnes died of appendicitis and she just I
think was stricken by grief but she did work on her reminiscences her memoirs and she
and those eventually were published it's kind of a wonderful story by JD Hague's grandson
who who was through the Huntington Library tried to bring them out and they came out in 1972
it's called a Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West the reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foot
and they are just a beguiling and delightful read before they were published a man named
Wallace Stegner who many people have heard of read them in their unpublished form and he
used quite a chunk chunks and chunks of them in his novel Angle of Repose which one the
Pulits are in 72 ironically and the reason that he was within his rights to use the language
of her was that the reminiscences hadn't been published yet so he was within his legal rights
if not his ethical ones but then he also used her very beguiling letters she wrote to that friend
and Richard that I just mentioned earlier all of her life as she says in her reminiscences
they wrote to each other for 50 years so it's a trove of letters now stored in the Stanford
library which Stegner also borrowed from and then the thing that I find really interesting is
that Mary Hallock Foot had as I've just described an extraordinary life and she wound up here in
Grass Valley where she lived happily with her husband for many years one of the things I love
and it's noted in Mary Hallock Foot's reminiscences is that big dream of Arthur's eventually came true
it took the federal government and 25 years to make it happen but it's a beautiful redemptive aspect
of their story and they lived in a gorgeous house in Boyd they built themselves very similar
to this design actually and I think probably they asked Julia Morgan to incorporate it then
the big wide verandas the big thick columns are very very similar they learned in Mexico
how to keep the cool in in summer and the cold out in winter so I think that's a very interesting
aspect of their lives as well when I think about this eastern woman of such eastern sensibilities
leaving behind all that culture all that art to come west into you know dusty place and I think
of it as dusty and hot and her east coast readers were fascinated of course because she was writing
about an utterly exotic place to them you know and she Mary loved to ride horseback was one of her
favorite things she loved to camp so she had a tremendous sense of adventure as well and I think
nevertheless she was tugged east all the time by what she left behind so I find it also a bit tragic
how much she kept in a way wanting to go east while completely understanding the freedoms that she enjoyed
in being a western woman very profound.

Let me tell you about Madame Harriet or some people
refer to old Harriet old Harriet had a public house on Broad Street that overlooked the Deer Creek
and frequently men would go looking for gold along Deer Creek and they would stop in at her house to visit
for a little while now Madame Harriet had a bouncer of sorts that worked with her so if anybody was
roughing her up or roughing up any of her ladies in her sporting house he would he would quickly
dispatch them quickly get rid of them one night they had a visit from a gentleman by the name of Perry
and Perry was a minor and he was very well respected in the area everybody liked him had a great laugh
and Perry had made a find of some gold in Deer Creek and stopped in at Madame Harriet's
that was the last anyone saw of him until they found him in an Eddy on Deer Creek and he had a huge bruise on his head
and he had no clothes.

Now the day prior to that he had gone to visit with Madame Harriet wearing a brand new outfit
got himself a brand new suit and hat he made this great find in Deer Creek and he wanted to spend some of the money
and he wanted to celebrate with Madame Harriet but that was the last anybody saw of him was that he was at Harriet's
and so it wasn't unusual that Madame Harriet would be accused of murdering him a lot of the sporting women at that time were accused of theft
or blackmail and so the fact that Madame Harriet was someone that they sought out and arrested for Perry's death wasn't unusual
as I said it was the last place anybody saw him so they just assumed that she did something to him
she insisted she did not and was very upset and crying and weeping and on her knees in front of all of these men saying please I didn't have anything to do with this
she said her bouncer didn't have anything to do with this either strong man that followed around yet nothing to do with either
but she was arrested was put in jail was awaiting trial
some of the law enforcement agents and some of the other minors wanted to find out more about where Mr. Perry had died
and so they went looking along Deer Creek now this is 1852 there had been an incredible rain in the area
there was no natural bridge no bridge that went over Deer Creek it was trees that had fallen and that's how you got across
but during the storm many more trees had fallen than just the couple that generally the minors would go across
Mr. Perry was one of them that did walk across this tree bridge
and as these law enforcement agents and the minors were walking across this bridge to inspect the Eddie and just look around to see what they might find about Mr. Perry
two of them fell off of the bridge now as I said it had stormed and so the creek was very high and it was running very swiftly
so both of these men hit their head at just the same area that Mr. Perry had hit his head
and their bodies were being treated like ragdolls and they ended up being in the brush and in this Eddie and being tossed around and turned around
and before you know it they too didn't have any of their clothes on them they were torn off and ripped off by tree limbs and by the rocks
and so in that one instant they realized Madam Harriet was not the murderer and so they let her go
when they let her go Madam Harriet stands in the street and praises God for answering her prayers and for watching over her
and she decides at that moment that she will no longer be a soil dove and work in public houses and then goes the straight and narrow
the last we hear of her is she goes on to San Francisco and becomes somebody who works as someone that proselytizes in streets and tries to
it was before the Salvation Army but that's pretty much what she did she would tell people about the Lord
so from public house to being someone who also talks in the public not about soil doves any longer but about the Lord
I am Shelley Covert and I am on the Nevada City Rancheria Tribal Council
I'd like to acknowledge and honor some of the Nissanan women that were here long long before me
I survived the time of what we call the time of the great change which was the great gold rush
our families in our society is countless generations old thousands of years we've been here from the same place
and at the time of the gold rush of course tens of thousand people came into this territory and those were the people who met the gold rush face on
they moved from a completely oral society where we did not write things down everything was passed on by word of mouth
and they in one generation moved when they were taken away to the Indian boarding schools and talked to read and write
we moved from an oral society to a written society so today we all read and write but I truly believe that the culture is passed on orally even still
so sometimes at this time of great change the times were very hard for the Nissanan people
and this is a story I try not to dwell on too much because while there is a lot of pain and there was a lot of really bad stuff that happened to our people during that great time of change
the people did survive we survived and it's because of their strength and their tenacity those women who you know they kept having their children
they kept bringing them up as best as they could but what also happened here on our territories every once in a while when times would get really rough
it seems to be like sprinkled throughout time you will have these people who are champions for people who are really in need and it still happens today
and one of these women who was a champion for the Nissanan was a woman named Belle Douglas and she was the daughter of I believe he was a very high powered lawyer here in Nevada County
who they had come over from the east coast very politically intertwined with the new government that was created here in Nevada County, Nevada City
and she I love thinking about this because this was a time before women could vote so here is this woman and the big hat and the real tight dress and the corset and everything
and she championed for our people we have many many many documents where she wrote to the Bureau of Indian Affairs worrying about the Indians
they were being abused many times and she took notice and she wouldn't stand for it and so she did all she could we have decades of correspondence between her and the Bureau of Indian Affairs demanding that they help the people here
and of course while the Bureau of Indian Affairs had a different take on it they said well those are a sovereign people we can't interfere
Belle did everything she could with another group of local ladies that lived up near the reservation here in Nevada City which was just up off of Cement Hill Road
and so Belle Douglas was also a founding member of our local Laurel Parler number six of the Native Daughters of the Golden West and she used her family affluence
and she used her friendships within the Native Daughters of the Golden West and also the Native Sons of the Golden West they used their lawyers and their political prowess I guess you could say
they ended up getting our reservation up on Cement Hill federally recognized and it's created as an official reservation for our tribe of Indians
and again this was in 1913 so reading back through you know the women's the suffragettes and all these different movements that were happening
these women they were so strong and because of her we never would have been federally recognized and never had our reservation up there in Nevada City on Cement Hill
along with that protection came the protection of the people who were up there and the protection especially through some of these correspondents she seems to have
I don't not just a soft spot but she has a very special place in her heart for the old Indian ladies that were living up there
and it's just so well received through the correspondents that because of Bell Douglas we were able to be sort of saved and I think it brings a great opportunity to acknowledge her
we've written we've read in some of the old hundred year ago today newspapers that the Union does they've mentioned Bell Douglas and they said she had an infectious laugh
and she always had a different hat on and just sort of paints the picture of this woman through being able to read her handwritten correspondences
always advocating for the Nissanan people here and then reading these other articles I had nothing to do with the tribe but talking about her personality it was really quite beautiful
there's a street in Grass Valley called Kate Hayes Street and people often wonder where that name came from and the street was named for a wonderful songstress who was 17 when she came to the gold country
she was discovered in Dublin Island she would frequently take her boat out into a river and just sing to her heart's content and a lot of other people would hear her sing
and they would paddle their little canoes and then anchor them not too terribly far from where she would be rowing so they could hear her sing
and it was on one of those journeys that a person that trained individuals in opera heard her sing and discovered her and took her right away to Venice to get her to be trained in singing and performing
and they decided that they'd make a lot of money in the gold country which many entertainers did come to the gold country for that very reason
and you had some famous entertainers that were here Laura Keane who entertained with Edwin Booth whose brother John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln
this was just a hub of activity for anybody who wanted to get their start in the entertainment field they made a lot of money here because minors wouldn't necessarily just throw coins at their feet but they would throw gold at their feet
so they would, this is the place where you made a lot of money so Kate Hayes being here in Nevada County was not unusual but she had this wonderful voice
and men said that when she sang that it felt as though there was a heavenly choir around them so you would see these men at the theaters where she would sing
she was beautiful too but you would just see them sitting with their eyes closed listening to her sing and just imagining themselves being lifted up to heaven out of the cold of a creek
or panning for gold wherever it is that they were at or using their picks to find gold it was a difficult life but Kate Hayes lifted them out of there
and not only was Kate someone that sang but she would visit with the minors too the following days after she would do a show
it wasn't unusual for her to go and visit with them and pick up a pick and help them pan or mine for gold and the minors the prospectors loved her
and so they named a street after her Kate Hayes Street so that is where it came from
eventually Kate makes all the money that she thinks that she needs to start a life again in Dublin Ireland and that is where she returns
so we remember her always in the name of the street
I am Lorraine Gervais and I get to talk about Lola Montez which is a real treat
she arrived in San Francisco on a ship in 1850 I think and by the time she stepped off that ship she was already really famous
that girl had no writing she was like a rock star and she was born in Ireland in a small town and at some point she ended up in Spain and became a Spanish dancer
so she had this crazy erotic dance highly erotic in the 1800s which we will talk about later
but anyway she did this dance and had so many wealthy people they would throw things on stage and give her things to the point that King Ludwig of Valeria gave her a castle and he made her a countess
and so she became very legitimate and being that she was very political she also influenced public policy
to the point that everybody hated her all of the establishment hated her and they ran her out of the country
so Lola boarded the ship and came to San Francisco around the horn and this was in the time of the gold rush so it was a pretty big deal
it was a rough place so she set up shop as a dancer doing this very famous spider dance I think is what people really remember her for
and essentially it was her wearing petticoats that were knee length which was shocking and she had flesh colored stockings on underneath
and so she would flick up her petticoats like this to show her thighs and sort of ride around and jump around on stage
and actually every once in a while touch her legs looking for spiders and so men at the time in that time period went ape over this
and some people hated her some people called her you know like harlot and just a very naughty low kind of person in the moral times of that day
but people would throw things on stage they would throw gold nuggets because she was in the gold rush times
they would throw money they would throw rotten vegetables on her for the people that hated her
but the thing about Lola was that she would insult people she would yell at them she would horse whip people
and the girl knew how to work with them let's just say
at some point she moved to grass valley she decided she needed to leave San Francisco she wanted to calm down a little bit
so she came up to the great valley and she ended up in grass valley where she bought a house in 1551
and settled down I mean settled down as much as she could but part of that included she ran a school a dancing school
so she had little girls that would come in and I think a lot of Crabtree was one of those little girls that she ended up teaching how to dance
she had a bear that she had in her yard that she had chained up God only knows what else that she had going on
but she continued to dance and do this crazy flickety flickety thing
and eventually left because that was about all she could do in the gold country and she kind of ran out of her course
so at that point she moved to Australia and tried to do the same thing and it didn't really go very well for her
so she ended up coming back to the United States and moved to New York
she lived in abject poverty she kind of repented all of her evil ways
and sadly she died at 39 years of age and she died of syphilis because of her lifestyle
and I know it's interesting with Olavantes because a lot of people think of her with this you know
she was just a harlot and a whore and all of that stuff
but really she was way ahead of time she was very fiercely independent
she was self employed she kept it together she reinvented herself over and over and over
she was married I think five or six times she didn't put up with nothing else that girl
she did what she wanted to do and if she was living in these times she would not be reviled as much
but in Victorian times that was a huge thing
Laura Keane was another one of the most famous actresses of the old west
and Laura Keane came to the gold country to perform in a variety of plays that she had purchased
that had been specifically written for her by a gentleman by the name of Tom Taylor
Taylor writes a play for her called Our American Cousin
which she starts rehearsing here in the gold country
and she rehearses it with Edwin Booth and is eventually invited to come and perform that very play in Washington
and so she leaves the gold country and starts rehearsing this play and fords theater
and she's very excited because the first people to come to be invited to come are the president
President Lincoln is going to be there with his wife
now a lot of women want to come to see Laura Keane's programs because Laura Keane just dressed had these incredible costumes
so you had women, the few women that were in the San Francisco area when she was performing in the late 1860s
and also in the gold country when she would make her way down in this area and perform at the theaters here
you had women that would come out just to see what she was going to wear
I mean she was a phenomenal actress as well but just to see what she was going to wear
so when she does go to do Our American Cousin in Washington DC
Mary Todd Lincoln wants to go to the play because she wants to see what she's wearing
Lincoln is not necessarily, he goes along with what Mary wants to do
as I said the play was starring Laura Keane and it had as an understudy Edwin Booth
now Edwin Booth came from a very aristocratic background and his whole family was in acting
John Wilkes Booth, his brother, was also an actor
so the fact that Edwin and John Wilkes Booth were also at Ford's Theater during this time did not raise any flags with anybody
they performed there, John Wilkes Booth was there so often that he got his mail at Ford's Theater
and he was there for all of the rehearsals for Our American Cousin
he knew exactly when there was going to be a laugh, when there was going to be a pratfall
when there was going to be any kind of loud sound on stage
and he timed when he shot the president at just the time when he knew there was going to be a laugh
followed by a very loud sound on stage
so it was Laura Keane's night, she got up on stage and they began Our American Cousin
and just the time when there was a laughter and a louch bang there was also the gunfire
which no one knows is a shot to Abraham Lincoln at the time, no one knows this
but she looks in the balcony and she sees Booth jump down onto the stage
and that's when he yells out death to tyrants and he limps off the stage
but she can see the president who's slumped over and she can see Mary Todd Lincoln
with her arms wrapped around her just rocking back and forth
and she knows that there's got to be some comfort there
now Laura Keane is trying to keep panic under control with the audience
but she makes her way up to the balcony as well and she's trying to get people to take their seat
she goes up to the balcony and at this time Lincoln is on the floor
so Laura Keane who asks Mary if she could please hold him
because Mary Todd Lincoln is just hysterical
Laura Keane picks up the president's head and puts the president's head in her lap
and wipes his head with her handkerchief
she stays with Lincoln and Mary Todd right up until they pick the president up
and take him across the street to lie him in bed
and she's there with Mary Todd Lincoln when they inform her that he has expired
you