Women of the Rush
Near Groveland, California
About ninety percent of the forty-niners were men. That is the figure that tends to be cited, and it is roughly accurate. It has also had the effect, across a hundred and seventy years of Gold Rush historiography, of making the Gold Rush a story in which women are almost absent. They were not absent.
The women who came to the camps in the early eighteen-fifties were a diverse group with, in many cases, more economic sense than their male counterparts. Domestic labor, in a camp where ninety percent of the people were men who had no idea how to cook, sew, or do laundry, commanded rates that would have been unthinkable in the cities those men had come from. A woman who ran a boarding house in a mining camp in eighteen fifty could clear more money per week than most of the miners who were her customers. Several of the largest commercial operations in the larger camps, the boarding houses, the restaurants, the laundries, were owned and operated by women who accumulated capital that outlasted the gold.
Brothel operators, who are rarely included in polite Gold Rush histories, ran some of the more sophisticated commercial enterprises in the larger towns. They understood credit, managed employees, and in several documented cases used their earnings to fund more respectable business ventures after the rush.
Women built the institutions that turned temporary camps into towns: the schools, the churches, the civic organizations that gave a mining settlement the infrastructure of a permanent community. Their names are almost uniformly absent from the land records and business registries because women rarely held title to land or deeds to businesses, regardless of who had put up the money. The social architecture of the Gold Rush was built in large part by people who were legally invisible when the building was done.
The monument to that is not on any street in Columbia or Angels Camp or Sonora. It is in the towns themselves, still standing, which would not have become towns without the work that women did to make them livable.
