Beautiful Mine, page 10
During an exchange of wounded prisoners Charley was freed and transported back to her regiment. While she was recuperating she learned that General Curtis had recommended her for a promotion. She was soon upgraded to First Lieutenant and served out the rest of the war with her unit. Doctor Terry kept his word and never told anyone of Charley’s true identity. Charley continued with her life dressed in male attire, and she never failed to provide for her children.
She also never fully abandoned her search for Jamieson. It was while she was on an excursion three miles from Denver City that she came in contact with him again. Charley and Jamieson rode towards one another on a narrow road through a mountain pass. He was riding a mule and from a distance Charley thought there was something familiar about his countenance. As they neared each other she began to realize that it was Jamieson. At roughly the same time he recognized her too. He went for his revolver, but Charley was a second too quick for him.
Charley sent a bullet Jamieson’s way and he tumbled off his mule. A bullet from his gun whistled past Charley’s head, just missing her. She leveled her revolver at him as he tried to pull himself to his feet. Two more rounds sailed into his body, and he fell down again. He wasn’t dead, but Charley was determined to change that. Just as she removed a second revolver from her holster, two hunters came upon the dispute. The hunters stopped the gunplay, constructed crude irons, and hauled Jamieson off to Denver. Charley followed along behind them, cursing the murderer of her husband the whole way.
Jamieson was taken to a boardinghouse and examined by a physician. Three bullets were removed from his body, but none of the wounds were proved fatal. Within a few weeks he was back on his feet and telling anyone who would listen the whole story of Charley’s past life. He told the story of why she was after him and absolved her of blame. He left town and headed for New Orleans.
When word of Charley’s true identity made the papers, she became famous. Her efforts during the Civil War were now made all the more astounding in light of the truth of her sex. Charley sought refuge from her newfound popularity in the mountains around Denver. There she married a bartender by the name of H. L. Guerin. The two ran a saloon and a boardinghouse before selling both businesses and mining for gold. The couple had two children together. Charley penned her autobiography in 1861, and subsequent details about her life were published in the Colorado Transcript newspaper twenty-four years later by a reporter who claimed to have known Charley and served with her in the cavalry.
Some historians believe there were more than one “Charley Hatfield” and that the story of their lives has intertwined over the years to become one. Still others insist that there was only one person by that name—a daring woman unafraid to venture into areas women seldom entered. Historical records show that she eventually moved to St. Joseph, Missouri and lived out her days surrounded by her loving family.
ETHEL BERRY: MINER BRIDE OF THE KLONDIKE
“They hit it big up on Rabbit Creek. I’ll take the rowboat up to stake us a couple of claims. You put together what we need for the winter.”
—Miner Clarence Berry’s instructions to his wife and fellow prospector, Ethel, 1896
Bitterly cold snow flurries pelted the determined features of twenty-one-year-old Ethel Berry’s face as she drove her dog sled over the Chilkoot Pass in Alaska. Clad in a pair of men’s mackinaw breeches and moccasins, she cracked her whip over the team of animals hauling an enormous mound of supplies behind them. Ethel was slowly making her way to the spot where her husband Clarence was prospecting along the Bonanza Creek, later renamed Rabbit Creek, near the town of Forty Mile. Five months prior to embarking on the arduous journey she had married her childhood sweetheart, promising to follow after him all the days of her life. The newlyweds agreed to spend their honeymoon searching for gold in the Yukon Territory.
In spite of the newspaper articles in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in the late 1890s, which firmly reported that Alaska’s frigid terrain was “no place for women,” Ethel believed she was strong enough to withstand the brutal trip. The outing to the area where Clarence was panning was a nine-week venture from its starting point in Skagway.
In 1896, the quickest way to reach the remote Bonanza Creek from Skagway was to trek the Inside Passage of Alaska, over a rugged channel that led to British Columbia and Lake Bennett, then travel by boat downstream along the Yukon River, some five hundred miles. Next would be a hike to the town of Dawson and hiring a dog sled team to go to the panning site.
For more than two months, Ethel slept on the ground in a wolf fur-lined sleeping bag and dined primarily on sandwiches made of sticky flapjacks and cold bacon. When she arrived at the camp, Clarence escorted his bride to their primitive new home and left her there to unpack while he worked out on the creeks. The crude structure had no door, windows, or floors, and it wasn’t until a hole was cut in the front wall frame that she could even go inside.
As Ethel surveyed the shelter, she remembered a warning she’d received from an elderly prospector she met in Portland, Oregon: “Gold seekers in the heart of Alaska must put up with living in drafty cabins, tents, or caves. Their chief food in winter is bear-fat, and a bath or change of clothing is death.” The words echoed inside her head and for a single moment she contemplated returning to her parents’ home in central California.
Love for her husband and a severe case of gold fever prompted her to stay and make the best of the difficult living conditions. In an interview several years later, Ethel described the initial hardship she and Clarence faced while setting up house.
We had all the camp-made furniture we needed, a bed and stove—a long, little sheet-iron affair, with two holes on top and a drum to bake in. The fire would burn up and go out if you turned your back on it for a minute. The water we used was all snow or ice, and had to be thawed. If anyone wanted a drink, a chunk of ice had to be thawed and (the hot water) cooled again.
Ethel Bush Berry was born in 1873 in Selma, California, where the average low temperature in the winter was thirty-nine degrees. Her parents were farmers, and although she was raised to endure hard labor and long hours of work, nothing could prepare her for the frozen north.
Clarence spent days away from Ethel searching for a profitable claim. The hope that he could locate a rich stake and provide his wife with the luxury he felt she deserved kept him going back to the frigid creek beds and icy mines. Ethel occupied her time tending to their home. She cleaned and cooked and made flour sack curtains for the windows. The sacks were eventually taken down and cut into strips to use to sift pay dirt in order to find chunks of gold. Ethel took her daily baths by lamplight in a washtub used for collecting pay dirt.
Clarence’s early but determined attempts to find gold were unsuccessful. While waiting for the big strike he worked tending bar in Bill McPhee’s saloon in Forty Mile to provide an income for his wife and himself. The longest stretch of time Ethel was left alone to fend for herself was five weeks. She knew the separation from her husband was necessary, however. Someone had to stay on their land to keep claim jumpers from overtaking their property.
The time apart from Clarence seemed like an eternity. “I missed him terribly and there was absolutely nothing to do,” she later wrote in her memoirs. “No one who has not had a like experience could appreciate even half the misery contained in those words—nothing to do. Just imagine sitting for hours in one’s home doing nothing, looking out a scrap of a window and seeing nothing, searching for work and finding nothing. At times when I felt I could not bear another minute of the utter blackness of such an existence, I would walk to a little cemetery nearby for consolation.”
With the arrival of spring, Ethel found plenty to occupy her time. When the ice melted and the rocky mountains began to crumble away from the shifting snowpacks, she had new places to pan for gold. While examining chunks of bedrock one day, Ethel unearthed a handful of nuggets from their claim. Not long after her find, Clarence returned with rumors about a major discovery a few miles from their present location. The pair quickly packed their belongings and headed for the spot at Eldorado Creek. Clarence reasoned it was better to have two claims making money than one. Given Ethel’s talent for prospecting, she could see to the Bonanza Creek claim and he would work the one at Eldorado Creek, provided they found gold.
The first pan Ethel dipped into the clear, cold water produced favorable results. Layers of gold rock reached from the point where Ethel was panning in the creek to a nearby craggy ledge. The Berrys had hit the mother lode. They sank a shaft deep into the ground and began stockpiling gold-bearing gravel. A stampede to the Klondike followed the news of their discovery and of a few other miners working the creek bed downstream from them. Almost overnight Ethel went from living in solitude to regularly entertaining numerous miners for dinner. The Berry home was always filled with cold, tired, hungry prospectors who enjoyed Ethel’s cooking and her company.
In July 1897, a jubilant but exhausted Ethel boarded a steamer bound for Washington. Clarence had decided to remain behind to secure the claim and complete the digging. Ethel was sent ahead with $100,000 in gold dust and nuggets tucked inside a moose-hide bedroll. After she deposited their find in a bank she was going to California to visit her family.
When the ship docked in Seattle she was bombarded by reporters who had heard about the Alaska gold rush and were anxious to interview the brave men and women who were the first to prospect in the frozen territory. Adorned in weathered garments that were kept in place with one of Clarence’s belts, and wearing shoes with holes in them, Ethel was the only woman miner among the plethora of men. Journalists called her “The Bride of the Klondike” and her candor in answering the questions posed to her made headlines. A feature article about her exploits circulated around the world and included the advice she would give to women who were thinking about going north.
“Why, to stay away,” she said with a slight chuckle. “It’s no place for a woman. I mean for a woman alone—one who goes to make a living or a fortune. Yes, there are women going into the mines alone. There were when we came out; widows and lone women to do whatever they could for miners, with the hope of getting big pay.
“It’s much better for a man, though, if he has a wife along. The men are not much at cooking up there, and that is the reason they suffer with stomach troubles and some say they did, with scurvy. After a man has worked all day in the diggings he doesn’t feel much like cooking. . .”
Although Ethel spoke a great deal about the hardship of living in the glacier wilderness, some newspaper reporters chose to focus more on the riches to be had in Alaska than the difficulties of getting to the fortune. The bold type across the California Alta News July 17, 1897, edition read, “Woman Keeps House, Picks Up $10,000 in Nuggets in Spare Time.” The headline overshadowed Ethel’s comments about the hazards of traveling across the region on a dog sled. “I put on my Alaskan uniform first . . . the heavy flannels, warm dress with short skirt, moccasins, fur coat, cap and gloves, kept my shawl handy to roll up in case of storms, and was rolled in a full robe and bound to the sled, so when it rolled over I rolled with it and many tumbles in the snow I got that way.”
Ethel and Clarence’s Klondike claim was one of the richest ever found in Alaska. More than $140,000 was pulled out of the mine in a single day. The couple wisely invested their discovery, developing claims throughout the Yukon, further adding to their wealth. The couple used their money to purchase a sprawling farm near her parents’ home in Selma. Reporters interested in learning how Clarence and his wife managed to survive the Arctic frontier and return with such a large treasure were surprised by his answer: “I question seriously whether I would have done so well if it had not been for the excellent advice and aid of my wife. I want to give her all the credit that is due to her, and I can assure you that it is a great deal.”
In spite of her initial hesitation to go back to the mines at Eldorado and Bonanza Creek, Ethel did return in the spring of 1898. Her sister accompanied her on the second journey over the treacherous Chilkoot Pass. In addition to cooking and caring for her husband and the other prospectors in the area, Ethel carried out various mining duties. She oversaw the diggings at two of the major claims the Berrys owned.
In 1907, the enterprising Berrys began a successful, large-scale dredging operation in the Circle Mining district in the north central region of Alaska. The operation was an excavation activity carried out at least partially underwater. Dredging scraped the gold sediment off the seabed and further increased Clarence and Ethel’s strike.
In 1909, Ethel loaned $70,000 in gold nuggets she had found for a display in the Alaskan Yukon Pacific Exposition held in Seattle. After the exposition, Clarence collected the nuggets and sent them on to Tiffany & Co., where the gold was melted down and transformed into a dresser set for his wife.
For more than thirty years, Ethel and Clarence traveled back and forth between their farm in California and their home in Alaska. Clarence passed away during one of those trips in 1930. Ethel then moved to Beverly Hills and died at her home there in 1948 at the age of seventy-five.
FRANCES ALLEN NOYES: MINER ON CANDLE CREEK
“If I can’t be in the hills, I would sooner be dead.”
—Frances Noyes, 1928
Acluster of tents dotted a strip of frozen earth at the base of a massive glacier in Skagway, Alaska. Beyond the solid layer of ice was a thick forest that followed the contours of a mountain. The numerous trees that covered the ridge were like deep-pile carpet and the grassy scruff under the timbers were red and yellow with the coming of autumn. A clear, cold stream flowed swiftly from the white peaks, spilling over the layers of compacted snow. Pieces of the iceberg broke off and fell into the freezing water.
Frances Noyes, a pretty, determined woman dressed in a heavy wool coat, thick-soled, knee-high boots, and wool gloves traveled along a gravel trail running parallel to the stream.
Frances stopped momentarily to plunge a gold mining pan into the rocky creek bed and sift through the pebbles. Like hundreds of other miners that rushed to Alaska in 1898 looking for gold, Frances was confident she would discover a fortune. The biting wind and snow flurries that cut across her path did not deter her from her work. She glanced around at the setting and smiled.
She was invigorated by her surroundings. “If there ever was a woman prospector, it was Frances,” Frances’s nephew William Simonds recalled of his aunt. “She was never as content in her life as she was mining in the Alaskan wilderness.”
Frances and her husband, Thomas C. Noyes, searched for gold along Otter Creek near Skagway from September 1899 to February 1900. She was one of a handful of women miners who dared to brave the sub-zero temperatures of the isolated Klondike. The intrepid female pioneer actually chose mining as her second career. Her first job was as a stage actress. Beautiful and talented, she spent years entertaining audiences in boomtowns across the Old West. One audience member was Thomas Noyes, a man she fell in love with and wanted to marry in spite of his family’s objections and without whom, she may not have ever realized her true calling.
“I shall conduct no training school for actresses,” Montana mining tycoon John Noyes declared. He sent his son Tom a withering glare. The boy had obviously been taken in by a pretty face, but this was not the type of woman he had in mind as a wife for his son. She’d been married and divorced, and that scandal had hardly quieted when a new one had erupted.
The full weight of his father’s displeasure only strengthened Tom’s resolve. “You have $2,500 in a trust fund that you are holding for me, have you not, Father?”
“Yes.”
“Well, give me that. I will start out for myself, and you can cut me off without a cent.”
Tom had loved Frances Allen ever since he first saw her in a theatrical production. His father thought Tom was too young to marry and Frances too infamous to be his bride, but Tom intended to marry her, and soon, for Frances had another would-be suitor from New Orleans who was stalking her from state to state and might soon appear in Butte.
Tom did not change his mind, though his father continually dredged up the infamy of Frances’s past, starting with her divorce from Samuel Allen earlier in 1897. The newspapers had reported every titillating development. According to one account, Samuel Allen had told his friends that his ex-wife “is a good woman, but has a passion for money, a siren who uses her charms to infatuate men to the point where they lavish their wealth upon her, but she never strays from the straight and narrow path.”
A report in Spokane’s Spokesman entitled “She’s An Actress, Ex-Prosecuting Attorney Objects to the Life” claimed, “The wreck of this family commenced about the time of the society circus at Natatorium Park in 1895, when Mrs. Allen rode two horses bareback. Mr. Allen did not enjoy this exhibition, and the family was never a happy one.”
Tom suspected his father had seen that article. He was certain the electrifying accounts had convinced his father to forbid him to marry the woman he loved. The newspapers, in Tom’s opinion, wrongly made Frances sound like a beautiful but heartless, money-hungry tease. Tom’s father certainly believed this and reminded his son that no respectable woman would flaunt herself on stage unless she was out to snare a rich husband. But Tom knew Frances did not care about money. She would marry him with his small trust fund and no prospects of inheriting his father’s huge fortune. She would marry him for him.
What worried Tom was the threat hanging over Frances’s life. A would-be suitor, Alfred Hildreth, was stalking Frances, and his actions had steadily become more dangerous. At the Leland Hotel in Chicago, Hildreth had lain in wait for his mistress for five days. The Southerner confronted Frances in the lobby, and witnesses said Frances agreed to dine with him at a downtown restaurant, where the man brandished a carving knife while declaring he would do something desperate if she wouldn’t have him. He had followed Frances through several states, and his ardor increased every time he caught up with her. Tom knew Alfred could show up at any time.
