Beautiful Mine, page 11
Newspapers in Chicago and New York recorded the tales of Hildreth’s obsession. The Chicago Chronicle carried one story that made Tom’s blood boil:
Alfred J. Hildreth loves Mrs. Frances Allen with such true and ardent affection that he has followed her 5,000 miles to prove it. Even though Mr. Allen secured a divorce from his wife because she rode bareback at a charity circus in Spokane, Wash., attired in the reddest of red silken tights, Hildreth says she is dear to him. Mrs. Allen, however, does not return the feeling of young Hildreth, and she has spent many weary hours moving from one city to another to escape the devoted lover.
The tights had been pink, but Tom didn’t bother to correct the story. Frances Allen belonged to him, and neither Alfred Hildreth nor Tom’s own father was going to stand in the way of a wedding.
And Arabella Frances Patchen Allen did not care that Tom’s father disapproved of her life on the stage. She intended to marry his son.
Of all the men who had pursued her since she had left Spokane after the fateful circus ride, Tommy was the one she truly loved. Her first marriage had been troubled from the start. On the day of her wedding to Samuel Allen in 1892, when she was barely eighteen, the groom had disappeared. His drunken companions had held a “special session” and voted to continue the wedding anyway, with a different groom. After several good-natured votes were taken among the unmarried men, each of whom had voted for himself, Samuel had finally reappeared, and the vows were spoken.
For a few years she had enjoyed the social life that was part of being married to a prominent lawyer. Samuel had even given his consent for her participation in the charity circus at Natatorium Park, since half the money would go to the family of a boy who had broken his back in a barrel slide. Her husband had stalked out in a rage when he discovered his beautiful young wife in form-fitting tights and short blue skirt, riveting the attention of every person in the place.
Samuel’s outrage had resulted in a huge quarrel, and she’d left his fine home for good that August. By April of the following year, she had succeeded on the stage. She knew if she hadn’t ridden in the society circus, she might still be married to Samuel and living well, but by leaving Spokane and taking parts in productions in Bradford, Pennsylvania, she’d achieved some success of her own. And her acting career had allowed her to meet Tom Noyes.
The 1897 wedding of Tom Noyes and Frances Allen did not compare in any way to Tom’s sister, Ruth Noyes’s wedding to Arthur Heinz, which linked two prosperous mining families and was celebrated as the most brilliant wedding ever held in Montana. Tom and Frances were married in a small, quiet ceremony and started mining together in Skagway, Alaska, at the foot of a glacier on Otter Creek.
Tom knew he was a lucky man. Not many women would have smiled through the bitter cold and long darkness of an Alaskan winter. Unlike the California gold rush, few women had hurried to the rush in the frozen northland. But his petite, vivacious Frances was one of a handful of women truly interested in mining. She loved the open country and the freedom from the society that had scorned her.
Frances was as eager as Tom to move on when Otter Creek didn’t provide the wealth they were seeking. They headed for wideopen, lawless Nome, located at the edge of the Seward Peninsula on the Bering Sea.
Gold had been discovered at Anvil Creek, and by the spring of 1900, somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand “stampeders” had come to Nome.
Camped above the tide line with thousands of others, Frances, who stood approximately two inches shorter than five feet tall, helped shovel sand into the portable rockers used to sift out the fine gold. Many people believed that the ocean was depositing gold at high tide. Tents and rockers stretched for miles along the beach.
Tom was appointed to a four-year term as a U.S. Commissioner for the Fairhaven District of Alaska, and soon Frances and Tom were again moving in the upper circles of society, albeit a much more flamboyant elite than the stuffy and conventional social strata they’d left behind. Tom’s knowledge of mining and his impeccable character, dubbed “pure gold” by one of the men he worked with on several claims, earned report in lawless Nome.
Tom wanted to find the Alaska mother lode, and Frances always followed where he led. He learned from one of the native people in the area that gold was easier to get on Candle Creek. Frances put away her silks and lace and followed Tom hundreds of miles north to Candle Creek, where they staked several claims.
Frances experienced “mushing” by dogsled and began to learn more and more about prospecting. Alaskan newspapers covered some of the adventures of the prospecting newlyweds, reporting that they endured “perilous trips, lost trails, [and] climbs over glacier fields, where steps had to be cut with an ax.” More than once Frances was credited with saving her husband’s life. After a time, their claims paid off, and Tom became known as “King of the Candle.” He built a home for himself and Frances, where anyone was welcome.
In 1902 Tom’s father died, and Tom inherited an interest in a hotel in Seattle. Success piled on success, and Frances and Tom began to alternate between harsh conditions and adventures in Alaska with society teas and balls in Seattle and Butte.
In 1905, Tom and Frances adopted a half-Eskimo girl, Bonnie, who was approximately five years old. During the winter she attended school in Butte; in the summer she often returned to Alaska with her parents.
As their success in Candle grew, Tom conceived of a plan to bring water to the rich placer diggings. In the autumn of 1907, he left for New York to obtain $200,000 to finance the completion of the Bear Creek ditch. Frances stayed at Candle to manage their interests.
He’d barely arrived in New York when a financial panic hit, jeopardizing the nation’s economy. As a result, no bank would loan him money for a project in Alaska, and funds were so tight Tom had to pawn his watch and jewelry to pay his hotel bills. The bank in Candle and the bank in Nome were threatened with a run by fright-ened customers eager to get their money into their own hands.
In an unprecedented feat of courage and strength, Frances once again came to her husband’s rescue, only this time she saved his financial life. Pawning her jewelry to raise ten thousand dollars, Frances mushed across the frozen Artic tundra in the dead of winter to deliver the proceeds. The story was printed in the Seattle Times and many other newspapers.
With only a driver for her team of malamutes, she started out across the hundreds of miles of ice and snow, the thermometer so low it almost faded from view. Through the short days and into the nights this brave woman trudged on through the snow. Many days were needed for the journey, but the news that the money was coming had spread a better feeling in Nome and the bank was able to weather the storm until relief should arrive. The journey made by Mrs. Noyes was one of the most heroic ever attempted by a woman on her own initiative in the far North, and when she reached Nome she was accorded a welcome that was commensurate with her feat.
The bank was saved, and a woman had been the agent.
Unfortunately, two years later Tom’s bank failed, and his claims at Candle were lost. Tom had made a critical mistake—failing to use his official bank title when he signed checks—that left him personally liable when the bank failed. Tom and Frances retreated to Tongass Island near Ketchikan. In 1913 Tom ventured out to try his luck during a stampede to the Shushana gold strike. Shortly afterward, Frances joined him. There the harsh conditions of the Alaskan goldfields took their final toll.
Although they met with some success, one of the prospecting trips they took resulted in disaster. Days on the trail in temperatures as low as fifty degrees below zero with little shelter and poor food left Tom a “physical wreck.”
On December 15, 1915, Tom was hospitalized in Port Simpson General Hospital in British Columbia. Frances slept on a cot in his room, watching over and caring for him. Later, with Frances and his mother at his side, he was taken to a hospital in St. Louis, but he died of pneumonia on February 2, 1916.
Stunned and heartbroken, their fortune gone, Frances returned alone to Tongass Island. She received a letter that spring from one of their former partners recalling Tom and Frances’s early days at Otter Creek.
Nearly 17 years ago you said goodbye to me on the platform at Seattle and you knew that you were saying farewell to a friend who would have done anything for you. I have not altered. I am just the same William you knew at Otter Creek and in our little camp at the foot of the glacier.
The letter goes on to remember Tom.
I shall never realize that Tommy is dead. Since I left you I have been in many places and had dealings with many men, but I have never come across another Tommy, he was just pure gold. I was trying to think last night if I could remember him being out of temper or cross, but I could not, and we had some trying times. It is a great thing to have had a partner in life who you can look forward to meeting, to whom you can hold your hand out to and look straight in the eye and say “Tommy, I am glad to see you.”
Perhaps there may be another Klondike for us beyond the clouds; if there is I could ask for nothing better than my two dear friends of the glacier should be my partners again.
The writer advised Frances not to return to Alaska, but the woman who had married at eighteen, divorced at twenty-three, and married again that same year to a man she cherished despite the scorn and anger of her father-in-law, returned to the northern land she loved.
She kept body and soul together by managing the Nakat Inlet cannery store, but her love of the Alaskan wilderness eventually lured her away from civilization. She went back to prospecting, where everything she’d learned from her beloved Tommy allowed her to prosper.
Frances married again at the age of forty-five to William Muncaster, who was fifteen years younger. Despite the age difference, Bill had been smitten for years with Frances. He’d sent her love letters and stopped in to visit her between trips to survey Alaska for the Coast and Geodetic Survey. Her daughter Bonnie accompanied Frances and her new stepfather on their honeymoon trip to Alaska’s goldfields.
Frances and William lived in a cabin on Wellesley Lake. They prospected and often went on fishing and hunting trips even when the temperature dipped to fifty below zero. Tom’s memory, however, never faded from Frances’s mind. Visiting a place she and Tom had stayed during the Shushana gold strike, she wrote in her diary, “Everything looks different. Everything is different.”
One thing that never changed was Frances’s love of prospecting. She and William visited their claims until 1946, at which time Frances was seventy-two years old and living in Haines, a small town in southeastern Alaska.
The woman who scandalized Spokane with her daring ride in pink tights, the actress who caused a mining tycoon to shun his heir, the woman who saved her husband’s bank with a grueling trek across the frozen northland, the unlikely prospector who loved Alaska so much she spent fifty-four years there, died on October 28, 1952. William Muncaster provided the press with clippings and stories about her life in Alaska, including a final letter he wrote for the local newspaper.
Dear Sir,
Please publish this letter, for I wish to thank with all my heart all the people, young and old alike, in the town of Haines, Alaska, and the adjoining vicinities North, South, East and West for the unbelievable 100 percent respect shown by them at Mrs. Frances Muncaster’s final rites. I thank you.
William Muncaster
FERMINIA SARRAS: NEVADA’S COPPER MINING QUEEN
“We do not see any reason why women should not engage in mining as well as men. If they can rock a cradle, they can run a car; if they can wash and scrub, they can pick and shovel.”
Editorial comments by the staff at Virginia City, Nevada’s newspaper The Territorial Enterprise, 1871
A strong, but dainty hand dipped a pen into an inkwell and scratched a name in a ledger at the Esmeralda County court-house in 1881. Written in big, bold letters was the name “Ferminia Sarras. Spanish Lady, Belleville.” Every miner in the area was required to register in the tax record and this feisty, forty-one-year-old prospector, often mistaken for being an Indian or Mexican, wanted to list her true heritage. The form completed, Ferminia proudly exited the building and marched off to her mining claims in the western Nevada hills.
A hard rock miner who made and lost a fortune in numerous silver and copper diggings, she was considered by her peers to be a formidable force. Ferminia had a talent for locating valuable ore and was tough enough to defend her mine. The diminutive, slightly overweight woman carried a six-shooter in the folds of her dress to ward off anyone who considered jumping her claim.
Ferminia was born in July 1840 in Nicaragua, a descendant of the noble Contreras family who governed the entire region in the 16th century. Several years before leaving Nicaragua, Ferminia married Pablo Flores and the couple had four little girls. In 1876, the ambitious thirty-six-year-old woman traveled to San Francisco in search of a better life and the immense opportunity for wealth in the nearby goldfields. Whether or not Pablo accompanied his family on the journey is unknown—some historical records indicate that Pablo made his way to the mining district of Nevada without family. After arriving in San Francisco, Ferminia traveled through California and on into Nevada in 1880 with only her daughters by her side.
The prospective miner initially settled in Virginia City, Nevada, after she learned of the discovery of silver in the outlying hills. Looking out of place in a black taffeta dress and wearing a gold cross pendant, Ferminia invested the little funds she had in mining equipment and supplies. She decided to leave her two youngest girls at the Nevada Orphans Asylum before setting out to stake a claim with her two oldest children.
Loaded down with picks, pans, axes, food, and clothing, the three hiked more than one hundred miles from Virginia City to the mining camp of Belleville and then proceeded on to Candelaria. A census from 1875 shows that Pablo was in the vicinity at the same time, but there is no record that the two searched for silver together. And while Ferminia filed her first claim in April of 1883, her husband’s name is not associated with the find. Some speculate that he had died by that time.
The weather in the high desert where Ferminia looked for silver, copper, and gold was extreme. During the winter months, temperatures plunged below freezing and in the summer, the sun’s hot rays were relentless. The weather, though, would not overwhelm the lady miner: She would trek for days at a time carrying a forty-pound pack on her back. The possibility of a great fortune spurred her on, and after scouring the countryside for more than two years, Ferminia finally located valuable silver ore on a site she named “The Central American.”
When Ferminia wasn’t prospecting, she was spending the fruits of her labor in the mining camps that dotted the Candelaria Hills. She splurged on the finest food and champagne and kept company with a variety of miners, most of whom were considerably younger than she.
She was also drawn to gunslingers, since they would be valuable in defending her claims. One such suitor lost his life defending her property from thieves. In early 1881, another of the men she became involved with left her with a new baby to care for and disappeared. On January 25, 1881, she gave birth to her fifth child, a son named Joseph A. Marshall. She carried the newborn from one boom camp to another, never deviating from her mission to stake more claims.
In 1885, Ferminia moved her family into a small house in the railroad town of Luning, Nevada, near Tonopah. After locating a series of copper mines in the area, she purchased a ranch in Sand Springs, a spot east of Fallon, and a toll road in Death Valley. The toll road proved to be one of the most profitable ventures she ever entered into. During the years when her mines were not producing, she lived off the funds earned from the road. In addition to supporting her family on the income, she helped destitute miners passing through the area who needed a meal and a place to sleep.
Determined that she would one day find a strike that would yield millions, Ferminia moved south to Silver Peak, a location rumored to be rich with silver and copper. She registered numerous claims in the area, none of which panned out to be worth much at all.
It wasn’t until 1900 that she managed to make the significant money she dreamed she could from her various mines. Lucrative ore deposits found near Tonopah prompted investors to scramble to buy up claims. Ferminia’s holdings in the vicinity included abundant copper diggings and she sold off twenty-five claims at $8,000 a piece. She celebrated her windfall in San Francisco in the way she always did whenever she got a little ahead financially: staying in fancy hotels, buying elegant clothing, and dining at the most expensive eateries.
As a result of the copper discovery, the area around Tonopah grew at an alarming rate. By 1905, the region was in desperate need of a railroad depot to accommodate the miners and businessmen who were traveling back and forth between Tonopah and the nearby camp of Goldfield. Railroad executives decided against paying the landowners in the area the outrageous price they were asking for their property to build the depot. They chose instead to create a new town north of the Caldelaria Hills and build the depot there. Ferminia’s reputation as Nevada territory’s “Copper Queen” prompted railroad executives to name the spot Mina.
Mina was a prosperous location and Ferminia benefited greatly from the influx of people to the town.
Over the years, she amassed a handsome sum selling off her land to the brokerage firms and entrepreneurs. Although she had relinquished many of her holdings in the district, she still possessed many profitable mines throughout the state.
