How One Enterprising Woman Struck Gold Rush Riches

Remember the gold rushes in California starting in 1849 and elsewhere in the Old West? If you thought precious metals were the source of gold rush riches, you would be wrong.

Many who struck riches in the American gold camps were far from grizzled prospectors. This story is about one hardworking wife and mother who went westward with her husband and kids with the fabled ‘49ers and enjoyed some hard-earned riches, if only for a short time.

The mom in question was Luzena Stanley Wilson and her story is one told in a book by historian Lillian Schlissel, “Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey.” Like many women of the West, Luzena was a practical, hardworking wife and mother who found a profit bringing necessary services and order out of the chaos of the California gold camps. She met a real need — feeding and caring for the miners — and turned their hardships into gold through her own hard work.

Luzena, her husband, and their kids came to Nevada City, California, in 1849 after a long journey by wagon train across the Plains and mountains. The good news for this little family was that the hardships of their rugged journey prepared them to face the rough life of the mining camps. Luzana said in her brief diary that the town as they found it was made up of tents lining two steep gulches, and the gulches were “alive with moving men.”

Luzena noticed immediately that the miners needed someone to fix meals and take the rough edges off their living facilities. Before she and her family even got settled into make-shift shelter, she discovered that decent lodging and good food were at a premium.

According to Luzena’s diary, she took quick action. Her husband went out the same day they arrived to find some wood for building the family shelter and put a roof over their weary heads. She describes in her diary what she did while he was gone:

“With my own hands I chopped stakes, drove them into the ground, and set up my table. I bought provisions at a neighboring store and when my husband came back at night he found… twenty miners eating at my table. Each man as he rose put a dollar in my hand and said I might count on him as a permanent customer. I called my hotel ‘El Dorado.’ “

The diary excerpts in the book don’t say how Luzena’s unnamed husband may have reacted — or nothing of what he said about his wife’s enterprising approach to life in the mining camp. But we do read that during the following months she and her husband made about $25.00 a week serving from 75 to 200 borders.

But Luzena’s hard work and popularity paid off in other ways. The miners began to look to her as someone they could trust with their livelihood — and began depositing gold dust and gold nuggets with her for safekeeping. She soon became the town’s leading innkeeper and the nearest thing the mining camp had to a banker. “Many a night,” she wrote, “I have shut my oven door on two milk-pans filled high with bags of gold dust and I have often slept with my mattress lined… I must have had more than two hundred thousand dollars lying unprotected in my bedroom.”

Unfortunately, Luzena Stanley Wilson’s ambition, hard work, and determination failed to have a happy ending. Their hard-won prosperity came to an unhappy ending within 18 months when a major fire swept through the mining camp. The Nevada City settlement was wiped out, leaving 8,000 miners and prospectors homeless. The fire also destroyed the growing fortune Luzena and her family had started. According to Schlissel’s book, the Wilson’s moved on and were lost in the history of the Old West. Either Luzena’s dairy keeping days ended or her continued journal beyond the disaster of the fire was lost.

But the lessons of hard work and being in the right place at the right time remains. Many women and men worked hard and turned their sweat into the true gold rush riches of the mining camps and settlements of the American West.