'Really, everybody ought to go to the mines just to see how little it takes to make people comfortable in the world,' Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clapp wrote from the mines in California, to her sister Molly in New England. She penned 23 letters in all, from September 13, 1851, through November 21, 1852, describing life at Rich Bar and nearby Indian Bar, on the 'East Branch of the North Fork of Feather River,' roughly 120 miles northeast of Sacramento, in present-day Plumas National Forest.

Louise Clapp's letters were published as a series, from January 1854 through December 1855, under the nom de plume 'Dame Shirley,' in Ferdinand Ewer's short-lived literary journal: The Pioneer: or California Monthly Magazine. Ewer informed readers that the letters 'were not (originally) intended for publication, and have been inserted with scarcely an erasure from us.' Among those who read the series was Bret Harte (see August 1995 Wild West). Harte was influenced by the Shirley letters when he wrote The Luck of Roaring Camp and other California Gold Rush stories. Nineteenth century historian, philosopher and writer Josiah Royce said the Shirley letters 'form the best account of an early mining camp that is known to me.' And in the 20th century, when the Book Club of California invited 16 leading authorities to list the 10 best primary sources on the California Gold Rush, 13 named the Shirley letters. No other source received that much recognition.

Louisa Amelia Knapp Smith was born on July 28, 1819, in Elizabeth, N.J., the daughter of Moses and Lois (Lee) Smith. Her father was the schoolmaster at the local academy. The family eventually moved back to her father's hometown of Amherst, Mass., where Moses died in 1832, at age 47. Louise was 13 at the time. Lois followed her husband to the grave five years later, leaving seven orphans. Louise was entrusted to an attorney and family friend in Amherst, Osmyn Baker. He sent her to school at the Female Seminary in Charlestown, Mass., and the Amherst Academy. Her closest sibling was Mary Jane, or 'Molly,' to whom she later wrote her now famous letters. Louise may have met Amherst residents Emily Dickinson and Helen Hunt (Jackson), but Louise, as historian Rodman Wilson Paul notes, was 11 years older than her literary neighbors.

Someone with whom Louise did exchange letters was Alexander Hill Everett. They met by chance in August 1839 while traveling by stagecoach in southern Vermont. Louise Smith was then a delicate, bright, golden-haired 20-year-old student. Alexander Everett was a widely traveled diplomat 30 years her elder. She was fascinated by him, in an academic way. He was infatuated with her. As her literary mentor, he advised, on October 31, 1839: 'If you were to add to the love of reading the habit of writing you would find a new and inexhaustible source of comfort and satisfaction opening upon you.' She accepted his advice, rejected his love. Everett died in Macao, China, in June 1847, the same year he received a letter from Louise announcing her engagement to a young doctor.

The man Louise Smith married was five years her junior. Fayette Clapp had graduated from Brown University in 1848 and was a medical student and doctor's apprentice when he met Louise. Both Louise and Fayette Clapp longed to go west, so when they heard that gold had been discovered in California, the newlyweds packed their trunks and boarded the schooner Manilla. They sailed out of New York Harbor in August 1849, arriving in San Francisco about five months later. The foggy, damp bay weather did not agree with Fayette. He suffered from bilious attacks, fever, ague and jaundice while in San Francisco. Louise, on the other hand, liked the hilly city. She wrote: 'What with its many-costumed, many-tongued, many-visaged population: its flashy looking squares, built one day and burned the next; its wickedly beautiful gambling houses; its gay stores where the richest productions of every nation can be found; and its wild, free, unconventional style of living, it possesses, for the young adventurer especially, a strange charm.'

For health reasons, Fayette Clapp moved inland with his wife, settling in Plumas City, a place Louise described as 'a was-to-have-been city' of 'vanishing splendors.' Built near the Feather River, between Sacramento City and Marysville, Plumas City no longer exists.

On June 7, 1851, Fayette set out with a friend to Rich Bar, hoping the pure mountain air would be good for his health. He also hoped that good mining investment opportunities existed at the camp, and that there was a shortage of doctors. In many other places in California, doctors and lawyers were already in abundance. Luckily for young Dr. Clapp, prospects at Rich Bar were good on all counts. Once he had successfully established himself, he returned for his wife in September. Since Louise was provided with a cook and a laundress, she had plenty of time for writing.

There were few women at Rich Bar. Louise found only four besides herself. The mining camp had no brothel, although the Empire, a combination inn, restaurant and general store, had originally been constructed with a brothel in mind. The venture had failed and the gamblers who had invested $8,000 — building and furnishing the two-story structure with its 'elegant mirror,' glass windows, monte tables, and 'bedsteads so heavy that nothing short of a giant's strength could move them' — sold out to Curtis and Louise Bancroft for a few hundred dollars.

Louise Bancroft (referred to in the letters as 'Mrs. B-') was the first woman Louise Clapp met at Rich Bar. The writer describes her as 'a gentle and amiable looking woman, about twenty-five years of age.' When Louise Clapp entered the Empire, Mrs. Bancroft 'was cooking supper for some half-a-dozen people, while her really pretty boy, who lay kicking furiously in his champagne basket cradle and screaming…had that day completed just two weeks of his earthly pilgrimage.'

The other women at the camp included 'Mrs. R-,' whose name has not yet been decoded by historians. She lived with her husband in a three-room canvas house she kept exceptionally clean. Louise dubbed her 'the little sixty-eight-pounder queen.' In her fifth letter, she quotes a miner who praised Mrs. R- enthusiastically. 'Magnificent woman that,' the miner said. 'A wife of the right sort she is. Why, she earnt her old man nine-hundred dollars in nine weeks, clear of all expenses, by washing! Such women ain't common I tell you; if they were, a man might marry and make money by the operation.'

Mrs. Nancy Bailey was also tiny. She shared a dirt floor cabin with her husband and three children, but she fell sick and died weeks after Louise arrived. 'I have just returned from the funeral of poor Mrs. B-,' Louise wrote, 'who died of peritonitis, a common disease in this country.' The body was placed in a coffin and carried, with a monte tablecloth for a pall, to a mountainside cemetery, where the gravestone still stands.

The first woman to arrive at Rich Bar ran the Indiana Hotel with her father. She was called the Indiana Girl. Louise wrote about her in her second letter:

The sweet name of girl seems sadly incongruous when applied to such a gigantic piece of humanity….The far-off roll of her mighty voice, booming through two closed doors and a long entry, added greatly to the severe attack of nervous headache under which I was suffering when she called. This gentle creature wears the thickest kind of miner's boots, and has the dainty habit of wiping her dishes on her apron! Last spring she walked to this place and packed fifty pounds of flour on her back down that awful hill — the snow being five feet deep at the time.

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All the same, several men, including Yank, keeper of a log cabin store farther up the bar, were'smitten with the charms of the Indiana Girl,' Louise admits in her ninth letter. Yank himself was a character. His aspiration was to be a dandy grafter. 'He takes me largely into his confidence, as to the various ways he has of doing green miners,' Louise wrote. As for his log cabin store, she described it as 'the most comical olla podrida [potpourri] of heterogeneous merchandise that I ever saw. There is nothing you can ask for but what he has — from crow bars down to cambric needles; from velveteen trowsers up to broadcloth coats of the jauntiest description….His collection of novels is by far the largest, the greasiest, and the 'yellowest kivered' of any to be found on the river.'

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