Some have called the residents of the Koyukuk country “losers,” “escaped criminals,” the “flotsam of the world.” Of the eight or nine women in the vicinity, most were prostitutes. One was a clergyman’s wife, another a temporary visitor. And there was Nellie Cashman–resident, miner, employer, equipment purchaser, and without doubt one of the steadiest mining personalities in the North.

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In this fierce environment, where strength and a variety of talents might allow one to succeed–if one did not fall to venereal disease, frostbite, alcohol, or a mining cave-in–Nellie mined, mostly the placer or alluvial ground on Nolan Creek.

Nellie did take some trips south during her years on the Koyukuk. She visited Arizona four or five times to see her friends and her nephews and nieces, who were like her own children to her. She also went on purchasing trips to Seattle, San Francisco, once even to New York. During a typical year she would leave Nolan Creek at least once for supplies and equipment, traveling the hundreds of miles to Fairbanks by boat, sled, or wagon, depending on the season.

There are no mining ledgers for Nellie’s Koyukuk years, but she must have been doing well. She was always working ground, filing more claims. She never lacked for what she needed and always had sufficient funds to travel within Alaska or to the “outside.” An intelligent, knowledgeable prospector and miner, she stayed in this harshest of environments because she was having luck and enjoyed it. And like all inveterate miners, she hoped that one day she would hit the “Big Bonanza.”

The Koyukuk country was the fulfillment of her dreams. Here, among mankind’s forgotten, Nellie worked her claims personally, usually with the help of a few hired hands. Near the end of her life, she even organized a firm, the “Midnight Sun Mining Company,” with herself as trustee. The stock certificates proclaimed “No Offices” and “No Officers.” Fifty thousand shares in the company went on sale at $2.00 each.

Late in 1924, Nellie realized that she had severe health problems. Gradually, she worked her way down to Fairbanks, Juneau, and then Seattle. Finally, she requested to be sent to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Victoria–the very hospital she had helped fund almost forty years earlier. She was there for several weeks under the care of the Sisters of St. Ann and Doctor W. T. Barrett, who had also been her physician in Dawson. Nellie died on January 4, 1925, of “unresolved pneumonia.”

Over the years, Nellie’s career had made good copy because she was a female seemingly succeeding in a male environment. Inevitably, some of the newspaper notices she received cited her good works; she was, after all, a prime mover in building hospitals and churches in Pioche, Nevada; Victoria, British Columbia; Tombstone, Arizona; Dawson, Yukon Territory; and Fairbanks, Alaska.

Now, because she had been so well known, newspapers across North America printed obituaries. In the East, the New York Times published a few paragraphs that emphasized her reputation as a “champion woman musher” and noted her service as a nurse to needy miners. On the West Coast, newspapers in Tucson, Los Angeles, and San Francisco also pointed out her many travels, her use of dog sleds, and other apparently “non-female” activities. Even the Engineering and Mining Journal-Press succumbed to the same type of assessment, noting that she “was held in high regard by a very wide circle of acquaintances,” but failed to give her credit as a miner.

Nellie started off in her first mining camp knowing absolutely nothing about mining or geology. In each successive locale, she absorbed herself in gaining knowledge of terrain, geology, equipment, and people. Then, her apprenticeship served, she spent the last 25 years of her life ably prospecting and mining.

Nellie’s great consideration for her fellow man, which led to her lending a helping hand and funds when needed or coercing her frontier neighbors into contributing to churches and hospitals, has obscured her long, fascinating, and mostly successful mining career. But Nellie Cashman was indeed a true pioneer, who could face any challenge that the elements or man placed in her path.

Don Chaput is Curator Emeritus at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. Author of numerous books and articles on mining, he has recently published Nellie Cashman and the North American Mining Frontier (Tucson: Westernlore Press, 1995).

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