![New York Girl in the Fields of California](https://www.historynet.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/New-York-Girl-in-the-Fields-of-California-scaled-e1647549570424.jpg)
Cartoons like this one mocked women in 1850s California as gold-diggers– and not the mining kind. Louise Clapp’s letters, however, paint a more nuanced picture of the few adventurous women who roughed it in the gold fields. (Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)