The Shirley Letters: Being Letters Written in 1851-1852 from the California Mines

The miners called her Dame Shirley thought her name was Louisa Clapp. This book is made up of her letters to her sister written from a mining camp on the Feather River in 1851 and 52. While many first person accounts of the California Gold Rush have been published very few were written by women. Not surprising since very few women joined the Forty-niners and fewer still had the literary skill of Mrs. Clapp. Her letters were full of careful observations of mining camp life and the land around the Feather River. She didn't hold much back, she captured the dirt, brutality and hardship as well as the romance and adventure of her experience. She had more to say about the racism and assumed superiority of most of the American miners. There show more were just as many others in the mines of the Feather River as there were men from the Eastern US. Men from Chile and Argentina got there before most of the arrivals from the East, but they looked on as foreigner interlopers by many. First published serially in The Pioneer Magazine in 1854, I read the 1980 printing. show less