NELLIE CASHMAN
The story of a real life dime novel heroine
By Marshall Trimble American author, singer, community college professor, and Arizona’s official state historian
Many women came west in the 19th century to pan out that dream of getting rich, but none can match a little Irish lady named Nellie Cashman. A restless adventurer, Nellie ranged the Old West for 50 years prospecting for gold and spreading good cheer whenever she traveled. She made and lost, or gave away, a number of fortunes during her lifetime.
She ran restaurants and boarding houses, never refusing a meal or a room to some down and out miner who had no money to pay. She was always willing to grubstake some prospector on the slim chance that he might strike it rich, in which case she would share in the bonanza. More likely, she would lose her investment. But that never dampened her enthusiasm for challenging ol’ dame fortune. She loved to make money and spent it as fast as she made it. One of her grubstakes did pay off handsomely, netting her $100,000, enough for a secure retirement. But, Nellie gave most of it away. Her philanthropy earned her the respectful title, “Angel of the Mining Camps.”
Nellie Cashman was born in Ireland and came to the United States with her sister, Frances, or Fannie, in the 1860’s. In 1869, they left Boston for San Francisco, coming west on the new transcontinental railroad. In San Francisco, Fannie married Tom Cunningham and soon started a family. Nellie, a petite lady about five feet tall, slender figure with dark hair and large, luminous brown eyes had many offers to get married, but preferred to stay single. Married women, even in the West, had too many restraints and Nellie was a lady filled with wanderlust. Did a pretty lady along in the wilderness with love-starved men ever pose a problem? Not according to Nellie. Her philosophy seems to have been, “if you act like a lady, men will treat you like one.” As Nellie wrote: “I never have had a word said to me out of the way. The ‘boys’ would sure see to it that anyone whoever offered to insult me could never be able to repeat the offense.”
In 1872, she headed for the silver boom town of the Comstock Lode, Virginia City, Nevada and opened up a restaurant. Two years later she followed the gold rush to British Columbia where she prospected and ran a boarding house for miners. When she heard that a group of miners was ill up in the snowy high country, Nellie hired six men to help her haul 1,500 pounds of provisions to the stricken men. She donned snow shoes and pulled a sled, surviving a snowslide along the way.
In 1880, Nellie learned of the great silver strike at Tombstone and headed for Arizona. That same year, Tom Cunningham died of tuberculosis. Fannie packed up the five children and moved to Tombstone where she and Nellie opened a hotel called the Russ House. Two years later Fannie died, leaving Nellie to raise five children.
She opened the Russ House in Tombstone during the heyday of the legendary boom town and became one of the most influential leaders in the rough-hewn community. She was a resident at the time of the notorious “Gunfight at the OK Corral.”
Nellie was always a fighter for just causes and wasn’t afraid to stand up for what she believed in. Like the time when five men were condemned to hang for murder during a robbery in Bisbee and a local carpenter decided to build a wooden grandstand outside the gallow walls so spectators could see the sentence carried out. While the men were waiting in jail for their sentence, Nellie befriended them. They asked that their hanging not become a public spectacle and Nellie was happy to oblige. The night before the hanging she organized and led a party over to the Tombstone Courthouse and they proceeded to dismantle the grandstand. The next day the hanging was carried out, thanks to Nellie, without a circus atmosphere.
Another time striking miners were plotting to kidnap and lynch miner owner, E. B. Gage. When Nellie learned of the plot she hitched up her buggy, rescued Gage and drove him to Benson where she put him on a train to Tucson.
In 1882, she joined a party of prospectors heading for Mexico in search of lost treasure. The party got lost in the desert themselves and Nellie was the only one fit to go for water. She made her way to an old mission where the padre helped her fill canteens with water. Nellie was all that saved 20 prospectors dying in that searing Mexican desert.
In the late 1880’s Nellie was in South Africa looking for diamonds and by 1889 she joined the gold rush to the Klondike. On the way she negotiated the rapids of the Yukon River in a kayak.
Nellie spent her last years with her dog sled team combing the vast lands of the frozen north searching for one more gold strike. She became known as the “Champion Woman Musher of the Yukon.” When she was nearly 70 years old, Nellie mushed a dog sled 750 miles across the tundra to the edge of the Arctic Circle to a mining claim she’d staked out. She died soon after, on January 4, 1925.
Nellie Cashman was truly a “Woman Who Matched The Mountains.” If that wasn’t her epitaph, it should have been.
