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March 25, 2005
How women coped with life, hard times out west
By PHILLIP GOMEZ
The high point in the life of Sally Zanjani's father was his participation in the rush to Goldfield (1903-09). Together with nearby Tonopah's earlier occurring silver boom, Goldfield's explosion in the year 1906 permanently reversed Nevada's long economic slide into depression that had depopulated the state for the previous 20 years. Hints of her former glory remain, testament to Goldfield's status as "the world's last and greatest gold rush," said Zanjani at the start of her talk at Death Valley's history conference last month in Furnace Creek. No other town in Nevada "could match Goldfield in its palmiest days for excitement and great expectations," Zanjani said. Zanjani, since 1975 a professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno, is the author of more than 40 articles and eight books, including "A Mine of Her Own: Women Prospectors in the American West, 1850-1950 (1997). In 1992 she published "Goldfield: The Last Gold Rush on the West Frontier," for which she won the Westerners International Award. A pioneer in her own right, Zanjani has been coming to Death Valley history conferences since 1987. Her Furnace Creek presentation, "Love and Death in a Desert Boom Town," looked at life's basics based on her earlier research. Life was hard in Goldfield on women and horses, but also on men. Most women's deaths were caused by pneumonia, but Zanjani found the adult female proportion of Goldfielders succumbing to the disease was less than half the number of men who succumbed. She speculates that this was due to women occupying a much smaller segment of the population. "Black plague" was everywhere in mining towns, but hard-rock miners by this time referred to influenza and pneumonia, the second leading death-dealing disease in the United States at the time. Patients often turned to home remedies, Zanjani said. One woman kept her pneumonia suffering husband "well-plastered in onions" as a cure for his malady. Respiratory disease was Goldfield's leading killer. For the entire period of Goldfield's boom years, before the advent of antibiotics, a third of deaths were caused by pneumonia. About 40 percent of miners' deaths were due to respiratory disease of some kind, Zanjani said. But this figure was 10 percent below the rate of respiratory deaths among professionals and white-collar occupations in Goldfield. Mining camp life took a harsh toll on women: The medium age of death for females was 25, compared to 41 for males. "This ran counter to national trends," she said. In 1910 the median age at death for American females was 45. Love and Loathing in Goldfield Zanjani believes that psychological health is connected to the reason women died younger in Goldfield. With family life the center of most women's concern, wives found themselves with the least amount of control over events, causing chronic anxiety. "Not only were they tied to the chaotic vicissitudes of a mining boom economy, but also they depended upon sometimes irresponsible husbands," she said. Domestic violence, desertion, nonsupport following divorce "and numerous fracases between husbands and so-called 'home-wreckers' all hint at the erosion of (family life) under gold rush conditions." The intense stress women lived under reveals itself in the large number of suicides: more than three times the figure for men. In Goldfield the average age of prostitutes committing suicide was 21. A full third of prostitutes' deaths were attributed to suicide, suggesting, "the terrible psychological burden imposed by prostitution." Many women, and especially prostitutes, would go into "crying jags" during the long winter nights, often worsening into suicidal dejection. As one camp drifter reported, "In the tent cabins of the pioneer housewife as well as the cribs of the tenderloin, dejection took hold and a woman might end her life by quietly swallowing a lump of opium." Zanjani also examined how Goldfielders married. Elopements were quite the fashion in Goldfield, Zanjani said. "The impulsive madcap flavor of a sudden wedding was regarded as irresistibly romantic - and after all, why not? The gold rusher was by definition an adventurer, reckless and usually young." The rest is history Judy Palmer, who lives in Palo Alto, Calif., volunteers at the Shoshone Museum and in the archives at Death Valley National Park. Palmer has spent much of the past five years on the trail of Louise Grantham (1900-1969), a little-known Death Valley miner and businesswoman. Grantham came to Death Valley in 1926, looking for a man who had accepted a grubstake from her father and who had not been heard from since. Soon, Grantham was working several gold claims high in the Panamint Mountains. People considered Grantham an outrageous woman. She smoked, she cussed, and she wore pants and carried a gun. She wore her hair in a "flapper" bob cut. She came to have a female friend, a physician, whom she lived with for the rest of her life. Grantham built a mill to process the mined ore and constructed a two-mile-long aerial tramway to transport the ore over rugged country to gondolas waiting at a rail siding. Gold mining was never very profitable on Grantham's claim. So, ever resourceful, she turned to mining talc, of which she had a large deposit at her Warm Springs camp. In 1932 she washed dishes and clerked in stores to earn cash, in order to keep her mine in operation. Grantham struggled with many of the same things that male miners struggled with - her financial support, the remoteness of her mine, the cessation of rail service in the late 1930s, legal battles and labor troubles. Grantham, a woman in a businessman's world, knew how to be tough on herself. But she was pragmatically sweet to her miners. In 1951 she modernized her mining camp and built a first-class dining facility for her employees. In the 1960s she modernized the mine with trackless diesel equipment. To ward off a threat from the operators' union, she put in a swimming pool. "She built this pool as a surprise for the miners in 1967, after a short-lived attempt at unionization quickly fizzled when the miners realized that the union offered no real advantages," Palmer said. "The rest is history." By the time of her death from cancer in 1969, Grantham's mining property was huge, extending a mile under a hillside. She employed 10 to 15 miners underground. Talc had become an important ingredient in the manufacture of low-reflective camouflage marine paint, essential in the war effort for World War II. Grantham's mine was a leading national producer. "Her story is an inspiring tale of success through hard work and dedication to the pursuit of a personal dream," said Palmer. A fallen woman Robin Flinchum, a freelance writer for a number of periodicals including the Pahrump Valley Times, is the curator of artifacts at the Shoshone Museum. She and Palmer put together the first ever Death Valley Women's History exhibit at the museum. She is currently finishing a book about women working in the red-light districts of Death Valley's mining camps. Flinchum's presentation focused on one of hundreds of common dance hall entertainers, madams and prostitutes who flourished in the boom camps of Death Valley and central Nevada. Diamond Tooth Lil was a woman Flinchum sees as a "mistress of her own destiny," because she did things her way, "never apologizing for her choices." Hungarian-born Katie Fialla achieved some minor fame as the stage singer Diamond Lil. She reveled in the creation of her own legend. Helped along by the notoriety of Mae West's stage play of the same name and period, Diamond Tooth Lil, nee Katie Fialla, may not have been the original article, but she tried to be. Lil's signature feature - a diamond embedded in one incisor - she got from a gambling debt owed by a Reno dentist. Or so legend goes. Lil carried a gun, smoked a cigar and flashed her sparkling diamond tooth when cracking a smile on stage. She was "a bona fide character of the Old West," said Flinchum. From her start in Chicago she came west to work in dance halls from Nome, Alaska to San Francisco. After the earthquake and fire of 1906, she came by train to Nevada, where she plied her trade in a number of towns. Bighearted and protective of those she loved, Lil had "a lush, curvy figure and a penchant for fancy clothes." She personified the femme fatale prototype developed by Mae West, who in her stage play "Diamond Lil" (1928) portrayed life in the 1890s Bowery district of Brooklyn, where West got her start in show business. The setting for "Diamond Lil" was a saloon called Suicide Hall in the "gay-nineties," where the saloon owner runs a white slave ring of girls. Named for the way most of the girls came to their end, the story was based on a real-life character, one Diamond Lil. At the height of Goldfield's boom, Diamond Lil came to town while excitement brewed over a highly promoted championship boxing match. Rubbing shoulders with Tex Rickard, Diamondfield Jack Davis and Death Valley Scotty at the Northern Saloon and Nevada Club, Lil made her reputation smoking and drinking with the men in the rough and tumble town. Greenwater in Death Valley was the low point in Lil's career, said Flinchum. "The camp of Greenwater was a failure, both in terms of mining and business, and also on a personal level for Lil." She was only 23 years old when she left Greenwater, worn out by camp life, said Flinchum. She went on to other adventures, cashing in on America's mythologizing of the Old West in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Lil lived into the 1960s, including a long flamboyant stay in Boise, Idaho, where she dressed lavishly in wigs and feather boas. She married and divorced three husbands. She ran brothels, bars, rooming houses and trailer courts. She headed finally for California, where, penniless and nearly blind, she drank heavily and wound up a ward of the state in a nursing home. "I've been every place I want to go and seen everything I want to see," she told a reporter in 1963. "I've had everything I ever wanted out of life." |
