November 2018 20 Nellie arrived in the United States in 1850, six years after her 1844 birth in County Cork, Ireland, to Patrick Cashman and his wife Frances “Fanny” (Cronin) Cashman. Her father had died and her widowed mother, with Nellie and her younger sister Fanny, fled to Boston from the devastating Irish potato famine. They settled in Boston where Nellie, at age 16, became a hotel bellhop, reportedly the first female to hold that position in Massachusetts. In 1869, Mrs. Cashman and her daughters moved to San Francisco, taking advantage of the just completed transcontinental railway. Three years later, Nellie Cashman and her aging mother heard of the new silver mining district in Nevada called Pioche. They headed there, and some 10 miles from the new mining camp, opened a boarding house. Nellie found her element in the wild, boisterous, rowdy and at times the deadly atmosphere of Pioche. It helped that many of the thousands of miners who had flooded into Pioche were Irish immigrants like her. She had unknowingly launched herself into a life of traveling from mining camp to mining camp from Tombstone to Alaska and the Yukon Territory, places she felt comfortable in and where she succeeded time after time in business, prospecting and mining. This is the story of the amazing Nellie Cashman. Nellie Cashman plunged into life in Pioche with the vigor and giving nature she was to become famous for. She operated her boarding house, became deeply involved in the affairs of the local Catholic Church and in numerous other civic activities. There is no record that Nellie did any mining in the Pioche District, but it is a certainty that the intelligent, curious, determined and strong young woman from Ireland was learning as much as she could about prospecting and mining. Within a couple of years, Nellie Cashman had left Pioche for San Francisco where she left her mother and younger sister and set out alone for British Columbia, where she opened a miner's boarding house in the Cassiar District on the Stikine River. That mining strike was not far from today’s Juneau, Alaska. The record shows Nellie, in addition to operating her boarding house, had gold placer claims and worked those claims, learning as much as she could about basic geology as it was associated with mining. Strength, Courage Awe All The winter of 1874-5 was harder than most in the Cassiar District of British Columbia. Nellie was traveling to Victoria for supplies when she heard that the Cassiar diggings had been buried in a severe winter snow storm and her fellow miners were stranded. No one could get through to them with food and medical supplies the men needed to survive. She bought food and medical supplies in Victoria and secured dog sleds and teams to carry them on. She then loaded them aboard a ship and sailed for Fort Wrangell, Alaska. Nellie and her crew pushed the sleds across snows nobody else would attempt and made their way to the snow buried digs at Cassiar. The food and medicines she brought with her saved the day for the stranded miners and their lives. With that courageous deed, Nellie was, for the rest of her life, revered by the miners throughout the west, from Arizona to Alaska. The all considered her “the angel of mercy.” Victoria’s Daily British Colonist took a different view in its February 5, 1875 edition. It said the “freak feat” is attributed by her friends as “insanity.” The paper noted one well-known man in the region had attempted three times to reach the snowbound diggings, only to be driven back to Fort Wrangell by raging snow storms. The 30-year-old Nellie made it the first attempt. To Booming Tucson In 1879, Tucson, Arizona Territory was a booming new rail center. Again, she was attracted to a boom camp filled with Irish immigrants, the men who dominated the railroad crews on the southern line. Nellie had no more than opened a restaurant to serve the rail crews than a new boom town mushroomed out of the desert nearby. Called Tombstone, the new silver camp saw Nellie Cashman set up a hotel and restaurant business in 1880. Nellie made Tombstone her home base from 1880 through 1887, but she often left town to set up other ventures and explore opportunities in Baja, Mexico, New Mexico Territory and other mining digs in Arizona Territory. During those years, Nellie operated six different enterprises, filed or bought and sold claims routinely, and worked numerous gold and silver claims herself. She was always giving much of what she made to charity or to hungry miners who came into her restaurant to eat without money to pay. Nellie helped to finance Tombstone’s first hospital and its first Roman Catholic Church. In 1881, her brother in law Tom Cunningham died and she took in her sister Fanny and the couple’s five children. NELLIE, DARLING OF THE MINING CAMPS continued on page 22 There was never, in western history, a woman quite like Nellie Cashman. A successful business owner, miner, prospector, and philanthropist known widely as “the miner’s angel,” it is said that when she walked into a saloon in a mining camp, men stood up in respect. By Bill Roberts — Reprinted from The Traveler