[music playing] SANDRA DALLAS: You had to be too
be a woman in a mining town. RUDY DAVISON: A lot
of this was adventure. SANDRA DALLAS: Women were
themselves. They weren't simply
these stereotypes. RUDY DAVISON: The women
that lived at the mines had a lot of tenacity and courage. DUANE SMITH: You
make it on your own, or you lose it on your own. WILLIAM J. CONVERY: You had
to rely on yourself in order to succeed. SANDRA DALLAS: Women could
do things out here that they wouldn't be
allowed to do in the east. So there was a kind of
freeing aspect for the women. DUANE SMITH: They could
look back and think, we helped make what
America is today. ANNOUNCER: This program was
funded by the History Colorado State Historical Fund. Supporting projects
throughout the state to preserve, protect,
and interpret Colorado's architectural and
archaeological treasures. History Colorado State
Historical Fund-- create the future,
honor the past. With support from the Denver
Public Library and History Colorado. With additional funding
and support from these fine organizations and
viewers like you. Thank you. [music playing] WILLIAM J. CONVERY: So there
was no Colorado before 1859. There were four different
territories-- Kansas, Nebraska, Utah, and New Mexico--
that constituted the mountains and plains of what
would become Colorado in 1861. But before the Pikes
Peak Gold Rush, the area that became Colorado
was an incredibly fluid place. DUANE SMITH: Well,
of course, Colorado had people living here, Native
Americans out at Mesa Verde, a couple thousand years ago. The Spanish were here
from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Albuquerque. And then of course,
the fur trappers. We've had a long history before
1858, '59, and then came gold. In 1857 there was a
tremendous financial panic in the United States. Our economy collapsed,
and thousands of farmhands and business
owners lost their jobs. They lost their businesses,
they lost their homes, and many of them were looking
for the next big thing. And the next big thing was
gold in the Rocky Mountains. RUDY DAVISON: First, you had
the gold rush in California that took place in 1849. After the gold was
somewhat depleted, people started
migrating back east. And now, they recognized
what to look for, and the Rocky Mountains
look like a place to look. WILLIAM J. CONVERY:
In the summer of 1858, prospectors from Georgia found
traces of gold at Cherry Creek, in the South Platte
River, and in Clear Creek, and rumors of that gold
sparked an immense gold rush to the Pikes Peak region
as they called it-- what became Colorado. Nobody kept gold a secret. When you discovered
gold, you told everybody. Then the word got
out, and there was a rush-- rush to the Rockies. WILLIAM J. CONVERY:
Hundreds of thousands of people embarked from
their homes in the Midwest and in the east to seek
their fortunes in Colorado. SANDRA DALLAS: Mostly men. Prospecting was a man's game. Well, let's face facts. Americans-- or anybody
else-- are greedy. And there was an old saying,
mining was a way to wealth. WILLIAM J. CONVERY:
And most people who came out to
Colorado seeking gold were looking to get
rich and get out. They wanted to mine
the gold and then go back home to live a life of
luxury wherever they came from. DUANE SMITH: It seemed
like an easy way to wealth. All you had to do was come
out here for one summer, and then you could go
back home with your bag of gold nuggets, or gold
dust, or gold flakes, or whatever you had. It didn't work out that way. SANDRA DALLAS: In the beginning,
to get to the mining towns, you generally took wagons. And that was difficult because
the roads were not very good. Augusta Tabor talks about
seeing last night's fire from tonight's camping spot. WILLIAM J. CONVERY: Mining
camps in early Colorado were diverse places. And you had gold
seekers from the east. You had suppliers and drovers
bringing in groceries from New Mexico and speaking Spanish. You had the American
Indian tribes who were camping right in
Denver in the early years. All of these people
are mingling together with mountain men, and
soldiers, and pioneers, and creating this wonderful
ferment, this excitement, because nobody knew
what the future held. You always heard music. The saloons were
open 24 hours a day. The streets were muddy. The miners were usually
polite to the women. They would step aside
as they passed by. But it was dirty-- they'd
get their skirts dirty just walking down the street. It was a very exciting time
because people were young and they were
enthusiastic, and they thought they were going
to strike it rich. WILLIAM J. CONVERY: Those
Pikes Peak gold towns were violent communities. There was certainly a lot of
alcohol, saloons, bordellos, and the kind of
alcohol-fueled violence that you would find when you
bring a group of relatively young, restless, mostly
men together in an isolated frontier community. DUANE SMITH: When
people came out here, they left the wife behind
because that was just an extra mouth to feed. And there were a
lot of single men who could simply
pack up and come out. Mining was basically
a masculine world. SANDRA DALLAS: The men very
often lived in boarding houses. They would share beds. If you work the early
shift, you slept at night. And if you work the night
shift, you slept in the same bed during the day, in
the same sheets. But once a town was
established and it wasn't just one of these ephemeral
camps that came and went, then you had people
bringing their wives. You had settlement
with families. And the lawlessness that
you think of basically went by the wayside. WILLIAM J. CONVERY: So
the men and the women who made the decision together
to bring their children into a mining camp really
believed in the future-- that they would find a
stable way to make a living, that things would
be all right there, that the community itself
would mature, it would grow. It would adopt law and order
and more stable institutions like schools and churches. And as long as you
had faith in that and you were willing to work
hard and, quite frankly, sacrifice for that end,
many of these communities turned into the kind
of places where you'd want to raise your family. It was very exciting
for children here. They had the run of the camps. There were schools. The women made sure
that there were schools. But when school was out,
the kids played everywhere. They would collect coal
that fell off the trains and take it home to be burned. They could see what was
going on in the saloons. They had jobs. They sometimes
worked in the mines, or they ran errands
or did menial work for a little bit of pay. The girls helped their mothers
with cooking and sewing and doing all the
kinds of things that girls were supposed to do. But they had a certain
amount of freedom. Anne Ellis-- she grew up in
poverty from the beginning. WILLIAM J. CONVERY: Anne Ellis's
family moved several times. They moved out of necessity. They moved to mining
camps like Bonanza because they needed to find
a way to make a living. So Anne Ellis's early life was
a life of motion, of traveling. One of her earliest
memories of the mining camps was her mother selling a
quilt in order to buy food. You know, sort of a
humiliating experience. Henry was Anne's stepfather,
and she describes him as a fairly successful miner
who could provide for his family when there was work. Life was good if
the mines were open. People like Anne and her
family didn't expect much. It was really something
when they owned a cow and could have fresh milk. Even the children
in mining camps had to work hard for a living. Anne Ellis foraged for
berries-- for blackberries and gooseberries. And she and her mother took
in miners' dirty underwear and clothing and got it
clean for the miners. SANDRA DALLAS: The men,
for some reason, wouldn't wash their own clothes. They turned to women
to wash them for them. It was really hard work. You'd draw ice-cold
water from the streams, and you'd wash all
day on a scrub board and then have to starch
and iron the clothes. And ultimately, you weren't
paid very well for it. It was about as low a
job as you could have. WILLIAM J. CONVERY:
Even for small children, while there was
some time for play, there was a lot of hard
work in their futures in order to make
it in these camps. [music playing] Anne Ellis and other
children in mining camps took their education
where they could. For Anne Ellis, she had
a few years of schooling in kind of rough, uncomfortable,
drafty one-room schoolhouses. And she ran into
a little trouble because she picked
up her ability to speak from these miners, and
she spoke a lot of miner slang. And she was constantly
chastised for that. DUANE SMITH: Well, the
kids learned how to swear, they learned how to gamble. I mean, that was
just part of life-- like kids learn how to
play baseball today. RUDY DAVISON: At a
fairly early age, her stepfather, Henry, would
gather all of his family on couches and beds that
were placed around the family kitchen and read them books--
"Swiss Family Robinson," "The Arabian Nights." The miners themselves
provided her an education. They taught her ideas
of self-reliance. They taught her how to
survive in the wilderness, and they shaped
her in a way that forever created who she was. Anne was 18 when she
married her first husband. George worked at the Vindicator
Mine in Cripple Creek. He was a miner, and he had the
unfortunate luck of drilling into dynamite that
had not blown up in the previous shift's work. So when his drill
hit that, it blew up, and it basically
blew him to bits. Anne Ellis was forced
to work as a seamstress. One day she looked
up at the wall on a house she was
renting in Cripple Creek, and she saw a couplet. "Sometimes, I stop
with half-drawn thread, not often, though-- each
moment's time means bread." DUANE SMITH: So for women, it
was one continual struggle. And if you read some
of the accounts-- letters and things
like that-- you can see how lonely they
were and how they really wished they weren't there. And they didn't think
their husbands were going to make all this fortune. [music playing] WILLIAM J. CONVERY: Mabel Barbee
Lee certainly grew up poor. Her father was a dreamer, a man
who believed that one day he would find the great bonanza
that would make them all rich. RUDY DAVISON: Johnson--
or Johns as he was called-- he goes
to Silver Reef, Utah, and he meets a
younger lady, Kitty. Kitty has two daughters,
Mabel-- or Mabs-- who's the oldest one, and Nina. But tragically,
Nina dies when she falls into the water barrel used
to water the garden flowers. So Johns leaves, and
they go to Cripple Creek. WILLIAM J. CONVERY: Mabel Barbee
Lee's father was a dowser. He was a gold dowser. He used a divining rod
to search for gold. He believed that
he had magnetism, and by using a switch he
could travel around a hillside until he was over a
vein of gold or silver, and that his own magnetism
would force the switch to point into the ground. He dug and dug for years
and never quite struck that great rich vein that he
always believed was out there. You know, there were
superstitions involved, and so much of it was just luck. They were lucky to
make enough to live. It was a rare, rare individual
who said, ooh, look, there it is, bingo,
and off we go. RUDY DAVISON: Mabs'
childhood was comfortable. Mabs grew up pretty much
having food on a regular basis, but there were those
down times where the only food in the house is
what her father could bring back stuffed in his
shirt from the free lunch counter at Burnside's Bar. WILLIAM J. CONVERY: Her
family was never rich, but she was rich in experience
and rich in memories. And you can tell from her
memoir how much she absolutely loved growing up in this
small city of Cripple Creek, a city of great
promise and great potential, where it literally seemed that
you could get rich by sticking your shovel into the hillside
and striking a vein of gold. Mabel felt that women
should have an education. You just shouldn't be
barefoot and pregnant, as they often said, that there
was more to life than that. Mabs' father
wanted his daughter to have a good
education because he knew what the life
of his wife, Kitty, was like, which was often
very lonely because Johns-- the father-- was out
prospecting, or working his claim. Kitty was alone and by herself. So if his daughter
had a good education, she could leave Cripple Creek
and go out and earn more money, and probably meet somebody
that wasn't necessarily a mining person that would
leave her lonely and abandoned. SANDRA DALLAS: So many of
the women felt alone because there were so
few of them in the camps. They were lonely
because there was no one to share their lives with, other
than their husbands and maybe their families. There were no women
they could gossip with, and that was difficult
for so many of them. RUDY DAVISON: Mabs went to
a finishing school called The Cutler Academy that was in
the downtown part of Colorado Springs. Mabs was a teacher. She taught in the
Victor School System, and then she went
to Colorado College. She taught at Harvard. She taught at Bennington,
and then she returned back to her roots at Cripple Creek. SANDRA DALLAS: For women,
coming to the mining camps-- it was
very difficult. It was a time of
sphere of influence, and a woman's sphere was home,
and family, church, school-- and none of those existed here. On the other hand, they
were freed from some of the social conventions. They didn't have to sit in
the parlor and do needlepoint. They didn't have to go
leave their calling cards. They could do much more here. And if they were inclined
to want that freedom, they liked the west. Others didn't. Others wanted to go back
to the kind of conformity they were used to. RUDY DAVISON: Harriet Backus
grew up in Oakland, California, and she had a good education. She was trained to be a teacher. And when she was
22 years old, she married her high school
sweetheart, George Backus. His first job was
at the Tomboy Mine above Telluride-- a totally
strange environment, an alien type of place
to be for a young woman from Oakland, California. WILLIAM J. CONVERY: She was
also a little better off. She didn't suffer the same
kinds of economic deprivation that Mabel Barbee Lee
or Anne Ellis suffered. But she certainly
encountered her own hardships and privations in
living in a small mining community more than two
miles above sea level. RUDY DAVISON: When Harriet
found where she was going, she described it through a
quote from a writer named HH Bancroft that was
something like, the San Juan mountains are the
wildest and most desolate place in Colorado. Just reaching Tomboy
was an expedition. RUDY DAVISON: George had bought
her tights, extra petticoats, heavy dresses, wrapped her in
a shawl, wrapped her in a fur. And the teamster
that took them up put an additional fur on them. So, I mean, it looked
like an arctic expedition. WILLIAM J. CONVERY: Imagine
Harriet on the back of a mule or on a wagon, on a
narrow, winding mountain trail that hugs its way up
the side of the mountain. Sheer cliffs down on one side. In the wintertime, avalanches
which can roar down on you and bury you at any time. And indeed, Harriet
Fish Backus described being trapped on the trail
because of avalanches that were ahead of them
and having to wait until the miners
from the mine above dug their way back down to her. DUANE SMITH: When you think
of the homes at the mines, they quite often
had bare wood walls. And you would tack up
newspapers in them, and that would cut down the
wind coming through the cracks. The houses in the
wind would rock. After a snowstorm, you would
find snow on your floor. It would blow in
through the keyhole. It would blow in
around the doors. It would blow in
around the windows. And Harriet and other women
always talked about this. You had to clean the house
after the snowstorms and sweep the snow out. WILLIAM J. CONVERY:
Harriet Backus writes about her husband
spending all one snowy day digging out the 100
yards between their house and the outhouse. And that meets the old
saying, that in the summertime an outhouse is 100 yards
too close and in the winter it's 100 yards too far away. Harriet faced a lot of
challenges as a new bride. One, she didn't
know how to cook. A very Victorian, genteel,
sheltered young lady. WILLIAM J. CONVERY: You're
miles and miles away from the nearest grocery store. You planned your grocery
deliveries a month or more in advance, because
you never knew how long it would be again
until the trail was open and you could get out. RUDY DAVISON: When she
started making her list, it was something like a
dozen eggs, a pound of bacon, and some butter. But she met some ladies
there that told her, dearie, you need to order big packs. WILLIAM J. CONVERY:
The good news is that your grocery store
in Telluride delivers. RUDY DAVISON: They would
put it on the mules, and up they'd go and hope
a mule didn't fall off. And the mules were
all tied together. So if mule A goes pah-ping,
you've got to really stop or you're going to have
the whole train of mules down at the bottom
of the canyon. WILLIAM J. CONVERY:
She complains about how the mule drivers would
take the mules up the trail and just dump your groceries
on the side of the trail, in the vicinity of your house. She writes about how difficult
it is in the wintertime to find your pile of groceries
underneath the high winter snows. RUDY DAVISON: And
I'm sure occasionally you found bits and pieces
that were left over sometime in the spring
when the snow melted. Harriet would get her food. Anything like meat
she would hang outside because it would freeze. WILLIAM J. CONVERY:
Hacking off a piece of a frozen meat
from the carcass required a hacksaw, literally. And the pieces would
come out not in these straight little slabs but
kind of paper thin on one end and maybe wedge-shaped
at the other end. So they would have
these irregular pieces of mutton or steak. DUANE SMITH: Fresh fruit and
fresh vegetables were a rarity except in the summertime. George, knowing
where they were going, bought her "The Rocky
Mountain Cookbook" so she could get a few tips on
how to cook at high altitude. WILLIAM J. CONVERY: We're
talking more than two miles above sea level. DUANE SMITH: Look what
temperature water boils-- you can stick your finger in it. And so how do you make
a hard-boiled egg? WILLIAM J. CONVERY:
She took baking lessons from the woman who ran the
miners' boarding houses, but only with marginal success. One Thanksgiving, she
made a turkey for guests. And she brought it
out, and it looked brown and warm and succulent. And she put it down,
and they carved into it and took the first bite. And the turkey was rotten. And they had to throw it away. In the early years, she
was the first to admit that she was lucky she didn't
kill someone with her cooking. The mining camps
were really tough. It was so cold in the mountains. Sanitation was very poor. DUANE SMITH: And
when you took a bath, the youngest kid would
go first, and you'd go through the
children-- same water-- all the way down to the parents. And the husband
would go in last. And so not only was the
water probably cooler, but it was also dirtier. They had toothbrushes, but most
people never put a toothbrush to their teeth. You went to the dentist
for one reason-- you wanted a tooth pulled. SANDRA DALLAS: There was
a lot of sickness. It was very difficult for women,
particularly young women who gave birth. When you look at the
cemeteries in Breckenridge and some of the
other mining towns, you see gravestones of
children in a family plot. A different child
died every year. And then eventually there
was the mother's grave. She had died in childbirth. WILLIAM J. CONVERY: If you
were a baby, just the altitude itself could be a
life-threatening circumstance. And many women went
to lower altitudes in order to give birth. SANDRA DALLAS: Children
were usually delivered by
other women. So a woman who was good
at delivering children would be called on
by her neighbors. Women feared childbirth
as much as anything in the mining towns. It wasn't that they were
afraid they would die. They were religious,
and they believed they would go to heaven. What really frightened them
was the idea they would die and leave their children. Their husbands wouldn't be able
to take care of the children, and they would be parceled
out to relatives, or friends, or someone else-- anyone else. WILLIAM J. CONVERY: Infant
mortality in mining camps was a very serious thing. In these small
isolated communities, diseases could tear through
a community-- typhoid, diphtheria, smallpox, measles. These were baby
killers in the 1800s. And isolated mining communities
were particularly vulnerable because you have these
concentrated population of men living in the boarding
houses, working close together in the mines, and exposing the
children to all of the diseases that they get, as well. Many towns had doctors,
but medicine in those days wasn't very good
anyplace in America. And it was worse in
the mining towns. Mabel, when she
married her husband How, he was a successful
mining engineer. And he was moving up the
ladder in his company. And they were going to send
him to San Francisco, where he'd basically have a desk job. But he had one
more mine to visit. Unfortunately, this happened at
the same time the Spanish flu was rabid in Silverton. And How contacted
the Spanish flu and was dead within a
matter of a few days. So if you got sick, you were
really in serious trouble. A simple scratch could
lead to your death. WILLIAM J. CONVERY: Harriet
Backus sort of marveled, how could a disease like
typhoid or diphtheria be so devastating in
such an isolated place? How could these diseases
even get up to the mines? But the issue was, is
once they got there, how easy it was for them to
spread from person to person to person in these close
quarters of the boarding houses and mining camps. There weren't a lot of
acceptable jobs open for women because there was a thought
that women could not do a lot of physical
labor, which was literally a bunch of hogwash. Women had very few
economic opportunities. They could be laundresses. If they were educated they
could become teachers, or if they had enough money they
could open a boarding house. But most were dependent
on their husbands. And if their husbands died,
they had a very, very difficult time. Mining camps are
masculine communities. Men outnumber women
by 10 to 1 or more. And these are young, healthy
men who are working hard and who want to play hard. And so having pool
halls and saloons was a very important
part of mining culture. But equally important
were the presence of prostitutes and bordellos. There were a lot of
prostitutes because there were a lot of single men. The more prostitutes
you had in your town, it was a sign that your town was
in good times and prosperous. Mabel Barbee Lee writes
about the prostitutes in her community in
kind of a nostalgic way. She talks about Pearl de Vere,
this beautiful, unapproachable, kind of elegant woman who Lee
sort of creates as somebody that she looked up to
in her mysteriousness and her inaccessibility. The life of a
prostitute, in fact, was far less glamorous
in these communities. These women had difficult lives. They were not very
high regarded. They were certainly not
accepted into polite society. Women who lived in
the towns pretty much ignored the prostitutes. They liked to pretend
that they didn't exist. There were attempts
to rescue the girls and send them to
farms-- healthy farms-- but most of the prostitutes
had come off of farms, and they didn't want
to go back to them. We tend to look at the
prostitutes of the 19th century as flamboyant, women who
flaunted society and had a wonderful time and
drank too much, and so on. The truth of it was,
they were disease-ridden. Most of them had
a career-- if you want to call it that--
of four to seven years, had venereal disease. They were alcoholic,
they were tubercular-- it was a pretty grim way of life. It only lasted so long. The older you got and
the less pretty you were, the lower the amount of
money you could charge. And their lives were difficult.
They were very often exploited. They were very often
subject to sex abuse. Many of them became addicted
to drugs or alcohol, and many of them died young. We kind of glamorize
prostitutes, but the fact is, is their
lives were tough and very often short. You had to be tough to be
a woman in a mining town. The conditions were such that
if you weren't, you died. You went home, or you
simply didn't make it. The lives of any
of these three women could have been a disaster. They're all women in very
masculine environments. They're vulnerable in many ways. And their lives could
have gone very badly. They could've very easily
ended up in the bordellos or in some other bad situation. Women can persevere. This might have been
the Victorian era when they were supposed to not
have been able to persevere, but these ladies could persevere
no matter where you put them or in what kind of situation. It might have been tough. It was not the
life they expected as a young girl, or even a
teenager, or even a bride. But yet, when the women
found out they could adjust, they could live it. They could enjoy it. They could learn from it. They were the product
of the changes that were happening around them. The women were real pioneers. They settled this land. They civilized the land. They brought schools
and churches. They built hospitals. They raised money
to help the poor. It was a time when that was
considered women's work, but they made an
enormous contribution in making the towns and
cities what they later became. It's no surprise, really, that
western states like Colorado were the first to allow
women the right to vote. Because these kind of
mining camp experiences created the best kinds
of citizens-- people who were engaged in their
communities, who could think for themselves,
who understood hardship and moved beyond it. And for women, who might have
been smothered by society in the east, they
found opportunity in the west that allowed
them to very rapidly become its most important citizens. [music playing]
