Alaskan History A 1994 commemorative U. S. postage stamp, based on the only known photograph of a young Nellie Cashman taken in San Francisco in 1874, just before she left for the gold fields.
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Mining Camp Angel of the Frontier West From Tombstone, Arizona to the Koyukuk In the Preface to his 1995 book titled Nellie Cashman and the North American Mining Frontier (Westernlore Press, Tucson, Arizona), author Don Chaput, western historian and curator emeritus of the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, encapsulates Nellie Cashman’s life in these few words: Most authors who have considered Nellie’s career have emphasized the women’s angles, such as her help in establishing hospitals and churches and her caring for miners in trouble. The image of Nellie with a cup of soup for a sick miner” may be accurate but woefully incomplete. Nellie was a person of the frontier, hardened by five decades of toil, speculation, troubles and triumphs in the toughest mining camps of North America. The fact that she was decent and caring should not obscure Nellie’s lifelong goals: she was in the hills, mountains, deserts, and frozen ground in order to find precious metals, which she could then give away to those in need. Ellen Cashman was born in Midleton, County Cork, in the southwest corner of Ireland, in 1845. When her father died a few years later she and her younger sister, Frances, were brought to the United States by their mother to escape the poverty of the Great Potato Famine. The small family lived in Boston, Massachusetts, for the first 15 years in America, migrating to San Francisco, California, by ship, in 1865. In 1870 her sister Frances—called Fanny—married another young Irish immigrant, Thomas J. Cunningham, who was employed in the bootmaking industry. In the summer of 1872 Ellen—called Nellie—and her mother, Frances, opened a boarding house in the silver mining boomtown of Pioche, Nevada, named for the San Francisco financier F. L. A. Pioche. A year later an ad for their business in the Pioche Daily Record named Miss N. Cashman as proprietess and offered “good board at low rates” and noted “The Table will be supplied with the best to be had in the
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