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"Strong Minded Women": Desdemona Stott Beeson and Other Hard Rock Mining Entrepreneurs
Utah Historical Quarterly
Vol. 46, 1978, No. 2
"Strong Minded Women": Desdemona Stott Beeson and Other Hard Rock Mining Entrepreneurs
BY LAURENCE P. JAMES AND SANDRA C. TAYLOR
THROUGHOUT HISTORY MINING has been a male profession, an exclusive masculine bastion. Folk songs and legends relate the tales of those women who did populate the miners' world, those relegated to the subordinate positions of dance hall girls, camp followers, prostitutes, and, very occasionally, wives. Women were not to be found as miners, certainly not in nineteenth-century America, which placed women on a pedestal; not even slaves or immigrant women were used in such work. The strong taboos against women going underground in mines prevail to the present day; laws are still on the books in many states, including Utah, to prohibit this great perversion of the natural order of things.
From the first discovery of ore in Utah in 1863 until around the turn of the century, women as miners, locators, or entrepreneurs, wore almost nonexistent. By the end of the century a few women had entered the mining world; and in the first decades of the twentieth century some unusual women wore to be found working as prospectors, locators of mining claims, and also as entrepreneurs, technicians whose knowledge of mining engineering or ability to handle financial operations gained them a special status as "female mining men." This paper presents a detailed look at one woman professional—Desdemona Stott Beeson— and glimpses of the careers of several other women and offers some analysis of why they were able to succeed in the masculine world of mining in Utah.
Not only wore the miners of Utah male, they w ere also usually non- Mormons from outside the state. Brigham Young, in warning the Saints away from the pursuit of precious metals, had sought to keep both sexes from the temptations of the mining camps. The camps themselves were diverse communities of Catholics, Protestants, Masons, and atheists, as befitted the polyglot ethnic mixture that came to work the mines. Relatively few Mormons sought this kind of work. The technical people came from other Great Basin camps or still further afield. Copper experts from Michigan mixed with gold speculators from Cripple Creek and California, and typically moved on after a few years. The wives and girlfriends who accompanied them stayed in Salt Lake City or the nearby towns.
Prospecting and locating a mining claim on some potentially valuable ore body was a relatively easy, though risky way to possible wealth.
The locator was usually not involved in rock excavation or mine management but only in seeking out a likely prospect. The records of many Utah counties show women as locators. One of the more persistent was Leatha Millard Amott. She arrived in Gold Hill on the desert near the Nevada border in 1907, and in the succeeding six decades she came to know the region well. Eventually she married an independent miner and prospector, Art Amott, and became involved with the operation of small mines and prospects in the Gold Hill and Dry Canyon districts. The pattern she set is one that most women who became entrepreneurs also followed: eventual partnership with a male, a spouse whose presence "legitimized" the female who intruded on the man's world.
The "mining men" generally served as intermediaries betwoen the initial discoverers and owners of mining property and the financiers who had the capital required to actually produce metals. Some operated small mines, hoping to develop large bonanzas, while others sought newdiscoveries. Some were trained in geology or mining engineering at colleges or universities, while others learned their considerable technical skills through a lifetime of practical experience. Most such entrepreneurs were closely involved in the planning and supervision of mine operations, although usually they did not mine the rock themselves. The hand labor necessary to get the ore to the surface was left to the semiskilled, assisted only by a mule until mechanized equipment was introduced between 1900 and 1930. Mining engineering, according to Clark Spence, was definitely a "man's world, into which but a few of the gentler sex intruded." Although most observers no doubt agreed with one Denver male who wrote that "a lady mining engineer is a revolutionary and anarchical departure from established precedent," by the end of the century there were a few in the nation. Only three female mining engineers wore listed in the 1900 U.S. Census, though some women apparently worked as assayers, metallurgists, or chemists. A few women graduated from the better known mining schools, and some did work in the profession. However, none appears to have worked in Utah as an engineer. Such jobs wore generally to be found with large companies where women had virtually no chance for employment in such nontraditional roles. The few women who did labor as engineers worked in small operations, usually in company with their husbands. Training and marital status, along with extraordinary ambition, ability, and luck, wore the prerequisites for success. Only a few exceptional women achieved it.
At the outset of Utah's mining history some women did indeed try to gain access. In 1864, one year after Gen. Patrick E. Connor and soldiers of the U.S. Army had discovered ore near Bingham, official records documented the location of the "Woman's Lode Mining Claim":
The general's wife headed the list of those signing the notice. All the names wore prefixed by "Mrs." and followed by the husband's army rank. The author who recorded this episode could not restrain himself from editorializing: "What would cause nine women to declare that they were 'strong minded' and would work the claim 'independent of any other man' is open to conjecture." At any rate no further record could be found of the activities of the "strong minded women." One can only speculate as to their motives: did the general mining excitement attract them, were they bored by life in a quiet military outpost, or wore they acting in some way for their husbands?
Within a few years Connor and his soldiers were transferred. The general later returned and lost a fortune in several Utah mines. Mining of silver, lead, and gold flourished for a few years, then declined slowly until the early years of the twontieth century. Records of the late nineteenth century mining operations are sparse, but apparently no more women were involved in the profession until the early decades of the twentieth century.
Desdemona Stott Beeson, who was to become the foremost Utah woman in mining, was born August 2, 1897, in the silver boom town of Eureka. The rapidly growing mining camp had attracted her parents, Bradford N. C. Stott and his wife, Emma, to move to Utah from the Midwest. Stott entered law practice in Eureka and used the profits from his thriving profession to erect the Stott Building and to speculate heavily in mines and mining stocks.
The Stott children, Desdemona and her two brothers, grew up in a town built between mine headframes. As a young girl Desdemona was fascinated by the mines, and the manager of the Gemini shaft, almost adjacent to her home, let her ride the cage down with the shift. Her older brother worked in the mines, and once took her into the Iron Blossom No. 3 to show her a giant, newly discovered cavity full of native silver. The sight of so much beautiful wire silver ore made a life-long impression. In later years she recalled that she and her brother wore sent out with a gun to frighten off claim-jumpers when her father, hardhit by the depression of 1907, could not afford to do the annual assessment work required to hold his claims. The children stood guard in the snow on New Year's Eve until midnight when their father could post the new notices. By the time Desdemona was a teenager the mines were offlimits, and her continued fascination with the underground world could only be whetted surreptitiously. Once she dated a young foreman who, at her request, let her spend evenings with him deep in the noted Mammoth Mine.
Access to higher education was no problem for the Stotts' daughter. Her mother had studied botany in Indiana, and Desdemona wont to the University of Utah. She wanted to study medicine, a choice her parents objected to, so she took her degree in psychology. Among the classes she attended were courses in geology, drawing, and the liberal arts. Although the classes wore exciting, she found college life in Salt Lake City more restrictive than being the relatively privileged daughter of a noted citizen of a small town. Fifty years later she recalled her irritation at being chastised by Dean Lucy Van Cott for going downtown alone and without a hat! During her junior year she agreed to move to the nearby mining camp of Alta for a few months. Her newly married brother George wanted someone to cook for him, a chore his wife could not manage in the family tent, so Desdemona obliged.
Alta, a silver mining camp near the crest of the Wasatch Mountains, was in the midst of a mining boom in 1916. George's position as a mining engineer gave Desdemona some access to the ever-fascinating mines. Underground at Alta she met Joseph J. Beeson, a Stanford-educated geologist. He had been hired to find the faulted-off part of the famous Emma Mine ore body. The British operators of the Emma Mine had abandoned the search for the lost ore and the mine in the 1890s, and the workings below the tunnel were filled with water. Joe worked out the surface geology and spotted four holes for a recent technical innovation, the diamond core drill, that he hoped would hit the lost ore body.
Joe and Desdemona wore married in Salt Lake City a year later, with the blessings of the whole Alta mining camp, and they set up housekeeping in a twolve-by-fourteen-foot tent. Joe's future at Alta was made more secure when the fourth drill hole struck the ore body, only twentyeight feet from the spot where the British had given up. Alta and Joe Beeson made headlines. As winter set in, the Emma company gave the young couple a room in the boardinghouse right over the compressor installation. Small mines could not afford frills, and the Beesons stoically endured other similar quarters in the next few decades.
Desdemona might well have followed her generation's typical life pattern of wife and mother. She had some education plus a lively interest in a mining career, but with a successful husband she might have been a "mining man" only vicariously had not fate intervened. In 1917, when the United States entered World War I, Joe enlisted and was sent to Europe as an army engineer. Soon after, the Emma Mining Company wont bankrupt due to excessive stock promotion. After Desdemona had a miscarriage she decided to return to school at Stanford University to learn technical skills to prepare for future family operations. At this point in her life she moved into nontraditional paths.
Stanford presented her with new challenges. Regulations demanded that she live in the dormitory with the freshmen girls, since she was unaccompanied by her spouse—a clear indication of the prevailing view of the "place" of women. Although the course work in mining engineering presented Desdemona with few difficulties, she found the attitude of her professors toward a female student much harder to cope with. She was unable to convince Professor Austin F. Rogers that her knowledge of mineralogy, acquired as a young woman in Eureka and Alta as well as in his laboratory, warranted more than a C grade even though she earned A grades on his examinations. He had never given a woman higher than a C, he responded to her complaint, and he had no intention of changing. His attitude certainly was not atypical of the times. However, Desdemona had a better relationship with most professors, who respected her for her experience. She recalled later that she was one of the few students in a class on ore deposits who had ever been in an underground mine.
When her husband returned from the army a year and a half later, Desdemona left her studies in mining engineering and geology and joined him at his profession. They wont back to Bingham, Utah, and the two began a lifelong partnership as independent mining entrepreneurs. Joe studied the geology and Desdemona researched old courthouse records. When she found some claims delinquent in taxes, they filed on adjacent land and went into partnership with Joe's wealthy in-law, James Hogle. While waiting for the title to be cleared through a tax sale, Desdemona gave birth to her first child and Joe supported the family through geologic consulting. After the title was cleared, years of hard work on the Bingham Prospect began, with meager results at first. For fifty dollars a month Desdemona kept the books and ran the mine whenever Joe took a consulting job to keep the family eating. However, great wealth slipped from their grasp. Hogle held control of the property when two leasers finally located a rich ore body, and he brought in Desdemona's brother George to run the mine. Blood ties did not bring agreement over management policies, however, and Desdemona was ordered off the property. But Hogle rehired her since she was good at keeping books. It was a recurring irritation to her when one miner even objected to having his paycheck signed by a woman!
Desdemona was a determined worker despite personal obstacles. She put in so many hours at the Bingham Prospect that she was hospitalized with sunstroke, the first of s several long hospitalizations; however, no one could keep her from working strenuously. But times wore hard, and when a large Boston firm made an offer on the Bingham Prospect, Hogle and the Beesons agreed to sell. The coporation vice-president, an acquaintance of hers, came to the hospital to collect her signature. He had negotiated a 25 percent reduction in the price with Joe and the others. Desdemona was outraged but had to give in. She was, after all, only one of several owners.
The 5 percent of the proceeds of the sale of the Bingham Prospect that the courts finally granted the Beesons appeared a substantial sum, although it was a considerable reduction from their original interest. The money was needed to finance Joe's Park City Consolidated venture. Here again the Beesons operated as a team; Desdemona helped stake the claims, carrying four-by-four posts while she was pregnant. Since outside capital was again needed, the Beesons brought in John Hayes Hammond and associates. An inclined shaft was sunk and rich silver ore was struck, but again the financiers put in their own manager and received most of the profitsThe mining business was a peripatetic one. The Beesons wore next associated with a losing venture in Cerro Gordo, Inyo County, California, which swallowed up most of the Park City money. The next move was to Jarbidge, in northeast Nevada. Joe again supplemented the family income with consulting, and when he was away Desdemona ran the operation. On one occasion there was a labor dispute and the miners went on strike. They wanted to be paid from the time they left the boardinghouse in the morning until they returned from work at a tunnel high on the mountain. Since this differed from Utah practice, Desdemona hurriedly drove one hundred miles to Elko to check Nevada law, then returned and nailed the relevant statute to the boardinghouse door. She informed the men that if they did not want to work under her conditions she would pay them off. Her determination and poise won the day and the strike ended. A woman doing a professional job, replacing her husband when he was away, could command the respect of the miners and win her point. Her practical knowledge of the mining industry coupled with her husband's skill in mining operations was usually a successful combination.
The miners generally respected Desdemona Beeson, although her professional colleagues sometimes did not. She was occasionally refused permission to visit underground mines when she traveled with her husband, even though she was a professional, not a tourist. Mining customs could not be ignored, but when she was at work her authority was not easily disputed. When a diamond drill crew- made some careless errors in procedure she gave them a scathing lecture on the unacceptability of such sloppy workmanship. She once fired a husky workman for using a shovel to catch the drill sludge. When he balked at leaving, she yelled at him, "You get out of here or I'll wrap that shovel around your neck!" He quickly left.
In the late 1930s Joe was offered a position with the Office of Price Administration governing appropriations for lead-zinc mines. Desdemona accompanied him to Washington, but found it difficult in late depression times to secure a job on her own. She did some consulting for coal companies and then was able to secure the first of several government positions when the outbreak of World War II caused the government to change its attitude toward hiring women. She spent most of the war working for the Foreign Economic Administration, monitoring world metal production and demand and purchasing foreign metals including uranium. At the war's end she, like most women employed in war industries, found her services no longer necessary. She could stay on, she was informed, but her rank would be reduced from professional to secretarial. Even though her pay would have remained the same, her pride was hurt. Desdemona, cushioned by her husband's continued employment, quit.
After six years in Washington the Beesons returned to Salt Lake and Desdemona went to work for Thayer Lindsley, a noted Canadian entrepreneur. She began compiling data on Nevada and presenting it to Lindsley in Toronto. But soon Joe had new ideas. Prosperity had returned and with it a new demand for metals. Desdemona gave up her independent career and joined Joe in a partnership, Beeson Exploration. They leased an old mine near St. George and opened a rich little ore body. Then the dangers always inherent in the mining business caught up with them. While she was checking out a section of the mine a huge mass of rock gave way, striking Desdemona and breaking her neck. She had to spend months in the hospital, since she was badly injured. As she said later, "It didn't cure me. I was back working in a neck brace."
Tragedy seemed to pursue the family. In the next few years, their eldest son, a test pilot, was killed in the crash of an army B-29. Their son-in-law, William Burgin, a geologist with Bear Creek Mining, was killed in the crash of a commercial airliner in Wyoming.
Nevertheless, the Beesons, well into middle age by this time, remained as deeply committed as ever to the mining profession. They returned to the Wasatch in the late 1950s, when Joe was hired to direct the connection of the Wasatch Drain Tunnel with the water-filled workings of the Cardiff Mine. The Cardiff had once been the biggest mine in the Alta district, and Joe and Desdemona had been to the bottom level in the 1920s, before the mine was closed and filled with water. After the connection was made, the Beesons and Charles A. Steen, the uranium magnate, obtained a lease to mine ore below the tunnel level. It was a difficult venture that required the sinking of an incline shaft at the end of two miles of tunnel. Big electric pumps and underground power lines were installed. Ice-cold water cascaded constantly onto the employees, who wore rubber suits and long underwear. Desdemona later recalled that operation as her most difficult engineering job. When the pumps broke down they had to be hauled out on cables, sent to Salt Lake for repairs, and reinstalled before the mine filled with water. They mined good ore from the incline but not enough for Steen, who decided to pull out, despite Desdemona's chiding him for being afraid of "a little water." The Beesons continued the operation at the tunnel level until 1967.
One winter Desdemona slipped on some ice at the tunnel portal and broke her ankle. The doctor insisted that she not go underground again, but she still went regularly into the mine, in cast and neck brace, to keep up with the operations. She also continued to handle ore sales and other paper work.
But times had changed. The operation barely broken even, and the Beesons were finally forced out by a different sort of entrepreneur—the men who built the Snowbird ski resort, an operation incompatible with an underground mine. The Beesons, their last dream ended, retired to an assortment of medical afflictions. Joe and Desdemona, despite heart troubles, still enthusiastically attended Salt Lake City geological meetings. They were elected honorary life members of the Utah Geological Association. Desdemona concluded their acceptance speech: "Together we have added new money to the state, had a good payroll, and thoroughly enjoyed being hard rock miners.""
In a conversation in 1975 Desdemona commented on the women's movement with some wonderment. Women, to her. wore born liberated; "liberation" was a strange term. Marriage and family were worthy goals, and since she had successfully combined them with a career she could not see why other women might not. Could not any other woman have done the same?
Desdemona Beeson died of cancer on July 8, 1976. At the Unitarian funeral (which she had planned) were many professional associates. One former employee, a husky, middle-aged mine foreman, commented that there wore no mining people like the Beesons any more. "They wore great to work for and they always took care of you." Desdemona had indeed been a trailblazer for the many women who now work in various aspects of Utah's mining industry.
Another Utah woman successful in the operation of small mines was Lena Larsen. Her interest in mining apparently developed as she worked at the boardinghouse of the Hidden Treasure Mine in Dry Canyon, above Ophir. There she observed how fortunate miners or prospectors could "strike it rich." She opened her own boardinghouse and became involved in mining ventures.
Moving to Salt Lake City, she acquired several lead-silver claim groups, notably the Muerbrook and Southport mines near Stockton. Betwoen 1912 and 1915 she employed about five men at the Muerbrook, supervised by H. B. Westover. Weekly production sometimes reached as much as one railroad car of ore worth thirty to forty dollars a ton. The prospect appeared good enough to interest two young graduate engineers in leasing part of the property.
Lena's biggest venture in the mining business was also intriguing. Through her friendship with old Mack Gisborn, she acquired the oncerich Mono Mine. Gisborn had made and lost several fortunes when he met Lena in Dry Canyon. She agreed to provide him with room and board at her boardinghouse, and a daily allowance of whiskey, in exchange for which he sold her fifty-eight claims in the district, including his interest in the Mono Mine, for $5,000.
Lena's family life remains obscure. She was married to Otto Larsen, but he was not involved in her mining activities. Whatever her personal life, mining men respected Lena Larsen as a crafty financial manager who was strong-willed enough to halt work on a venture requiring some of her land until her terms were met. She also had no hesitation about entering that sacred male bastion, the saloon, for a drink. A Dry Canyon mining operator once remarked to George Lawrence, Salt Lake mining attorney, that Lena had been studying law- and was probably seeking admittance to the Utah State Bar. Lawrence was not surprised, and ventured the opinion that she had been admitted to "just about every other bar in the mining regions." A more dispassionate opinion in the Salt Lake Alining Review referred to her as "one of the best known lady mine operators of the state" and later as "one of the few successful mining women of the west." Lena Larsen was an operator, a character, and an institution in Tooele County, though the big bonanza always eluded her.
Mining records hint at the presence of a few other women in mining ventures. A Mrs. Mary J. Stewart, proprietress of the Stewart Hotel and Boarding House at 231 South State, Salt Lake City, owned and managed a small mine in one of the most rugged areas of Utah. Her mine was situated nearly ten thousand feet high in the Silver Lake section of the American Fork Mining District in the Wasatch. Each summer she hired men to work it, but the short season and the long pack trail into the property made development costly and slow. She took a partner, J. E. Teeter, in 1914, and he supervised the installation of a new gasoline powered air compressor and drill. But the Stewart mine never proved out, and it probably failed to pay the considerable expenses of its backers.
Mrs. Stewart herself remains a shadowy figure. Apparently she was a divorcee, with no technical training. She was the proprietress of several hotels and rooming houses, and her interest in mines is uncharacteristic. She died or left the area in 1919.
These Utah women were largely unsuccessful in winning lasting fortunes from the earth, but so were the vast majority of mining men. Joe and Desdemona Beeson succeeded in finding and mining ore in several of their properties. Theirs appears to have been a true partnership; Joe provided the more theoretical and scientific bases for finding ore while Desdemona was, as she put it, "the practical nuts and bolts" of the operation, working as manager, bookkeeper, and mining engineer together with her husband in the rugged world of underground mines.
As a point of comparison, two other western women who joined the ranks of successful "mining men," Elizabeth Pellet of Rico, Colorado, and Josie Pearl of Nevada, had much in common with Desdemona Beeson. Both Pellet and Pearl were married to mining engineers. They worked on mining properties with their spouses but also played important roles in property development themselves. Both became highly involved in entrepreneurial ventures, which they continued after their husbands' deaths.
Probably a more typical story of the role an educated woman played in the mining industry is that of Lou Henry, who graduated in geology at Stanford and intended to teach it until she met and married Herbert Hoover. She accompanied him around the world on his mining ventures and raised a family. She also managed to translate with him De Re Metallic a, a Latin fourteenth-century classic on mining, that is still in use today as a valuable historical work.
Women in Utah mining in the past one hundred years wore not atypical of the women in the profession in the West generally. They wore few, they were non-Mormon, they worked long and hard under difficult conditions, and they, like the men, generally failed to find the "great bonanza." Only Desdemona Beeson was really successful; she sawnothing unusual in having become a "mining man" who happened also to be a wife and mother. All these women contributed to the development of mineral resources in Utah. History has perhaps overlooked them in favor of the more colorful dance hall girls, but their contribution is an important one as we search out and fill in the roles women played in the history of Utah.
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