Queens of the Mines

Queens of the Mines

By Andrea Anderson, Gold Rush Author & HistorianHistory
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Queens of the Mines episodes

  • Jennie Curry & Yosemite Firefalls (From the Vault)

    this week, I am posting an old episode that was subscription only. I’m sorry. I caught the ‘vid. Back to regular programming next week!


    In Yosemite, for thousands of years before the discovery of gold, Native Americans traveled through and inhabited the area that the Sierra Nevada’s melting snow spills dramatically over rocky cliffs on the walls into the Valley. Waterfalls that sit over three thousand feet above its floor. The treasures the park holds are unduplicated, each wonder differing from the next, each overwhelmingly spectacular.

    From 1850 to 1851 Native Americans and Euro-American miners in the area were at war, the Mariposa War. Some Euro-American men had formed a militia known as the Mariposa Battalion. Their purpose - drive the native Ahwahneechee people onto reservations. The Mariposa Battalion were the first non-natives to enter Yosemite. When this war ended, Yosemite was then open to settlement and speculation.
    Today we are going to talk about Jennie Curry, half of the curry couple who founded Camp Curry in Yosemite, and the history of the Yosemite Firefall.
    Season 3 features inspiring, gallant, even audacious stories of REAL 19th Century women from the Wild West. Stories that contain adult content, including violence which may be disturbing to some listeners, or secondhand listeners. So, discretion is advised. I am Andrea Anderson and this is Queens of the Mines, Season Three.


    17 min
  • To-tu-ya & the Mariposa War - Yosemite

    Welcome back to Queens of the Mines. This is Season 4. Yosemite.

    This season of Queens of the Mines explores the making of Yosemite National Park and true stories of women who were there along the way, and women that were there before.

    In this episode, I am going to tell you about To-tu-ya, who was later known as Maria Lebrado. She was part of that 5 percent and she was the last survivor born of the Ahwahneechee band that was driven out of the Yosemite Valley by the Mariposa Battalion during the Mariposa War. 

    5,500 years ago, Indigenous tribes were the first to settle what we now know as Yosemite. The most recent native group to live there was primarily an extension of the Southern Sierra Miwok. They had named the Yosemite Valley “Ahwahnee” and they referred to themselves as the Ahwahneechee. People of the valley. The Ah-wah-nee´-chees had been a large and powerful tribe and 171 years ago, before white men arrived to Yosemite, there were 37 indigenous villages in the area with over 10,000 Miwok living there. 

    After a war, and what the Miwoks called the fatal black sickness, the majority had died or had fled to live with other tribes. When it was all said and done, only around 500 of the 10,000 Miwoks remained. That is five % of their population.


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    47 min
  • National Day for Truth and Reconciliation - FROM THE VAULT
    “This is Queens of the Mines, where we discuss untold stories from the twisted roots of California. Today, we’ll be talking about Indian Boarding Schools in the US and California. We are in a time where historians and the public are no longer dismissing the “conflict history” that has been minimized or blotted out. We now have the opportunity to incorporate the racial and patriarchal experience in the presentation of American reality. The preceding episode may feature foul language and or adult content including violence which may be disturbing some listeners, or secondhand listeners. So, discretion is advised.
    Over 1,300 bodies of First Nations students were found at former Canada‘s residential schools this year. In response, Canada has declared September 30 2021, as the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Since 2013, this day has been commemorated as Orange Shirt Day.
    Like most of our topics on the podcast, the truth about our Indian boarding school has been written out of the US history books. The system has long been condemned by Native Americans as a form of cultural genocide. By 1926, nearly 83% of Indian school-age children were attending boarding schools. There once were over 350 government-funded Indian Boarding schools across the US where native children were forcibly abducted by government agents, sent to schools hundreds of miles away, and beaten, starved, or otherwise abused when they spoke their native languages. Nothing short of the previous Mission System, truly.
    This Episode is also brought to you by the Law Offices of CHARLES B SMITH. Are you facing criminal charges in California? The most important thing you can do is obtain legal counsel from an aggressive Criminal Defense Lawyer lawyer you can trust. The Law Office of Charles B. Smith has the knowledge and experience to assess your situation and help you build a strong defense against your charges. The Law Offices of CHARLES B SMITH do not just defend cases, they represent people. So visit their website cbsattorney.com, we know even in the gold rush no one liked attorneys, but Charles you will love.
    Between 1869 and the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Native American children were voluntarily or forcibly removed from their homes, families, communities and placed in boarding schools. where they were punished for speaking their native language, banned from acting in any way that might be seen to represent traditional or cultural practices, stripped of traditional clothing, hair and personal belongings and behaviors reflective of their native culture. The United States government tied Native Americans’ naturalization to the eradication of Native American cultural identity and complete assimilation into the “white culture.” Congress passed an act in 1887 that established “every Indian born within the territorial limits of the United States who has voluntarily taken up… his residence separate and apart from any tribe of Indians…[and] adopted the habits of civilized life…” may secure a United States citizenship.
    Often these residential schools were run by different faith groups including Methodists, Latter-day Saints (LDS) and Catholics. Like the Missions, often crowded conditions,students weakened by overwork and lack of public sanitation put students at risk for infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, measles and trachoma. None of these diseases were yet treatable by antibiotics or controlled by vaccines, and epidemics swept schools as they did cities. Often students were prevented from communicating with their families, and parents were not notified when their children fell ill; the schools also failed sometimes to notify them when a child died. ”Many of the Indian deaths during the great influenza pandemic of 1918–19, which hit the Native American population hard, took place in boarding schools. ”The 1928 Meriam Report noted that death rates for Native American students were six and a half times higher than for other ethnic groups.
    Th
    17 min
  • Yosemite - Season 4

    Have you ever experienced the breathtaking California wilderness? Yosemite National Park is known for its giant waterfalls and granite cliffs. Boasting Giant sequoia groves, grand valley, and lakes and streams. Yosemite receives over 3.5 million visitors annually. Just before the United State’s largest migration, the California gold rush, Yosemite remains vastly untouched and was the home of 10,000 California Miwoks. 

    Join me Andrea Anderson through the history of the making of Yosemite National Park and the women that were there along the way, and before. 

    Queens of the Mines- Yosemite 

    Premieres September 19th 2023

    Listen for free on Spotify or subscribe for ad free episodes with bonus content.



    1 min
  • Season Finale LIVE at The National Exchange Hotel
    Julia Cathrine Monnin Ducray. Born Julia Monnin, her family was from Switzerland and they had emigrated to Pennsylvania. Living next to them in Pennsylvania, was the Ducray family. The Ducray’s had boarded a steamship in France in 1839.
    The journey was almost fatal for 15 year old Jean-Baptiste Ducray, his parents and eight brothers and sisters. Southeast of Nova Scotia, the steamship began taking on water. The passengers and crew feared they would sink and began to throw all of their possessions overboard. The Ducray family threw overboard their wooden chest containing $2,000 in gold and everything else they had brought with them. Jean-Baptiste’s mother kept only a wooden cross bearing an ivory carving of Jesus.
    The ship sank, and everyone from the ship was left shipwrecked on what is now known as Sable Island. They went days without food. They were starving, crazed. A passenger from the ship overheard the ship’s crew planning to kill and eat Jean-Baptiste and his father. He hid them by burying them in sand. Luckily, only a day later, a passing ship rescued them. They arrived safely, settling in Pennsylvania, next to The Monnin family. Julia and Jean-Baptiste Ducray fell in love and were married.
    40 min
  • Luzena Wilson- Part 2 of 2 FROM THE VAULT
    Last Time in Luzena Wilson’s Story it was late December 1849.
    Luzena was serving up to 200 boarders a week in Sacramento and charging each twenty five dollars. Customers were happy to pay the high price tag for a meal prepared by Luzena Wilson, for the white woman, was a rarity. In 1850 women made up just three percent of the non-Native American population in California‘s mining region, numbering about 800 in a sea of 30,000 men. As a married American woman, Luzena Wilson reminded many of the American men of home, of their wives, mothers or sisters. They treated Luzena, as she put it, like a ”queen.” Luzena had put her boys to bed, and under dim light, wrote out her list of goods needed for the next week. She would make her largest purchase yet in the morning. Six months had passed in Sacramento and now she longed for a friend. She set down her steel dip-pen, blew out the beeswax candle next to it, and laid down beside Mason. The rain began to furiously pound on the family home’s weak roof, and it did not stop all night.
    21 min
  • Luzena Wilson - Part 1 of 2 FROM THE VAULT
    Queens of the Mines features the authentic stories of gold rush women who blossomed from the camouflaged, twisted roots of California. In the next episodes, we will hear the story of The Queen of Devotion in the California Gold Mines. Much if this story is told in the own words of this entrepreneur who knew how to capitalize on her strengths and proved that some men in the Old West would eventually tire of strong, successful women during America’s Largest Migration, The Gold Rush.
    Sources
    Source: J. S. Holliday, The World Rushed In (1981) 
    My Checkered Life. Luzena Stanley Wilson in Early California
    https://www.sierracollege.edu/ejournals/jsnhb/v4n2/wilson.html
    http://clic.cengage.com/uploads/70430dd28565018b949bcdd2c8f6f027_2_5312.pdf
    http://www.solanohistory.net/articles/207/207.1.pdf
    30 min
  • Ah Toy Part 3 of 3 FROM THE VAULT
    Queens of the Mines features the authentic stories of gold rush women who blossomed from the camouflaged, twisted roots of California. In Ah Toy’s final episode, we will finish the story of the true pioneer of San Francisco’s Chinatown, Ah Toy, whose story highlights important aspects of the role the Chinese immigrants played in America’s Largest Migration, The Gold Rush.
    Find the Spotify Playlist - Shelter in Place/Quarantine curated just for my listeners. You do not need a Spotify account to listen.
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    Resources
    Jacqueline Baker Barnhart, Working Women: Prostitution in San Francisco From the Gold Rush to 1900 (Santa Cruz: University of California Santa Cruz, 1977)
    Mud, Blood and Gold: San Francisco in 1849 (San Francisco: Heritage House Publishers, 2009)
    Joann Levy, They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush
    Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California GoldRush (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000)
    Unsubmissive Women The Bawdy House Girls: A Look at the Brothels of the Old West By Alton Pryor
    Historic Spots In California BY Mildred Brooke Hoover, Hero Eugene and Ethel Grace Rensch, William N Abeloe revised by Douglas E Kyle
    Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong ... By Elizabeth Sinn
    The White Woman’s Burden Chinese Prostitution in San Francisco
    THE CHINESE by Henry Kittredge Norton
    The California Gold Rush: A Sexual Nightmare for Minority Women
    A short history of bordellos in San Francisco, part 2
    Ah Toy
    - The Oldest Profession Podcast
    Badass Ladies Of Chinese History: Ah Toy
    Wild West Women: Ah Toy – A China Blossom in Old San Francisco
    A Gutsy Chinese `Working Girl‘ in Gold Rush San Francisco
    HISTORICAL HOTTIES
    ”The Best Bad Things”: An Analytical History of the Madams of Gold Rush San Francisco
    The Hakka People
    San Francisco’s Chinatown was a seedy ghetto.
    Chinese Deathscape; From Cradle to Grave
    The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920) by Lothrop Stoddard
    https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=bgsu1372091610
    28 min
  • Ah Toy - Part 2 of 3 FROM THE VAULT
    Queens of the Mines features the authentic stories of gold rush women who blossomed from the camouflaged, twisted roots of California. In Chapter Three, we will continue the story of the true pioneer of San Francisco’s Chinatown, Ah Toy, whose story highlights important aspects of the role the Chinese immigrants played in America’s Largest Migration, The Gold Rush.
     
    Lotus
    “Between the graves and the city wall stood a low building, in a clump of cedar trees.” Two Americans noted as they passed by a large cemetery while visiting China during the early 1850’s. “That is the Baby-tower, tended by the Buddhist Nunneries.” The building was a structure that was commonly built for the disposal of infants, used by parents too poor for burial costs or too ashamed of the murder of thier child. Tied up in a package, the infant would be thrown into one of the openings of the tower, or rather well, as it is sunk some distance below the earth. The babies left in the towers soon died of hunger, cold, or the heat but sometimes survived for up to two days. “The top, which rose about ten feet above the ground, was roofed, and looking into it, we saw that the tower was filled.” In a mound of bamboo straw that moves with the crawling of the worms, tiny legs and arms, and little fleshless bones, protrude. Those who passed by had to ignore the screaming cries.  
     
    Every few days the person or group of people who built the tower would clear it out and either bury the babies or burn the heap. They would spread the ashes over the land. “Was this a cemetery or a slaughterhouse?” The Chinese said it was only a tomb. There was no inquiry, no check. The parent had the power to kill or to save. As the conditions worsened in 19th century China, families were struggling to feed all of the members just to survive. If you were a woman born in China at the time, you would not have been considered as valuable in comparison to being born male. You would have been extremely vulnerable to being given up, killed, or sold off by your family. If not, you would have been perceived as subservient, your future role, a homemaker. Confucianism in China considered a son necessary for the guarantee of provision of security. It was believed that money spent on raising a female was not a logical investment. For the purpose of avoiding poverty, and population control, female gendercide, also known as gynocide, femicide or infanticide, has been practiced since ancient times. In result, female babies were left in the towers, or often suffocated, drowned or starved. The pressure on a woman to have a boy, and not have more than one child was beyond worrying. Buddists condemned the killings of young girls and insisted it would bring bad karma. However, the Buddhist belief in reincarnation meant that they believed that the death of an infant was not final. The child would be reborn. This belief eased guilty feelings that consumed parents. If your family was not in danger of poverty, actions would be taken to make you a more desirable bride. The ultimate woman bore a three-inch foot, known as a “golden lotus. Four-inch feet or “silver lotus”, were considered respectable, and feet that were five inches or longer were called the “iron lotus” and much less desirable. The prospects for marriage would be low for a girl with the iron lotus. Tiny feet were made possible by the process of foot binding, which began when a girl was at the age of 5 or 6. The pain was excruciating yet millions of Chinese women were devoted to the tradition. Try to imagine what it must have been like to endure this process as a young child. First, your feet would be submerged into extremely hot water, your toenails cut down as short as possible. Your feet would then be oiled and massaged before all of your toes, except the big toes, were snapped and forced flat against your sole, making a triangle. Bent double, the arch of your foot would be strained and folded in half. Ten foot long silk strips that w
    25 min

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