Nellie, the Angel of Cassiar, had just got started. Her path through life, one long adventure, would wind up taking her to the Klondike Gold Rush and then on to the Gold fields of Northern Alaska
When Cassiar mining petered out, Nellie headed south to try out the Silver fields of Arizona. She opened a restaurant in Tucson but she had little luck finding silver, so a year later she sold the restaurant and moved to Tombstone—got there just after the Earp brothers.
In Tombstone she started a whole series of businesses—a shoestore, a grocery, a restaurant, a boarding house and a hotel. She also got involved in Tombstone’s civic affairs, helped raise money for a catholic church, raised money for the Salvation Army and the Red Cross…
When Tombstone’s boom busted in 1886, Nellie’s businesses busted with it, so she packed up again and headed out, tried New Mexico, Idaho, Wyoming, Mexico, South Africa.
In 1897 back in Yuma Arizona she heard the news of the gold strike on the Klondike. February 1898 found her in Victoria assembling supplies and planning her trip north. March found fifty-four-year-old Nellie in Skagway, Alaska, preparing to climb the Chilkoot Pass and head down the Yukon River.
April found her in Dawson—at the gold fields.
She opened a restaurant and began looking for a claim. She found No. 19 on Bonanza Creek, but when word reached Dawson that goldfields in Fairbanks offered serious opportunity, Nellie sold No. 19 and relocated again.
She didn’t stay long in Fairbanks. Word came down of even richer goldfields further north and she left to join the Koykuk miners.
When Nellie drove her dogsled 350 miles over 17 days from Koykuk down to Fairbanks the trip put her back in the news. A routine trip in that time and place became something very different when the musher was a 78-year-old woman.