I couldn’t help but fall in love with Gold Rush writer Dame Shirley, who was called Louise (Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe) by the people who knew her.
Her place in literary history came from the letters she wrote to her sister, Molly, who lived in Western Massachusetts. Louise entertained her family as she made a life with her young husband first and last in San Francisco with two years in the early 1851 and 1952 along the gold mines of the Feather River northeast of San Francisco where young couple moved because Mr. Clapp was in ill health.
Louise’s writing became a powerful link to the lives of the women of the California Gold Rush.
I especially enjoyed her letter to Molly telling about when she actually tried on the occupation of Gold Miner. “Nothing of importance has happened since I last wrote you except that I have become a mineress; that is if the having washed a pan of dirt with my own hands, and procured therefrom three dollars and twenty five cents in gold dust, (which I shall inclose in this letter) entitle me to this name.”
Her letter continues to share she would rather not continue as a miner. She realized the male miners were hungry for female companionship while doing this grueling work. The solution, they thought, was to hand a new mineress a pan to sift through that was heaped with gold as an encouragement for her to continue because “it was such easy work.” They knew better AND they wanted more women around!
When she and her husband returned to San Francisco, she wasn’t happy about it. She wrote in her final letter: “My heart is heavy at the thought of departing forever from this place. I like this wild and barbarous life: I leave it with regret.” Her husband was tired of California completely. They divorced, he moved to Hawaii and eventually back to the eastern US and she added an “e” to the end of Clapp forever becoming Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe and happily stayed in San Francisco.
Her colorful letters were first memorialized via a magazine called The Pioneer in 1854 and 1855. Famed California writer Bret Harte later published fiction that bore a stunning resemblance to the stories Louise told in her letters to Molly.
Harte was her primary detractor, criticizing her letters when published in The Pioneer. Interesting, isn’t it, that when questioned about the similarities between her early letters and Hart’s later work when she was a teacher in San Francisco in later life, she stood beside her frenemy saying, “Oh, no he didn’t plagiarize my stories. He was unconsciously recreating what he had read from my letters and meant no harm.”
She taught for twenty years before returning to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where she was born. Another irony from Dame Shirley’s life was she rekindled her friendship with Bret Harte’s estranged wife in New Jersey. She actually lived in the boarding house of one of Mrs. Harte’s nieces when she died in 1906.
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© 2012 by Julie Jordan Scott
Julie Jordan Scott has been a Life & Creativity Coach, Writer, Facilitator and Teleclass Leader since 1999. She is also an award winning Actor, Director, Artist and Mother Extraordinaire. She was twice the StoryTelling Slam champion in Bakersfield. She leads Writing Camp with JJS & this Summer will be traveling throughout the US to bring this unique, fun filled creative experience to the people wherever she finds the passion & the interest.
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