Ellen “Nellie” Cashman (1845 or 1851 – 1925)
	
Nellie Cashman was born near Queenstown, Republic of Ireland to Fanny Cashman. She and her mother and sister immigrated to Boston about 1860 and they moved west to San Francisco in 1869. She and her mother soon moved to the silver mining camps in Nevada. In 1872, they opened the Miner’s Boarding House in Pioche, a pattern Nellie followed for the rest of her life – operating small businesses to support her mining activities.((Charlene Porsild, “Ellen Cashman.” //Dictionary of Canadian Biography,// 2018 website: http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/cashman_ellen_15E.html))
	
After a year in Pinoche, Nellie moved to the Cassiar mining district where she mined and kept a boarding house for miners.((Charlene Porsild, “Ellen Cashman.” //Dictionary of Canadian Biography,// 2018 website: http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/cashman_ellen_15E.html)) She arrived in Cassiar by travelling up the Stikine River with a group of two hundred miners from Nevada. She travelled back to Victoria in the fall where she heard that many of her party were sick with scurvy. She travelled back to Cassiar in a seventy-seven-day trip with enough potatoes to save her group. For this she became known as the Angel of the Goldfields.((Carolyn Anne Moore, “Representation and Renumeration: white women working in the Klondike Goldrush (1897-99) and the decade following (1900-10). A thesis submitted for a Master of Arts degree at the University of Toronto, Graduate Department of Education, 1994: 96.)) Her personality and quick wit caused journalists to follow her activities for many years. She left the Cassiar in 1876 and toured gold fields in the American west before establishing the Delmonico Restaurant in Tucson, Arizona in 1879, and then going on to Tombstone. She had several businesses and raised money for a Tucson hospital, and a church, a hospital and a public school in Tombstone. Her businesses collapsed with Tombstone in 1886 and she toured gold camps in the States, Mexico, and South Africa. In 1897, she was in her hotel in Yuma, Arizona when she heard about the Klondike strike. She told the //Arizona Daily Citizen// (Tucson) in September that she was organizing a party of prospectors, and in February 1898 she was in Victoria assembling supplies.((Charlene Porsild, “Ellen Cashman.” //Dictionary of Canadian Biography,// 2018 website: http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/cashman_ellen_15E.html))
	
Nellie Cashman was among the thousands of stampeders to arrive in Dawson in the early summer of 1898.  She purchased a claim on Bonanza Creek that yielded over $100,000 and claimed she spent it all on buying other claims and prospecting the country. She was exceptional in that in 1901 only one percent of Yukon miners were women and the majority of them were staking claims to increase family holdings. In Dawson, Cashman operated a restaurant and then a grocery store in the Donovan Hotel. She left Dawson for Fairbanks, Alaska in 1905 and moved on to the Koyukuk region in 1907 where she mined and prospected into her seventies. In 1924, she contracted pneumonia and moved to Victoria where she later died.((Charlene Porsild, “Ellen Cashman.” //Dictionary of Canadian Biography,// 2018 website: http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/cashman_ellen_15E.html))