Nellie Cashman: The Angel of the Mining Camps

The wind off the Cassiar Mountains could freeze the breath right in your throat. Snow fell so thick it swallowed lantern light whole. But somewhere inside that white roar, more than a hundred miners were starving, and Nellie Cashman was not going to leave them there. Nellie had come to the frontier when she was still a young woman, freshly arrived from Ireland with nothing but a sharp mind and a heart that refused to look away from trouble. Most people looked at the wild mining camps of the American West and saw danger. Nellie looked at them and saw people who needed a decent meal and a friendly face. She opened a miners' supply store and a small restaurant in the boomtowns of Arizona. She cooked hot beans and salt pork and strong coffee. She charged fair prices, and when a miner was broke, she fed him anyway. The men called her the Angel of the Mining Camps, and they meant every word. But the story people remembered longest happened in the winter of 1874, up in the frozen mountains of British Columbia. Word reached the lower settlements that scores of miners near Dease Lake were snowbound and sick with scurvy, their bodies going weak for want of fresh food and vegetables. Government officials said the rescue was impossible. The passes were buried. The journey was suicide. Nellie said she was going anyway. She gathered six volunteers, loaded six sleds with two hundred pounds of supplies each, and pushed north into the storm. For twenty-two days, they fought through blizzards and across frozen rivers, hauling food on their own backs when the sleds could not move. Nellie's mittened hands went numb and came back aching. Her boots soaked through each morning. At night, the temperature dropped so far below zero that the trees cracked like rifle shots in the dark. One of the men wanted to turn back. He sat down in the snow and looked at Nellie with hollow eyes. She knelt beside him, pressed warm broth into his hands, and said, steady as a rock, that they were almost there. Every hard mile they had already walked, she told him, was a mile they did not have to walk again. He got up. They all kept going. On the twenty-second day, the rescue party stumbled into the snowbound camp. The miners looked up from their bunks with sunken eyes and cracked lips. When they saw Nellie, some of them wept. She unpacked the limes and canned vegetables and potatoes, and she set to work cooking as if she were back in her little restaurant in Tucson. Within days, the sick men were sitting up. Within weeks, most were on their feet. Nellie never made much money from any of it. What she earned, she poured into schools and churches and missions for the poor. She raised money to build a hospital in Tombstone, Arizona, walking door to door in a town full of gamblers and gunslingers, asking for donations with a calm smile no one could refuse. Later in life, when most people her age were resting, Nellie packed her bags for Alaska. She was past sixty years old. She mushed through the Yukon wilderness, staked mining claims in the Klondike, and kept serving anyone who crossed her path and needed help. The cold never stopped her. The distance never stopped her. The whisper that a woman could not do such things never stopped her for even half a second. Nellie Cashman crossed more wild country and warmed more cold hearts than almost anyone in the frontier era. She was small in stature and enormous in spirit, and she showed everyone around her that the toughest thing you can carry into the wilderness is not a pickaxe or a rifle. It is the decision to care for other people no matter what. And on every hard night when the wind howls and the trail looks impossible, that is a very warm thing to remember.