Portrait of Nellie Cashman

People/prospector, miner

Nellie Cashman

Nellie Cashman (1845–1925), prospector, miner, from Ireland. Linked to gold, silver.

The lucky break

Joined a party of about 200 prospectors to the Cassiar district of northern British Columbia in 1873 and later staked on Bonanza Creek in the Klondike.1,2

The downfall

She told reporters she spent every cent of her earnings buying more claims and prospecting. She died unmarried in Victoria.1,2

Legacy

She ran boarding houses to fund her mining. In 1901 only one per cent of Yukon miners were women, and she was one of them.1,2

Story cards

Sources

  1. CASHMAN, ELLEN (Nellie Pioche, Irish Nellie) Dictionary of Canadian Biography
  2. File pages and licence metadata for portraits (via the Commons imageinfo/extmetadata API) Wikimedia Commons

Pictures on this page: Ellen Cashman.gif, Unknown author (Public domain).

From the Prospector Trails mining history dataset: each fact links to the source it was checked against. Figures are as the source gives them, in the money of their day. Not investment advice.

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Cover photos from Wikimedia Commons: Super Pit, Kalgoorlie by Kgbo, CC BY-SA 4.0. Pictures: Gold prospectors constructing a long box with a filter for panning gold. Process print after H.M. Paget, 1899., Henry Marriott Paget (Public Domain Mark 1.0); Kimberley, South Africa: miners and washing gear at the Bultfontein diamond mine. Woodburytype, 1888, after a photograph by Robert Harris., Harris, Robert, active 1881-1888. (Public Domain Mark 1.0); Falu gruva, Lundberg, Bengt A / Europeana (CC0 1.0).