Her name was Luzena Stanley Wilson and she came to Nevada City from Missouri during the Gold Rush. You can hear her whole story and others tonight in Nevada City when the Nevada County Historical Society holds their monthly Speaker Night. Author Gary Noy is the guest who is from a family of generations of gold miners in Nevada County and has written many stories of that era. Noy says Wilson was shunned by the wagon train because she was a woman, but ended up in Sacramento anyway, and started and ran a successful hotel. That hotel was wiped out by the Flood of 1850, so she moved to Nevada City, but had more bad luck…
She went back to Sacramento, ran another hotel which was overrun by rats, moved to Vacaville where her hotel burned to the ground twice, and ultimately ended up in San Francisco, and lived in a hotel that was eventually destroyed by the 1906 earthquake. Despite all of that, she said in a memoir that she had no regrets. Noy says people don’t realize that the Gold Rush was full of stories like that…
Speaker Night is tonight at 7 at the Sierra Presbyterian Church in Nevada City. Admission is free.
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