“Some people get NO respect — and a lot of them are women.”

Meet Elizabeth Jane “Jennie” Cloud Winner. She was born in 1822 in Virginia and moved to North Carolina when she was 16. With her second husband and his five children, they took a covered wagon to California where she got a job as a cook for James Marshal in Coloma, California. Yes, THAT James Marshal! The one who discovered the gold that set off the California Gold Rush.

Not quite.

Marshal did discover a nugget but he thought it was pyrite, fool’s gold. Jennie had actually panned for gold in North Carolina. (North Carolina hosted America’s first gold rush.) She knew gold from fool’s gold.

“Prove it,” snapped Marshal.

And she did. She knew pyrite would fall apart in lye so she tossed the nugget into a kettle of lye she was boiling to make soap. The nugget came out whole – and the rest of history.

Jennie died in San Diego in 1885. John Marshal gave her the nugget that started the California Gold Rush and it is on display in the Bancroft Library at UC Berkley today.

www.authormasterminds.com/steve-levi

(I autograph all my books from this site.)

Steve Levi is an Alaskan writer who specializes in the Alaska Gold Rush (nonfiction) and the ‘impossible crime,’ (fiction.) An ‘impossible crime’ is one where the detective must figure out HOW the crime was committed before going after the perpetrators – like a Greyhound bus with bank robbers and hostages disappearing off the Golden Gate Bridge –THE MATTER OF THE VANISHING GREYHOUND. Steve’s books can be found at www.authormasterminds.com/steve-levi

“Some people get NO respect — and a lot of them are women.”

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