The Nellie Cashman Trilogy is the fictionalized, but essentially true, story of a American woman—an Irish immigrant—in the 19th-Century. Truly a hero and famous in her day, she has been largely forgotten by the 21st-Century.
This trio of books covers Nellie’s life from the age of 20 to 30, at which point she executed her most courageous, fateful, and famous undertaking. The Nellie Cashman Trilogy is meant to reintroduce her to the world in the 21th-Century, in which she would have surely felt right at home. Aa woman ahead of her time; she was single by choice, a successful entrepreneur, and liberated woman, in a time when all those were disapproved of, to say the least.
Book #1 covers the journey that launches her toward the woman she is to become. Starting in Boston, ending in San Francisco in 1865, it’s a breathtaking seagoing adventure on which she meets three of the men who will be her lifelong friends. They, plus Nellie, her mam, sister, and Jeanette, a young woman they encounter en route, call themselves “The Lucky Strikes.” Upon disembarking, the men head to the foothills east of San Francisco to mine gold. By now Nellie has caught “gold fever” and yearns to join them and prospect for gold too.
Book #2 tells of Nellie’s life from 1865-1875: Stuck in San Francisco, she and her mam work hard to save up money so Nellie can seek her fortune as a miner. It takes money to make money. She intends to make a lot of it—millions, if she has her way. She meets up with “the fellers” in Virginia City, Nevada. Eventually they all move on to Pioche, Nevada where, still aspiring to be a miner, she buys a boarding house. She’s a mover and shaker with a generous, kind nature, as well as a successful businesswoman. They learn of a gold strike in the Cassiar Range of Canada and move on.
Book #3: At age 29/30 she executes her most daring, dangerous, and courageous, if admittedly impulsive and foolhardy, undertaking. That’s the story in the third book, Angel or Wild Woman. After a season in Cassiar Range, she’s wintering in comfort in Victoria, BC, when she learns her friends, and hundreds of other miners, are snowed in, sick and dying of starvation and scurvy. She must save them . . . or die trying.
Angel or Wild Woman will have you holding your breath, on the edge of your seat, and turning pages like mad.