Nellie Cashman: Tombstone's Angel With a Dirty Face

NELLIE CASHMAN, TOMBSTONE'S ANGEL WITH A DIRTY FACE By Susan Hazen-Hammond

The slender, mustachioed man finishes chewing and swallows. Then he draws his revolver and stands up. The other diners in the fashionable restaurant stop eating and watch.

"Stop complaining about this fine woman's fine food," he says, pointing his gun at a man sitting nearby.

The complainer looks at the revolver. "Food's delicious," he finally says into the gun barrel.

The standing man puts his gun away and sits down. From the kitchen doorway the petite, attractive young proprietress shakes her head.

The setting is Tombstone a century ago. Doc Holliday is eating at famed Nellie Cashman's Russ House, and he's just overheard Frank McLowry complain. The brief confrontation increases McLowry's hatred for Doc, but Nellie's good cooking is safe from further defamation. Not that the talented businesswoman minds. She knows one crabby diner can't hurt her reputation. And, in any case, she's perfectly capable of defending herself.

Today there's no proving that scene at the Russ House took place. Like Doc, the McLowrys, Tombstone itself, and so many of the area's other inhabitants, Nellie Cashman was the sort about whom legends blossom and thrive. In her seventyfour years, the enterprising individualist wandered from her Irish homeland to San Francisco and on to the Arctic. She did time in a Mexican jail and visited African diamond mines. And for nearly two decades from 1880, her twenty-ninth year-she called Tombstone home base.

High on her list of favorite activities came mining and prospecting ventures of all kinds. In addition, she owned a series of restaurants, grocery stores, and hotels. And wherever she went, the lively brunette became known for her kindness and generosity. She fed and housed newcomers free if they couldn't afford to pay. She grubstaked impoverished miners, and once saved a Tombstone mining superintendent from a lynch-eager mob. She kept a friendly eye on Tombstone's youth and reared her five orphaned nieces and nephews herself. Her same cheerful warmth spread to "good" women and "bad": to Nellie Cashman, distinctions like that weren't the point. Whenever possible, she combined her good works with the adventure she loved.

Soon stories of her exploits were circulating throughout the United States and beyond. Stories about the time she rescued two children from capture by Apaches, or the time she transported potatoes and limes hundreds of miles across snow-covered fields and mountains to stranded miners dying of scurvy in the Cassiar Digs in British Columbia. "No one else died after I arrived," she said later in her Irish brogue.

Most widely repeated of all is the Tombstone tale of how she eased the final hours of five criminals.

It is early spring of 1884, and a gang of villains has just been tried, convicted, and sentenced to die by hanging on March 28. The crime: robbing Castaneda and Goldwater's store in nearby Bisbee and murdering three bystanders and a deputy sheriff. One of the gang was lynched early on; so there will be five wicked men, hanging at once, right here in Tombstone. What a marvelous chance for a profitable enterprise, local entrepreneurs agree. They put together a grandstand and sell tickets, billing the event as a "Roman holiday."

The convicted men hear of the "holiday" in dismay. They're finally reconciled Nellie Cashman, a woman for all seasons, was a talented businesswoman in early-day Tombstone, a supporter of the down and out, a luckless prospector, and, in the Klondike during her later years, the “champion woman musher of the Far North.” to dying, but they don't want to be part of an exploited exhibition. Nellie visits the men in jail and listens to their complaints. She empathizes. But the whole town seems eager to see the hangings, and the officials say their hands are tied.

She returns to the Russ House and broods as she helps her Chinese cook with the next meal. Finally she knows what to do. Talking to officials again, she suggests a curfew. “People are too excited,” she says. “There's too much danger of trouble that night.” The sheriff and others agree. At midnight the normally rowdy part of town quiets down as the bars and entertainment houses close.

Nellie waits two hours. Then she picks up an ax and slips out the back door of the Russ House, followed by a few miners. Armed with hammers, saws, picks, and bars, they demolish the grandstand and throw the remains in a gully.

And that is the end of TombstoneRome, at least for now. The five men die next morning in relative peace. And no charges are pressed against Nellie for destruction of property.

She is independent and strong and almost fearless, but she understands she can't do everything herself. She makes an art of recruiting help and collecting money-occasionally for her own needs when her luck in business or prospecting is down, but more often for charitable causes: paying medical expenses for an injured miner, raising funds to build Tombstone's Catholic church, sending money to buy food for hungry Irishmen.

And she always dreams of striking paydirt as a miner and prospector. “When I hit the pay-streak in the shaft I'm sinking now, I'll strike it so damned rich I won't know what to do with my money,” she assures a friend.

One day in 1884, a Mexican prospector shows Nellie gold nuggets he's found somewhere in Baja California, just lying in a dry streambed. Then he disappears. When he doesn't return to be grubstaked, she decides to go to Mexico herself.

Dressed in overalls like the male companions from Tombstone who've agreed to try their luck, she sets out for adventure, after making sure her adopted children are in good hands.

Problems develop while they're crossing the Gulf of California. The captain of the ship gets drunk and starts to threaten his passengers. They tie him up and haul him below. Then they reach Baja and start their vague search. There's got to be gold here somewhere, Nellie is sure. They run out of food, then water. In better physical condition than the men, Nellie tells them, “Stay here and save your strength. I'll find water and return.” Miraculously, she does reach a spring. And-legend has it decades later-she discovers gold as well. But a padre is using the gold to feed and clothe his people. He asks her never to reveal his secret-and she doesn't for forty years. She brings water back to revive her companions. Unaware of the gold nearby, the men head home with Nellie-delayed when Mexican police throw them all in jail for the “piracy” committed back on that boat.

When the luckless explorers finally reach Tombstone, the newspapers have already printed the obituary of the Angel of Tombstone, the Toughest of the Sourdoughs, the West's Only Girl Mining Expert. But she is alive and thriving, even without the padre's gold.

Dozens of other Cashman legends evolved, some recorded, some lost. But the pattern that made Nellie famous in Tombstone was to last the rest of her life. She prospected. She mined. She ran boarding houses, restaurants, grocery stores, and a way station. She raised money. And tirelessly she helped the sick, the poor, the down and out.

In 1898 she joined the great stampede to the Klondike - “a small figure in mackinaw, trousers, boots, and a fur cap”-and spent much of her last twenty years near the Arctic Circle. Finally, after acquiring a reputation as “champion woman musher of the Far North,” the seventy-four-yearold miner caught pneumonia. A few weeks later, the Angel of Tombstone died in a British Columbia hospital she herself had collected money to build.Susan Hazen-Hammond of Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a free-lance writer whose work has appeared in Discovery, Modern Maturity, and Mature Outlook magazines. Her latest book, Enchanting New Mexico, was published by New Mexico Magazine Press.

Selected Reading

The Last Chance, by John Myers Myers. Dutton, New York, 1950.

Billy King's Tombstone, by Charles Leland Sonnichsen. The Caxton Printers, Ltd., Caldwell, Idaho, 1942.

Tombstone, Myth and Reality, by Odie B. Faulk. Oxford University Press, New York, 1972.