Uncovering Women Miners' Forgotten Legacy in the 'Swiss Alps' of Sequoia National Park

R

ushing waterfalls. Towering mountain peaks. Late-summer wildflowers. It’s no wonder Mineral King has often been compared to the Swiss Alps.

But the only road that brings visitors to this remote corner of Sequoia National Park is also, in part, what keeps people away. The glacial valley is narrow and treacherous. Storms have washed out big chunks of asphalt, and snow keeps the road closed for much of the winter and spring. And a recent late-summer wildfire – now mostly contained – threatened a stretch of the road. But when the road is passable, Laile Di Silvestro makes the trip from the foothill town of Three Rivers several times a week in her rickety Toyota Corolla, even as the door latches and windows have rattled loose from too many bumpy trips.

There’s no insulation in her engine compartment, either, because marmots have chewed through it. These giant rodents are known for drinking radiator fluid and eating hoses, so park rangers urge visitors to protect their cars by wrapping them in giant tarps. The trailhead parking lots look like something out of a sci-fi movie, with every vehicle encased in a burrito of blue plastic.

“One of the theories is that [marmots] are looking for salts,” explained Di Silvestro as she strapped tarps together in a kind of elaborate origami. “It’s fascinating because [eating rubber and insulation] couldn’t possibly be good for them. And yet, the marmot population is thriving. They don’t just limit themselves to cars. They eat cabins, too.”

Di Silvestro’s family owns a rustic wooden cabin in this remote corner of the national park, where there’s no electricity or grocery store. Her great-great-grandfather, John Crowley, built the first road into the park in the 1870s as miners disillusioned with dwindling gold fields in the Northern Sierra headed south.

They didn’t find gold in Mineral King, but they did dig into deposits of copper and silver. Mineral King soon became a bustling mining town, boasting a post office, several saloons, and, eventually, a hotel run by Di Silvestro’s great-grandfather, Arthur Crowley.

For generations, Di Silvestro’s family has spent summers in this majestic valley, climbing its steep granite canyons, exploring old mine shafts, and marveling at the waterfalls and pristine alpine lakes.

“As a child, I was allowed to run freely,” she said, gesturing to the East fork of the Kawaeah River. “This place was one of my favorites because I could almost always find a rubber boa snake.”

Snakes that, according to 1870s superstitions, could get rid of hangovers following too much high-elevation drinking. “The miners used to think that if they put the snakes in their long underwear, it would cure them,” Di Silvestro laughed. “They never bite. They just kind of wrap around you. They’re very sweet.”

Di Silvestro grew up with this kind of mining lore. But now, as a local historian and archeologist surveying Mineral King, she’s looking for the stories she didn’t hear as a child.

How early women miners thwarted the law

Di Silvestro has spent the last 11 years scouring county records and painstakingly mapping out every mining claim she can verify in Mineral King. She’s found that a surprising number of claims were held by women.

“When I mention the female miners, you should be gasping with astonishment,” she said. “That was something that just did not happen in the 1870s, 1880s. It was virtually unheard of.”

But Di Silvestro’s research shows that in Mineral King’s mining heyday, 11% of mine claim owners were women. In 1870s California, women were not legally allowed to engage in business or file mining claims, but these women thwarted the law.

On a recent hike through Mineral King Valley, Di Silvestro gestured to a pile of chipped rocks marking where one of her favorite miners, Rhoda Kansas Meadows, staked a 20-acre claim. An old hand-tinted photograph of Meadows shows her hair cut short by 19th-century standards. She was holding a brush in one hand and what Di Silvestro thought could be a straight-edged razor in the other.

“She was resisting a lot of the social gender norms of the time, as were many of the other women around here,” Di Silvestro said.

Meadows, the daughter of a slaveholder from Kentucky, rejected her father’s beliefs, Di Silvestro said. She was influenced by meeting others in Mineral King who called themselves “Spiritualists.” Nineteenth-century adherents of Spiritualism believed in communication with spirits, but they also believed in reconciling faith with science. They were morally opposed to slavery and vocal proponents of women’s rights.

Di Silvestro’s research has found that despite objections from some male miners, women voted in Mineral King district elections four decades before women could vote for U.S. President.

“That’s something that I really take to heart today here in the San Joaquin Valley,” she said. “The pay gap is huge. Women make vastly less than men for the same job. Fewer women are voting. It’s critically important that we return women to our cultural narratives. Part of that is restoring their voices from the past.”

Highlighting the stories of Chinese miners

Di Silvestro has also documented how Chinese laborers were brought in to do some of the most dangerous work of using dynamite – a technology that was new at the time – to blast through rock.

“The Chinese workers did all of the blasting. And the cliff is very unstable. So just being underground was risky,” she said, walking through a section of the valley where those workers were segregated away from the white miners. “Miners of European descent were working, under the sunshine, hauling the ore away.”

Eventually, Chinese workers were excluded from Mineral King entirely during the anti-Chinese fervor of the early 1880s. Di Silvestro tracked down a newspaper account of the brutal lynching of a Chinese worker on the road to Mineral King. She also discovered notes in her own great-grandfather’s journal about Chinese workers who wanted to set up a laundry. White miners chased them out of town, hitting their horses with shovels on a steep part of the road.

Di Silvestro is also trying to help preserve Native American history in and around Sequoia National Park, including documenting how white miners and others brutally massacred Indigenous tribes, including the Potwisha and Wukchumni, whose descendants still live in the region. Several of those tribes have helped curate an exhibit called “Native Voices” at the nearby Three Rivers Historical Museum.

“It’s the Euro-American males that tend to dominate our histories,” Di Silvestro said. “One of the things we’re doing here is shaking that up a bit.”

There aren’t any trail signs explaining the stories of women or Chinese miners in Mineral King, though. You have to be lucky enough to catch one of Di Silvestro’s public talks or hikes to hear her bring the stories she’s discovered to life.

Return to wilderness

By 1883, the mining rush in Mineral King had pretty much ended. Miners never found gold, and it proved too expensive to process and transport copper and silver out of the valley. Eventually, Mineral King began to attract tourists looking to take in the mountain air.

Walt Disney fell in love with the breathtaking scenery at Mineral King and tried to develop a ski resort in its valley in the 1960s, sparking a battle with environmentalists that went all the way up to the Supreme Court.

But the project fizzled, and Mineral King has largely returned to wilderness after becoming part of Sequoia National Park in 1978. The 60 or so historic cabins in the valley were grandfathered in as some of the only remaining structures in the valley.

Just like the miners whose ideologies were so different from each other, longtime families who spend summers here span the political spectrum: some conservative, others liberal. At some point, Di Silvestro said, they decided people weren’t allowed to put political flags up so that everyone could just focus on enjoying the outdoors together.

Cabin owner Michael Botkin has spent every summer off the grid here for 71 years. He lights propane lamps to read at night and boils water for coffee on a wood stove each morning.

“You just sit out on your porch and just go, ‘Oh, my God, how is it that I get to be here?’ ” he said, gesturing to the majestic peaks right outside his door.

Botkin has a lot of tales about his summers in Mineral King, but his favorite story is about the winter he pulled up to his cabin on a snowmobile to find a broken window.

“A bear went charging out the window when he heard the snowmobile. He had completely destroyed the kitchen. There wasn’t one thing left in the cupboards. The refrigerator was turned over on its side. And in the living room, there was a big pile of bear poop,” Botkin laughed.

Mineral King is certainly home to more critters than people, and that’s a draw for backpackers and hikers, too. It’s far more isolated than the more popular parts of Sequoia National Park, which feature giant trees.

Today, Mineral King’s wilderness feels so pristine that it’s hard to imagine blacksmiths clanking, dynamite exploding, and sulfur plumes spewing into the air during the mining boom.

“There’s nobody here,” marveled Joanne Denning, visiting from Alameda to hike the Eagle Lake trail. “You have to be fit to do the hikes. But once you wrap your brain around that, it’s really amazing.”