August 20, 1975 (8 pages)

4. The Nevada County Nugget Wed., August 20, 1975 = eae aaeaaaamaiaes (Lola Montez’ life has provided much material for biographers and novelists but what the press had to say about her has long been hidden in musty files. Author Doris Foley diligently searched early day California newspaper files, reading every issue published between 1853 and 1861,’to document what they-said about the divine Lol.aand then for contrast included Lola’s autobiography in this work.) PIONEER REMINISCENCES An interesting com n and sometimes contrast to the newspaper accounts are the reminiscences of pioneers who were in California during Lola’s glamorous descent upon the State. The greater the lapse of time from the date Lola came to California in 1853 to the date of reporting, the more legendary these reminiscences become. Some of them are pure fabrication, perhaps resulting from a desire on the raconteur’s part to be numbered among Lola’s friends or to bé known as an authority on her California exploits. Others represent a serious effort at correct reporting, but due to the author’s longevity, witnessing so many periods of events, the dating becomes faulty. Even buildings not in existence during Lola’s time in the State appear. One such reminiscence is that of Lemuel Snow who staked claims on Kentucky and Madison Hills, Grass Valley, in 1852. The following account is from the San Francisco Examiner, February 19, 1899, 46 years after Lola’s arrival in California. “IT was a young gold miner in Nevada County in 1853. I was a younger and close friend of Pat Hull, a San Francisco newspaperman and local politician. Hull had been sent out to the coast by the Taylor Administratation to superintend the National Census of 1850. He liked the state and he settled down there. He fell in love with Lola Montez first sight and he never resisted until he married her one morning in November 1853. Of course I was astonished when I heard of the marriage. A more mismated couple never lived. Pat’s Irish wit, his musical voice and smooth conversational powers, I found out later, had made him an accepted suiter by the beauty of Europe. “J came down from Grass Valley to Sacramento to congratulate the couple. Pat had sent word that I was wanted to come to see him and his bride. I shall never forget the first time I saw Lola Montez. It was one afternoon about the early part of December 1853. She and Pat were out walking in Sacramento. She wore a pink dress and an elaborate black and pink bonnet. She was positively the most beautiful creature I had ever seen up to that time. The eyes of every one in range followed her wherever she went in those days. The enchantment, however, disappeared very rapidly upon better acquaintance. “The bride was anxious to come and live in a camp where the yellow gold was actually dug from the earth. Pat agreed to leave his newspaper work in San Francisco and go to Grass Valley with his wife. I went ahead to engage a place for them at the Exchange Hotel in the town, while Lola and Pat traveled about California for a few weeks longer on a professional tour. “Lola had gathered together seven or eight people who would be second-class vaudeville artists in those days, and they were giving a melodrama in which the Lola Montez spider dance was the prime feature. Apart from the fact that Montez was truly a strange and dazzling type of feminine beauty, the performance would be laughed off the stage nowadays. “One day in January 1854, the old brown stage coach came laboring up the mountain side amid the snow, and Mrs. Pat Hull got out of conveyance at the hotel. I was sent for. She saw my surprise at not seeing Pat about. She drew me aside and told me that a week before at Marysville she and Pat had had a row about the way she should deport herself and that she had summarily ordered him out of her presence and had thrown his clothes to him out of the secondstory window at the Marysville hotel. From that hour I never heard her refer to Pat Hull but twice in the three years I knew her, although she knew Pat and I were corresponding every few weeks. “The beauty was charmed with Grass Valley at once. It was a rude mining camp of about 2000 people in those early days but the town was full of bright young men from all over the United States. The Divine LOLA MONTEZ AND 4 . One cannot go anywhere in the country nowadays and find so many young men from fine homes, of superior education and refinement, as were engaged in gold mining in Nevada County, in the early fifties. Everyone paid court to Lola Montez — rather the Countess von Landsfeldt. She gave a special dancing performance in the old Alta Hall—in the second story of a wooden building wherein there was a saloon downstairs and I believe the proceeds were over $1,000. Some reserved seats sold for $10.00. Oh! we were loaded with golden money in those days. “From that time until along in February 1857, Lola Montez was a constant resident of Grass Valley. She had over $10,000 to her credit in a San Francisco bank and she lived well but not expensively. She bought a little house on Mill Street in Grass Valley and she put about $2,000 worth of improvements on the building. The place is now the property of ex-postmaster Bosworth. Several of us young miners kept bachelor’s hall further down Mill Street, so we went to and from the postoffice. ‘Lola Montez salons became weekly and semi-weekly institutions in Grass Valley. (They were Parisian affairs with literary and philosophical features omitted.) Lola had one or two intimate friends among the married women in Grass Valley. All the other women were unfriendly for obvious reasons. The married women, their husbands and about a dozen convivial bachelors in the town made up a congenial company that met in the salon in the Countess de Landsfeldt’s home on a twelve hour notice from the perennial hostess. These salons consisted of games of cards, songs, dances, occasional stories of any of the salon coterie heard or read. There was a constant striving to invent some new sport. Several times a year — when the spirit moved — Lola would bring forth her former stage garments and arrayed in tights and short fleecy skirts would demonstrate for her guests that she had not forgotten some “ the fancy dancing steps that had set Europe wild a few years ore. “On such days as Christmas, New Year’s and Fourth of July, the members of the Lola Montez salons spent the whole day in celebrating at her home. Everyone was expected to have a new song or at least a new story for such occasions and sometimes two or three in the coterie would secretly have prepared the same story or song for rendering them. Extra refreshments were ordered in advance from Sacramento and sick or well, everyone of the Countess’ special friends had to accept the invitation for that day anyhow. The salons were what may be called ultra-Bohemian. ‘Ze gentlemen that is my frent,’ the Countess used to say, with a pretty shrug of her shoulders and in a foreign accent, ‘must come to be here and with us must celebrate or he is no longer a frent to me.’ ”’ “T could relate dozens of instances of the flash of temper in Lola Montez. She never pretended to curb a most fiery disposition. Once a local editor named Shipley published an item in his paper copied from a New York paper, to the effect that Lola Montez had left the stage to prey upon the rich miners of California. Of course someone carried a copy of the paper to the Countess’ as soon as it was published. Without a word she dressed, put a riding whip under her cloak and went hastily down town. She met Shipley face to face on Main Street. Drawing the whip, she started after him, exclaiming, while she rained blows upon his face and shoulders. “« ‘Ah, you vile man! Youliar! Youcoward!’ __ “Over fifty of Shipley’s associates were on the «treet. The editor could not decently run. He raised his hands to snat:h the whip but the young woman, graceful as a tiger, danced about him and whipped and whipped. At last the editor burst into a store and ran behind a counter for protection. The Countess threw her whip into ‘a street and walked home, but the humiliation of that public whipping was unbearable to editor Shipley, who would have been better pleased to meet a male enemy with a loaded pistol. ‘A month later he sold out and went away from California. He seldem appeared on the streets of Grass Valley after the day of his chastisement. “She loved to go over the mountains and experience the rugged side of mining life. Along with Mr. and Mrs. Randall who lived in Grass Valley when Lola Montez did, she used to go out on camping _ tours-at least a few days at a time. While she was a pretty fair By Doris Cr fa a PR eet ee pee

4. The Nevada County Nugget Wed., August 20, 1975 = eae aaeaaaamaiaes (Lola Montez’ life has provided much material for biographers and novelists but what the press had to say about her has long been hidden in musty files. Author Doris Foley diligently searched early day California newspaper files, reading every issue published between 1853 and 1861,’to document what they-said about the divine Lol.aand then for contrast included Lola’s autobiography in this work.) PIONEER REMINISCENCES An interesting com n and sometimes contrast to the newspaper accounts are the reminiscences of pioneers who were in California during Lola’s glamorous descent upon the State. The greater the lapse of time from the date Lola came to California in 1853 to the date of reporting, the more legendary these reminiscences become. Some of them are pure fabrication, perhaps resulting from a desire on the raconteur’s part to be numbered among Lola’s friends or to bé known as an authority on her California exploits. Others represent a serious effort at correct reporting, but due to the author’s longevity, witnessing so many periods of events, the dating becomes faulty. Even buildings not in existence during Lola’s time in the State appear. One such reminiscence is that of Lemuel Snow who staked claims on Kentucky and Madison Hills, Grass Valley, in 1852. The following account is from the San Francisco Examiner, February 19, 1899, 46 years after Lola’s arrival in California. “IT was a young gold miner in Nevada County in 1853. I was a younger and close friend of Pat Hull, a San Francisco newspaperman and local politician. Hull had been sent out to the coast by the Taylor Administratation to superintend the National Census of 1850. He liked the state and he settled down there. He fell in love with Lola Montez first sight and he never resisted until he married her one morning in November 1853. Of course I was astonished when I heard of the marriage. A more mismated couple never lived. Pat’s Irish wit, his musical voice and smooth conversational powers, I found out later, had made him an accepted suiter by the beauty of Europe. “J came down from Grass Valley to Sacramento to congratulate the couple. Pat had sent word that I was wanted to come to see him and his bride. I shall never forget the first time I saw Lola Montez. It was one afternoon about the early part of December 1853. She and Pat were out walking in Sacramento. She wore a pink dress and an elaborate black and pink bonnet. She was positively the most beautiful creature I had ever seen up to that time. The eyes of every one in range followed her wherever she went in those days. The enchantment, however, disappeared very rapidly upon better acquaintance. “The bride was anxious to come and live in a camp where the yellow gold was actually dug from the earth. Pat agreed to leave his newspaper work in San Francisco and go to Grass Valley with his wife. I went ahead to engage a place for them at the Exchange Hotel in the town, while Lola and Pat traveled about California for a few weeks longer on a professional tour. “Lola had gathered together seven or eight people who would be second-class vaudeville artists in those days, and they were giving a melodrama in which the Lola Montez spider dance was the prime feature. Apart from the fact that Montez was truly a strange and dazzling type of feminine beauty, the performance would be laughed off the stage nowadays. “One day in January 1854, the old brown stage coach came laboring up the mountain side amid the snow, and Mrs. Pat Hull got out of conveyance at the hotel. I was sent for. She saw my surprise at not seeing Pat about. She drew me aside and told me that a week before at Marysville she and Pat had had a row about the way she should deport herself and that she had summarily ordered him out of her presence and had thrown his clothes to him out of the secondstory window at the Marysville hotel. From that hour I never heard her refer to Pat Hull but twice in the three years I knew her, although she knew Pat and I were corresponding every few weeks. “The beauty was charmed with Grass Valley at once. It was a rude mining camp of about 2000 people in those early days but the town was full of bright young men from all over the United States. The Divine LOLA MONTEZ AND 4 . One cannot go anywhere in the country nowadays and find so many young men from fine homes, of superior education and refinement,

as were engaged in gold mining in Nevada County, in the early fifties. Everyone paid court to Lola Montez — rather the Countess von Landsfeldt. She gave a special dancing performance in the old Alta Hall—in the second story of a wooden building wherein there was a saloon downstairs and I believe the proceeds were over $1,000. Some reserved seats sold for $10.00. Oh! we were loaded with golden money in those days. “From that time until along in February 1857, Lola Montez was a constant resident of Grass Valley. She had over $10,000 to her credit in a San Francisco bank and she lived well but not expensively. She bought a little house on Mill Street in Grass Valley and she put about $2,000 worth of improvements on the building. The place is now the property of ex-postmaster Bosworth. Several of us young miners kept bachelor’s hall further down Mill Street, so we went to and from the postoffice. ‘Lola Montez salons became weekly and semi-weekly institutions in Grass Valley. (They were Parisian affairs with literary and philosophical features omitted.) Lola had one or two intimate friends among the married women in Grass Valley. All the other women were unfriendly for obvious reasons. The married women, their husbands and about a dozen convivial bachelors in the town made up a congenial company that met in the salon in the Countess de Landsfeldt’s home on a twelve hour notice from the perennial hostess. These salons consisted of games of cards, songs, dances, occasional stories of any of the salon coterie heard or read. There was a constant striving to invent some new sport. Several times a year — when the spirit moved — Lola would bring forth her former stage garments and arrayed in tights and short fleecy skirts would demonstrate for her guests that she had not forgotten some “ the fancy dancing steps that had set Europe wild a few years ore. “On such days as Christmas, New Year’s and Fourth of July, the members of the Lola Montez salons spent the whole day in celebrating at her home. Everyone was expected to have a new song or at least a new story for such occasions and sometimes two or three in the coterie would secretly have prepared the same story or song for rendering them. Extra refreshments were ordered in advance from Sacramento and sick or well, everyone of the Countess’ special friends had to accept the invitation for that day anyhow. The salons were what may be called ultra-Bohemian. ‘Ze gentlemen that is my frent,’ the Countess used to say, with a pretty shrug of her shoulders and in a foreign accent, ‘must come to be here and with us must celebrate or he is no longer a frent to me.’ ”’ “T could relate dozens of instances of the flash of temper in Lola Montez. She never pretended to curb a most fiery disposition. Once a local editor named Shipley published an item in his paper copied from a New York paper, to the effect that Lola Montez had left the stage to prey upon the rich miners of California. Of course someone carried a copy of the paper to the Countess’ as soon as it was published. Without a word she dressed, put a riding whip under her cloak and went hastily down town. She met Shipley face to face on Main Street. Drawing the whip, she started after him, exclaiming, while she rained blows upon his face and shoulders. “« ‘Ah, you vile man! Youliar! Youcoward!’ __ “Over fifty of Shipley’s associates were on the «treet. The editor could not decently run. He raised his hands to snat:h the whip but the young woman, graceful as a tiger, danced about him and whipped and whipped. At last the editor burst into a store and ran behind a counter for protection. The Countess threw her whip into ‘a street and walked home, but the humiliation of that public whipping was unbearable to editor Shipley, who would have been better pleased to meet a male enemy with a loaded pistol. ‘A month later he sold out and went away from California. He seldem appeared on the streets of Grass Valley after the day of his chastisement.. “She loved to go over the mountains and experience the rugged side of mining life. Along with Mr. and Mrs. Randall who lived in Grass Valley when Lola Montez did, she used to go out on camping _ tours-at least a few days at a time. While she was a pretty fair By Doris Cr fa a PR eet ee pee