By Laura Brown

When most people think of women in the Wild West, images of dance hall girls come to mind. JoAnn Levy has written three books debunking that myth, portraying gold rush-era women as hard-working miners, missionaries, boardinghouse keepers, church builders, schoolteachers, temperance workers and even a Wells Fargo stagecoach driver.

Levy, who spent eight years researching her first novel, “They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush,” told the March 19 Morning Forum audience that women in early California had to work: “It was hand-to-hand battle with starvation.”

Levy studied the letters and diaries of women who made the trek from the East to California, recounting the particular hardship of crossing the desert at the end of the journey, when they were already weak and exhausted from months of travel.

While most settlers followed the northern Carson-Truckee route, one party, hoping to find a shortcut, instead found themselves in a desolate area that would be named “Death Valley” because of the numbers in their party who perished there. That “shortcut” took the survivors four months and three days of walking through sand and rock to reach San Diego.

Once they arrived in California, women found it possible to earn a good living by running boardinghouses and taking in laundry, as well as doing nursing and clerical work. One pioneer woman boasted in her journal that she had earned $18,000 in a year by selling pies she baked “without benefit of an oven,” in a skillet over a campfire.

However successful the pioneers were financially, life was not easy on the frontier. One woman staying at the St. Francis Hotel, the only hotel to offer sheets on the beds, found herself in the middle of a conversation being carried on between two men staying in rooms on either side of her, since the walls of canvas offered no sound barrier.

Elizabeth Farnham, a Santa Cruz settler who rehabilitated a house whose walls “departed from the perpendicular in every direction,” declared after a three-day battle to repair a stove that “there must have been no stoves in the time of Job, for if there were, all other afflictions would have been unnecessary.”

Levy said that although the gold rush was rough-and-tumble, women were valued and protected by the community of men, and the only records of women being mistreated were cases of domestic abuse caused by drinking.

Levy’s second book, “Daughter of Joy,” about a real-life Chinese courtesan named Ah Toy, concentrates on the Chinese participation in the gold rush. Levy noted that Chinese were accepted in the life of San Francisco, participating in all celebrations in the city. “Daughter of Joy” won the 1999 Willa Award for Best Historical Fiction, and Levy’s third book, “California’s Gold, A Novel,” won the 2001 Willa Award for Best Historical Fiction.

Levy is scheduled to speak April 17 at Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, as part of its Literary Arts Series.

The Morning Forum is a members-only lecture series held at the United Methodist Church of Los Altos. Membership is closed for this year. To get on a waiting list for membership, write to: Morning Forum, P.O. Box 274, Los Altos 94023-0274.