What did Lee SUmmers Whipple-Haslam collect during the Gold Rush? Why do you think this item was so important to her?
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Answer:
Lee Summers Whipple-Haslam was the daughter of Franklin Summers, who came to California from Missouri in 1850 and mined enough gold at Shaw’s Flat (near Sonora) to return east and bring his family west in 1852. Early Days in California (c. 1925) chronicles her life in Shaw's Flat, Sonora, and other Tuolumne County communities from 1852 to 1853; and the family’s new home on Turnback Creek in Tuolumne’s so-called “East Belt” of mines, from 1854 to 1860. There her mother kept a boardinghouse while her husband prospected, and their guests included Mark Twain. In the book the author reminisces about her experiences as a child decades earlier in the rough mining communities. A 1923 reviewer of Early Days in California in 1923 commented that the reminiscences were “colored by time and approaching fiction,” but the descriptions contain enough detail and sense of place to have historical value nonetheless.
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