Nellie Cashman and the Wheel of Fortune
Gold prospector and entrepreneur Nellie Cashman was born in Midleton in County Cork in 1845. Her father died in 1850, and shortly afterwards her mother decided to emigrate with her family to America to escape the aftermath of the Great Famine. They first settled in Boston where Nellie found work as an elevator operator in a hotel, an occupation usually reserved for men. While there she was said to have met General Ulysses S. Grant who urged her to go west where there was more opportunity. In 1865, Nellie and her family moved again, this time to Lincoln County, Nevada. She was a mining boomer in the silver camp until 1873 when there were signs that silver production had peaked. Before long, she gained a reputation as being able to intuitively know which camps would result in successful yields and when a camp was about to decline. One of Nellie’s many talents was being able to document the geology of her surroundings and predict success for the camps based on her maps. In 1874, Nellie moved to the remote Cassiar district in British Columbia. She was said to have chosen B.C. over South Africa on the flip of a coin.
In the winter of 1874-75, Nellie learned that some miners were starving in the harsh weather conditions. She gathered emergency supplies and food and travelled hundreds of miles to rescue them. Before long, Nellie began to be known as the ‘angel’ of the mining camps. She financially supported the establishment of churches, hospitals, and schools throughout the West. She ran her businesses and mined in the Cassiar before leaving in 1876 to return to San Francisco where she took care of her aged mother. In 1878, she travelled to Tucson and opened a restaurant named Delmonicos, the first business owned by a woman there. Only a few months after her arrival, Nellie moved to Tombstone, one of the richest silver camps. Among the silver rush stampeders already there was Wyatt Earp. He was one of the owners of the Crystal Palace Saloon, and Nellie managed to persuade him to allow Sunday church services there until she had raised enough funds to build the Sacred Heart Church.
When her widowed sister died of tuberculosis, Nellie raised her five children taking them with her on her mining expeditions.
In July 1897, a ship named the Portland landed in Seattle with gold nuggets and bags of gold dust from the Klondike discovery in northwest Canada, and Nellie quickly made plans to travel there where she established another Delmonicos restaurant while she researched which location to mine. She successfully mined an area named Bonanza, No. 19, which later sold for $100,000.
In 1903, Nellie opened a grocer’s in Fairbanks and began fundraising for a new hospital in the area by joining the poker games being played in the mining camps.
Aged 60, she moved again to the Koyukuk District to mine in Nolan Creek. She stayed there until the summer of 1924, when she returned to Fairbanks, where she was admitted to hospital with pneumonia and rheumatism. Nellie died on January 4, 1925, in the Alaska Sisters of the Order’s Hospital that she helped to set up.
X. The Wheel of Fortune
The Wheel of Fortune is in perpetual motion, bringing with it chance occurrences, ‘luck’ and change. It asks us to remain vigilant for opportunities, even if they may arrive differently than planned.
The card asks us to explore the concept of luck. It speaks to the twists and turns of life and how we have no real way of knowing whether events or circumstances we experience truly are either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The card serves as a reminder to surrender to our Higher Power and not cling too tightly to anything. Control is an illusion, and we are never able to truly see the bigger picture until much after the fact. In hindsight, we can often see that things we truly wanted turn out to be a nightmare while undesirable events can be a blessing in disguise. The more we tune in to our intuition and let our Higher Power lead us, the easier the transitions will be and the card asks us to have faith that we will be taken care of.
The Wheel of Fortune card can speak to unexpected changes and events that take us by surprise. As unnerving as it may be to embrace unpredictability, this card suggests that approach can be a wiser course of action than being inflexible. It reminds us that nothing lasts forever and that paradoxically the only constant is change; sometimes the odds are in our favour and sometimes they aren’t but as day follows night, circumstances will change again. The card speaks to finding opportunity in unlikely places and being present and resourceful enough to make the best of the circumstances in which we find ourselves, just like Nellie.