Episode 222: Ferminia Sarras

This show is supported by Odoo.

When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing.

Odoo solves this.

It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales.

Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way.

You can save money without missing out on the features you need.

Check out Odoo at odoo.com.

That's odoo.com.

When you're a kid, you need all sorts of help, learning your ABCs, tying your shoes.

Then you become a teenager and a young adult, and if you are like I was, you need all sorts of help, but you are hardly asking for or accepting any of it.

Then you get older, you start looking around and thinking there has got to be a better or faster or safer way to do this thing.

Whatever that thing might be.

And while you are looking around, you will notice that there's a ton of nonsense, there are a lot of quick fixes, a lot of just mumbo jumbo.

But then there's Life Kit, a podcast from NPR, where you can find thoughtful, expert guided ideas and techniques about tackling issues in this thing we call life.

LifeKit delivers strategies to help you make meaningful, sustainable change.

And the show is fun.

You're flipping through episodes and bopping around thinking, yeah, I do kind of want to know what this whole thing is with seed oils and hear from people who really know and sort out the science from the hype and then you put it on and it is delightful and informative.

And then you're kind of idly listening to this one about how you can avoid buying counterfeit products online.

And you're like, Yeah, I do that technique, and yeah, I know that one too.

And yeah, sure, that one.

I'm no dummy.

But then you hear a couple more, and you're like, oh, shoot,

yeah, I almost fell for that yesterday.

And oh, yeah, I need that one for my back pocket.

LifeKit isn't just another podcast about self-improvement, it is about understanding how to live a better life.

Starting now, listen now to the Life Kit podcast from NPR.

This is the Memory Palace of Netameo.

She came from Nicaragua.

She came from Spanish parents, Spanish nobility, came from the family who had governed Nicaragua since as far back as the 1600s.

But how she came to live in Nevada in the late 1870s, no one really knows.

But there, then, we find Ferminia Saras.

She is just about 40.

She is the mother of four.

She is quite short.

You can see that in an old portrait.

But the broad shoulders you can also see.

She probably didn't have those when she first arrived.

She looked out of place, by all accounts, when she showed up in Virginia City, Nevada around 1879.

It had been a bustling boomtown.

But by the time she got there, the boom had been dampened, first by a massive fire.

Then because the silver mines that had fueled its rise had lost their shimmer.

Didn't seem to be much of value left in the hills.

But there was Ferminia Sarris, looking like no one else they'd seen around there.

And Virginia City was used to strangers.

It was one of those western outposts that had drawn so many of the many immigrants who had come to America seeking better lives.

German and Dutch and Scottish and Swedish and Chinese.

There to try and pull those better lives directly out of the dirt.

or to sell shovels or feed or entertain or wash the clothes of those who were.

But there weren't a lot of women, and none who dressed like her, prim and pious, in black taffeta, her high-necked dress and bonnet, a gold cross and a gold chain on her chest.

A Spanish lady, as she wrote in a document, perhaps to set right the frequent misperceptions that she was Mexican or Native American.

She wanted people to know that she was not who they thought she was.

Though if she told people about who she actually was,

the events and people and places that shaped her, that made her the woman she was at 40, past the midpoint of most lives being lived then in the American West.

No one wrote any of that down.

So we do not know, don't have much of anything that would even help us guess, what combination of lived experience, what balance or imbalance of nature and nurture, of trauma and epiphany, fickle happenstance or hardened fate had her in Virginia City, Nevada in 1879, dropping her two youngest children off in an orphanage, and dragging her two teenage daughters out through the desert and into the hills.

What happened in the hills?

We can do our best to guess.

We know plenty about the various ways that prospectors plied their trade as they tried to find something of value in them thar.

We can picture picks and shovels, pans to sift for gold in the streams swelled by winter melt.

Look to weather records.

Find a week of punishing heat, a stretch of brutal cold, try to hear wind rattling bony pines, or otherwise imagine ourselves there.

Picture this mother and her two daughters.

Wonder at how that goes.

How on board could two board teenagers?

It was the 19th century and so much was different, but how could they be otherwise?

These two girls who found themselves in the Nevada wilderness, with their mother doing something that neither mothers nor girls, essentially, ever do.

What happened in the hills?

While they looked for a glint of gold, a sliver of silver.

Took some crumbling rocks and dropped them in a cup with water and ammonia, some flex of powders they likely bought at some outfitter in town months before, and waited to see if the water turned blue.

And so they knew there was copper there.

Knew that some mysterious chemical something had taken place some unknowable time ago, and made this rare and shining thing that you could extract and pack and carry and lay out on the counter in front of a man with a monocle and a scale and trade for money in some amount that would in large part dictate how you lived your life.

Historians sift through clues about Ferminia Sarasis.

find a man in the mining camps in the general area with the same name as the one listed as her one-time husband.

But they never find that guy anywhere near where she was.

Historians can place her prior to her arrival in Virginia City, in Black Taffeta, in San Francisco, a bustling metropolis, the gateway, the Golden Gate to the rest of the world.

But those historians cannot tell us why, in that city of possibility, of economic opportunity, teeming certainly with men of means who might want to keep company with a Spanish lady, with ships departing just about daily for just about any place a person might want to be,

this woman chose holes in hillsides in Nevada.

Historians have searched and sifted, but found very little of substance before the time that she did.

Ferminia Saris registered her first claims in 1888, two small copper mines, discovered after years spent in the hills, whatever was happening up there.

Eight years documented only in the briefest of references, the marriage of her eldest daughter to a schoolteacher, the birth of Ferminia's first son, who had the last name Marshall, though the son of which among the handful of Mr.

Marshall known around the territory, no one could say.

There are just these tiny specks glinting in some historian's light as they search the past for signs of her, nothing ever bright enough to illuminate much at all.

But in 1888, with her two claims, two modest minds, all hers, the glinting fragments get larger, and the light a bit brighter.

Money can do that.

Can raise one's profile, put one's name in various ledgers, in the newspapers, on contracts and deeds to properties, that people down the road can look to, use to try to piece her story together.

Her words were rarely recorded.

The ones that were do not say much.

And so there is little we can do but spread these shiny fragments out on the counter and see how it all adds up.

Let me tell you about the Copper Queen, as Ferminia Saras came to be called.

Her friends, it seemed, called her Mina.

There is a Nevada town called Mina.

It is likely named after her.

She was a Spanish lady, as she always insisted on being called, from Nicaragua, who lived one of those improbable American lives.

A wearer of pants, when very few women wore pants.

A prospector when next to no women were prospectors.

A successful prospector, in a time and a place after the silver mines ran dry, when that too was an exceedingly rare thing to be.

She was a lover of men, of younger men it seems.

History has her pairing up with one after another.

Historians speculate that this might have been in part to protect her claims.

Both physically, the Wild West was actually wild and a young man with a gun was useful to have around.

And legally, she was married five times, which she may have done to help keep her from getting ripped off by a system that simply did not let women in, didn't let them even try to succeed.

And let's not forget that there were likely other reasons she liked having young men as lovers.

She did succeed.

She made many, many claims in the 35 years stretching from the day she arrived, for whatever reasons in Nevada, whatever combination of elements, of experience, having made her a person capable of living the life she lived from that day in 1880 until her death in her mid-70s, in 1915.

There were more successful prospectors than Ferminia Sarris.

There were people who built business empires, snapped up other people's claims, consolidated holdings, helped them.

Ferminia Saris was able to leave her descendants pretty comfortable.

A couple of her claims are still mined to this day.

But if we look at the shining things she dug up from the ground and try to find the life of Ferminia Saris in there, we find a life as we do when we find her for the first time at 40 years old, spent living as she pleased, and a life spent living it up.

Throughout her career as the copper queen, whenever she was given the chance to cash out, when the market was high and the offers were good, rather than hoarding her literal treasure, she took the cash and then took herself to San Francisco, stayed in the finest hotels, bought fancy things, ate fancy food, was entertained by gigolos.

That is in the historical record.

And I say good for her.

Though I am pretty sure she wouldn't care at all what any of us thinks.

This episode of The Memory Palace was written and produced by me, Nate Tomeo, in September of 2024.

This show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw.

It is a proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independently owned and operated listener-supported podcasts from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company.

If you are listening to this right when the episode comes out in fall of 2024, then it is a great time to pre-order my book, also called The Memory Palace, a collection collection of beloved stories and news stories, found photos and illustrations that I just found out the other day when I got my first review.

Book list called Ceaselessly Entertaining, which seems like a good thing to be.

If you are listening to this later down the road, then you could just walk to your local bookstore or go online and get it.

If that's true, I hope this book is doing well.

And dear listener, a lot of whether this book does do well will hinge upon whether you will become a dear reader or help others who don't know the show find the show and find the book.

With your help, I think this book, this ceaselessly entertaining book, apparently,

might have a shot of being something in the world.

In the meantime, if you want to read tweets or Facebook posts of mine, you can find them at The Memory Palace, or on Instagram and Threads at The Memory Palace Podcast, or on my Substack newsletter, thememorypalastpodcast.substack.com.

Or you can always drop drop me a line at nate at the memorypalace.org.

I'll talk to you again.

Radiotopia

from PRX.