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With Great Hope: Women of the California Gold Rush
Pioneer Nancy Kelsey
“We followed the Indian, and he led us along shelves of rock high in the Sierras, which overhang vast precipices. We all went on foot, leading our animals. Once, I remember, when I was struggling along trying to keep my horse from going over, I looked back and saw Missus Ben Kelsey a little way behind me, with her child in her arms, barefooted, I think, and leading a horse…a sight I shall never forget.” Nicholas Dawson Bidwell-Bartleson Party, 1841
Nancy Kelsey stood on the porch of her rustic home in Jackson County, Missouri, watching her husband load their belongings onto a covered wagon. Soon, the young couple and their one-year-old daughter would be on the way to California. She hated leaving her family behind and she knew the trip west would be difficult, but she believed she could “better endure the hardships of the journey than the anxieties for an absent husband.”
Nancy was born in Barren County, Kentucky, in 1823. She married Benjamin L. Kelsey when she was fifteen. She had fallen in love with his restless, adventurous spirit, and from the day the two exchanged vows she could not imagine her life without him. At the age of seventeen, Nancy agreed to follow Benjamin to a strange new land rumored to be a place where a “poor man could prosper.”
