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Lola Montez, Queen of the Spider Dance
Lola Montez, beautiful, intelligent and spirited, arrived in California in 1853 preceded by a delicious aroma of European scandal. Irish-born in 1818, she had danced her way to success on the Continent and had dazzled lovers, two husbands and the King of Bavaria, who had taken her as mistress and titled her Countess of Landsfeldt.
In San Francisco her spider dance was a theatrical sensation until caricatured by a rival. Ridiculed, Lola and her latest husband, journalist Patrick Purdy Hull, sailed for Sacramento. There she quarreled with the theatre manager, challenged him to a duel, was laughed at, and in burning indignation swept on to Marysville where the tour fizzled out. Lola and Pat boarded a stage for Grass Valley, decided it was a painfully needed refuge. They bought this home and Lola busied herself in domesticity, even tending the garden.
The town’s best families shunned them , so their elegant hospitality and brilliant salons were lavished on a few daring citizens and a parade of out-of-town leading lights who found their way to the house on Mill Street. Lola may or may not have horse-whipped a local editor for disparaging her in print, as one story goes. She did, however, show yet another facet by helping the town’s needy, carrying food and medicine to injured miners, keeping watch all night at the bed of a sick child, and endearing herself to many by her acts of charity.
Lola evicted Patrick Hull after a quarrel over the shooting of her pet bear. Afraid of boredom, she left Grass Valley in the summer of 1855 for a professional dance tour of Australia. She retuned just long enough to sell her home, the only one she ever had owned and to bid farewell to the town that had promised so much tranquility. Beset by dwindling health and fortune, Lola died in New York in 1861.
To learn more about Lola Montez and the other ladies who made their mark on the Gold Country read
With Great Hope: Women of the California Gold Rush
