Enter to win a copy of any book in the catalog of books written
by Chris Enss when you play Snowman Hunt on this very website.
One of the many fabulous and colorful characters of the California gold rush was Eleanore Dumont, known as Madam Moustache, who made her headquarters in Nevada City, California, for a while. According to the legend, Eleanore was a beautiful French woman who bore a slight growth of fuzz over her upper lip. One evening, a tired and thoroughly drunk miner made the trip to town to see the much-talked-of beauty. He took a look and yelled, “She’s pretty, for sure, but look at her moustache.” From that time on, Eleanore Dumont was laughingly called Madam Moustache.
The Nevada City establishment of Madam Moustache was a bit plusher than the average gold-camp bar. It contained a long, rough-boarded room which was fully fifty feet in length. The walls were draped with colored cloth and imported from France. The Madam boasted the fanciest bar in California, behind which the gin slingers served fifty men at a time. At one end of the room was a cleared space for dancing and an orchestra of fifteen pieces. The rest of the space was taken up by twelve or more tables for poker, twenty-one, or monte.
When Nevada City’s boom collapsed, so did Madam Moustache’s parlor house. Eleanore began moving from one camp to another, her fortunes gradually declining. Her beauty faded, she drank too much, and a darker shadow of down was growing on her upper lip. The Madam’s gaming skills began slipping too – ever so slightly, but an extra drink or two can make all the difference at cards. In 1859, with the discovery of the rich diggings of Nevada’s Comstock Lode, she joined the Washoe rush. By 1860, it was common knowledge the Madam was no longer deigned to make money other than at the vingt-et-un table.
Eleanore roamed across the West, following the new mining camps to Idaho and then the Black Hills. As her fortunes continued to plummet, she resumed the sale of her own flesh, offering her services in the construction camps along the route of the Union Pacific Railroad. In 1877, Madam Moustache was running a small-time brothel in Eureka, Nevada; two years later, the Sacramento Union of September 9, 1879, ran a brief dispatch from Bodie, California: “A woman named Eleanore Dumont was found dead today about one mile out of town, having committed suicide.”
