Sierra City was booming when young Mabel Thomas arrived in this California gold mining town in 1885. Her father was part of a Cornish diaspora that sent a generation of men from the declining copper and tin mines of southwest England in the mid-19th century to mines opening around the world. Mabel remembers her girlhood at the Sierra Buttes mine, where her home was bolted to the mountain to withstand fierce winter winds. Gold Miner's Daughter offers a young girl's view into makeshift towns where one could dine on fresh oysters and fine liquor one day, then contract smallpox or be buried in an avalanche the next. It's an intimate story filled with family love and community spirit, edited and introduced by Mabel's great-niece Laura Thomas, a former editor and writer at the San Francisco Chronicle . Intimate memoir of an extraordinary time Sierra City was booming when young Mabel Thomas arrived in this California gold mining town in 1885. Her father was part of a Cornish diaspora that sent a generation of men from the declining copper and tin mines of southwest England to new ones opening around the world. Mabel remembers her girlhood at the Sierra Buttes mine, where her home was bolted to the mountain to withstand fierce winter winds. Gold Miner's Daughter offers a young girl's view into makeshift towns where one could dine on fresh oysters and fine liquor one day, then contract smallpox or be buried in an avalanche the next. It's an intimate story filled with family love and community spirit, edited and introduced by Mabel's great-niece Laura Thomas, a former editor and writer at the San Francisco Chronicle. --cover blurb or description With its lively depictions of daily life, rendered with novelistic skill, fidelity to truth, devotion to Cornish heritage, and a great sense of fun, Gold Miner's Daughter is a delight to read. This welcome addition to the literature of the Sierra deserves a place on the bookshelf next to that classic account of a previous era, The Shirley Letters. - Malcolm Margolin, Founder and Publisher Emeritus, Heyday Books. Young Mabel Thomas arrives by a thundering stagecoach, puts on boys' lace-up boots and heads up the mountain to her new home at the Sierra Buttes Mine. Her stunning memoir chronicles domestic life in the Northern Mines set against the backdrop of local happenings and significant world events. It is a trip back in time worth taking. --Mary Nourse, Sierra County Historical Society Mabel Thomas was born in Grass Valley, California in 1878 and lived at the Sierra Buttes Mine for two years and in Sierra City, California until 1896 when she moved to Oakland. She graduated from San Jose Teachers College in 1897 and the University of California at Berkeley in 1901. She had a long career in the Oakland Public Library, retiring in 1948 as chief reference librarian Laura Thomas was born in 1952 in Nurnberg, Germany, grew up in Oakland, California and graduated in 1974 from the University of California, Berkeley in Journalism. She spent 35 years working on northern California daily newspapers, the Davis Enterprise, Sacramento Bee, Napa Register, Vallejo Times-Herald, Oakland Tribune, San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle as well as the national magazine, U.S. News and World Report.