Lillian Malcolm

Lillian Malcom Portrait

Photo from Nevada Women’s History Project

Quick Facts

Significance:

The Lady Prospector, Independent woman prospector in Rhyolite, Women miners & prospectors, Death Valley Scotty

Date of Birth:

1868

Lillian K Malcolm was born in 1868 in the Northeast of Scotland and arrived in New York City in January 1895 via the RMS Umbria. She became an actress on Broadway but did not find it adventurous enough for her. In 1898, Malcolm caught the gold fever and made her way out to Alaska to follow the Klondike gold rush. She drove her own sled dog team over the Chilkoot trail into Dawson, a dangerous feat in the early days of the Klondike gold rush, and prospected for gold in the Dawson area. Prospecting in Alaska was apparently not dangerous enough for Malcolm, as she navigated chunks of float-ing ice in the Bering Sea; she nearly starved and did end up in the freezing waters of the Bering Sea at least once, but she did survive to tell the tale.

Malcolm left Alaska after losing a battle against the men who jumped her claim. She followed gold strikes, “always a little bit too late and never striking the big bonanza” but wore a pistol on her belt and proudly worked in the male-dominated world of prospecting for years to come.  

In 1902, Malcolm caught wind of the gold and silver strikes in Goldfield and Tonopah. Still out of money from Alaska, Malcolm paid for her accommodations by recounting her adventures in Alaska. Never one to give up even though she arrived after most of the best strikes in the area, Malcolm staked a claim in Silver Peak and formed the Scotch Lassie Gold Mining Company. It was backed by eastern investors from Pittsburgh, and Malcolm  held onto the property even after it seemed to be a worthless claim.  

She moved to Rhyolite around the end of its boom, appearing in Rhyolite documents in September of 1905. She turned towards DEVA to strike it rich, but met Death Valley Scotty and his partner at the time, Bill Key instead. She got caught up in defending Key against murder accusations and lost her chance to option Key’s mining claim, but she left her mark with her flare for the dramatic. When she left Rhyolite to venture into DEVA, she dressed to impress; she wore a deco-rative hat that was too narrow to block the sun and her dress was shorter than a respectable riding dress, though her boots ensured she showed no skin. If people were going to  talk about her as a woman prospector, she decided to at least give them something to talk about. Her gold fever took her to Mexico before landing her back in the Slumbering Hills mining region of northern Nevada. The last records we have of Malcolm are in Nevada, from 1911 when she moved to Jarbridge in northeast-ern Nevada and from a news article from 1914 that she was heading to Cochise County. 

Malcolm had to contend with judgement from all sides during her life. She was not the first woman to catch gold fever, but it was still an unusual occupation for women. Women were still considered bad luck in mining operations, espe-cially underground mines. She was not accepted into the mining communities, nor was she welcome in the communities of women wherever she went. When she lived long enough in a place for it to become an established townsite, women moved their skirts aside when Malcolm passed them in the street. She seemed to fit in nowhere, a fact which seemed to weigh on her at least when women shied away from her in the streets. As a result, she mainly associated with men and held little at-tachment to the areas she settled in.