What a unique way to spend Mother's Day... Learning about some amazing local women!

On a glorious 93° Sunday, we found ourselves returning to the Minden Mill for a special history program presented by David and Gayle Woodruff- No Limits… No Boundaries: Tenacious Women of the Eastern Sierra. 
We began with Sarah Winnemucca. Please note, as with every one of David's talks, the history he shares is so in-depth. He is an incredible researcher and storyteller. I can only give a brief introduction to all of these exceptional women. All demand deeper studies. Sarah (c. 1844–1891) was a prominent Northern Paiute author, activist, and educator who tirelessly advocated for her people's rights amid Western expansion. Daughter of Chief Winnemucca, she served as an Army interpreter, scout, and lecturer, becoming the first Native American woman to publish a book, Life Among the Paiutes (1883).
Mary Austin (1868–1934) was a prolific American author, feminist, and environmental activist best known for The Land of Little Rain (1903), a seminal, transcendentalist tribute to the California desert. A pioneer in regionalism and Native American advocacy, she wrote over 30 books, including novels, plays, and essays focusing on the American Southwest's nature and culture. In her later life, she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico where she became a central figure in the literary community and founder of the Santa Fe Playhouse.
Nellie Bly Baker O'Bryan (1893–1984) was a pioneering American silent film actress, Hollywood projectionist, and Eastern Sierra entrepreneur. Moving from Oklahoma to Hollywood in 1918, she became California's first licensed female motion-picture projectionist. She worked with Charlie Chaplin, appearing in 14 films including The Kid (1921). In 1935, Nellie relocated to Mono County and opened a summer resort. She became an entrepreneur and also a skilled wilderness guide. Eventually, she sold the resort but spent the rest of her life in the area. She is credited with building a local tourist attraction, the "Upside Down House" which in its heyday was the most popular tourist attraction in Mono County (my blog post about it is here).
Nan Zischank (1907–2000) was new to us. There was little in her early life to suggest she would one day be who she became. Born into a wealthy and socially prominent family in Ohio, Nan lived as a young girl in Boston and attended finishing school on Cape Cod, where she learned the requisite skills—management of servants among them—for a life in East Coast society. Long story short, in 1935, she and her husband Max moved to an isolated winter cabin in the alpine scenery and deep snow of the Sierra Nevada eastern slopes. That, she made clear to all, was when her life began in earnest. She was a prominent Eastern Sierra pioneer, expert skier, and local businesswoman who operated the Long Valley Resort near Crowley Lake before WWII. During the war, Max enlisted and Nan worked as a "companion, guide, advisor and diplomat" at the Manzanar War Relocation Center. What a life well lived.
The final tenacious woman showcased has been on this blog a couple of times. Anne Brigman, a late nineteenth-century pictorialist photographer, was born in Hawaii but spent most of her life in California. Throughout her life, she was recognized for her courageous and modernist spirit as one of the first-ever female photographers to capture self-portraits of her body in the wilderness. As a woman with a Christian missionary upbringing and a suffragette, she did not fit the conventional profile of the early 1900s woman, and was often an advocate for women’s rights. Her work and her life as an artist was tied to the social-political time in which she lived, demonstrating her freedom of soul and mind. Wow.