Last Time in Luzena Wilson’s Story it was late December 1849.

Luzena was serving up to 200 boarders a week in Sacramento and charging each twenty five dollars. Customers were happy to pay the high price tag for a meal prepared by Luzena Wilson, for the white woman, was a rarity. In 1850 women made up just three percent of the non-Native American population in California‘s mining region, numbering about 800 in a sea of 30,000 men. As a married American woman, Luzena Wilson reminded many of the American men of home, of their wives, mothers or sisters. They treated Luzena, as she put it, like a ”queen.” Luzena had put her boys to bed, and under dim light, wrote out her list of goods needed for the next week. She would make her largest purchase yet in the morning. Six months had passed in Sacramento and now she longed for a friend. She set down her steel dip-pen, blew out the beeswax candle next to it, and laid down beside Mason. The rain began to furiously pound on the family home’s weak roof, and it did not stop all night.