Ladies of the Goldfield Stock Exchange

Downing based this novel, third in Forge's Women of the West series, on an actual women's stock exchange that opened in the booming gold-mining town of Goldfield, Nevada, in 1906. Her fictionalized characters include Meg Kendall, only a few weeks from starting medical studies at Johns Hopkins, who got waylaid in Goldfield after her father died in a mine accident; Tess Wallace, a former prostitute and saloon keeper who has a daughter to raise; and Verna Bates, who moved to the sweltering mining camp to take over one of its newspapers. Aggravated by the fees imposed on small investors who are unable to afford 100-share lots of mining stocks, they and a few other women establish a separate exchange through which smaller lots can be bought and sold. At first rebuked by male traders, the Ladies' Goldfield Stock Exchange is flooded with orders once it lists mines not available elsewhere. Although only a short-lived venture, the exchange demonstrated what determined women could achieve during the early years of this century. Jennifer Henderson