Josephine (Josie) Reed Pearl

Josephine (Josie) Reed Pearl. , Josie is reported to have sold her first mine by the age of thirteen. She went to Creede, CO where she married mining engineer Lane Pearl. They traveled the west to places such as Goldfield. Lane went to work at Ward, near Ely where he succumbed to the Spanish Flu in 1918. Josie operated boarding houses, worked as a waitress and nursed sick miners while also prospecting. She loved helping wayward boys, whom she referred to as "penitentiary fodder". Josie settled at the edge of the Black Rock Desert west of Leonard Creek, where she lived alone and continued to work her claims and prospect. Journalist Ernie Pyle, who visited Josie at her home in Humboldt County, wrote that she was "contradiction all over - a sort of tugboat Annie of the desert ... she was a prospector... playing a man's part in a man's game". With failing eyesight, she became a menace to other drivers and the occasional pedestrian, coming hell-bent-for leather down the middle of the road leaving clouds of dust in her wake. "Oh, oh, here comes Josie, head for the brush," was the usual comment. Josie was a legend straight out of the pages of the Old West.