Lady Prospector: Caroline Maben Flower
Timmins, ON
“My hands and feet are all swelled up[,] yet - from walking, otherwise I feel fine [and] dandy in health. I secured 49 days [of] work by 5 of us, 4 men and me.”
Excerpt from a letter Caroline wrote to her sister Anna.
Caroline Maben Flower was prospecting near Timmins, Ontario on Treaty 9 territory (the traditional lands of Ojibway/Chippewa, Oji-Cree, Mushkegowuk (Cree), and Algonquin), when she wrote this letter to her sister. She was what the local newspapers described as a “Lady Prospector”.
It was rather rare for a woman to register claims, never mind lead a team of men to develop them.
The Porcupine Advance, a local Timmins newspaper in 1912 writes that “Mrs. Flower of New York had returned to her home on Mattagami River and was putting a gang of men on her Turnbull properties to develop them”.
There would come to be a number of newspaper articles updating the public on Mrs. Flower’s happenings, many of which she may not approve.
Caroline was an accomplished pianist and piano teacher, who prior to prospecting had a studio in Carnegie Hall in New York City and several piano compositions. She was married to a Mr. Flower, her second husband, after leaving an unhappy and cruel marriage to a Mr. Maben (divorce being such an uncommon event in 1893, that it made the newspaper). More to her character, when she left him, she climbed Mount Hood and helped start an outdoor education nonprofit in Portland Oregon, called Mazamas , still popular today.
At this time, women often played piano as a pastime, but by the early 1900s female composers were becoming less rare. Partly because, it still fit within feminine attributes of what was deemed an “appropriate woman”. More so, at least, than other interests one could take up (see: prospecting). That is not to say women’s musicianship was not without its critics, the great pianist Anton Rubinstein, said during his career: that the growing increase of women in music would be the downfall of art.
Caroline, a graduate of music in New York, Berlin and Paris, would not have agreed, she was well-known in music and art circles in New York High Society and seemed to be thriving.
With all of this excitement and promising opportunity in her life, one might wonder then, why would she leave to prospect gold in northern Ontario?
In 1906, a flurry of newspapers from the New York Times to the Washington Post were writing about a “Woman Thief Well Known to the 400”, a Mrs. Flower, who lived a curious double life.
It goes on to state that she appears to be a sort of female “Jekyll and Hyde”.
Caroline Maben Flower was speculated to have gotten into a bit of trouble.
The press wrote that Caroline was charged with petty theft of table linens, silverware and other household accessories from a hotel (and various others), where she worked as a maid under the alias Thelma Paulson. The items were used to furnish a 15-unit apartment she co-owned.
Educated, well-mannered, well-dressed, and with Norwegian good looks, it baffled police as to why Caroline would be arrested over a few table linens and risk it all. Perhaps she wasn’t as well off as she conveyed and was subsidizing her “high society” life with what she could scrape together from her second job as a maid. Coming from an impoverished, harsh childhood in Minnesota, maybe she was trying to escape her family’s social class. A desire of many immigrants working to improve their quality of life, but not without risk; losing themselves to the American Dream.
From Personal Collection of Family, Caroline Maben Flower, Photograph, n.d.
The Porcupine Gold Rush, with thousands of fortune seekers pouring into the goldfields became the place for Caroline to recreate herself in the cold wilds of Northern Ontario. She arrived in black fly country – Timmins, with gun sling, rallying a team of men, snowshoes in toe and in the blink of an eye she became “Lady Prospector” hoping to strike it rich.
But she didn’t just prospect, she was attuned to using the resources she had, and offered up her cultural milieu for cash, piano lessons at Goldfield's Hotel. At a time when women were not yet considered “persons'', self-reliant and adaptable Caroline arranged for herself a life that was still grandiose, but this time on the gritty banks of Mattagami. And as it turns out, the north also worked its way into her heart – her music, writing a lyrical composition titled, “Mattagami River,” with the reminiscent lines of: “Oh! You grand and majestic Mattagami…. on your banks I’m longing to stay”.
Left: From Personal Collection of Family, Mattagami River by Lady Prospector, Composition, n.d. Right: From Woodland Sisters, Lady Prospector, Lino-print, 2019.
Special thank you to relatives of Caroline for allowing us to learn about her story.
