THEY SAW THE ELEPHANT Women in the California Gold Rush <i> by Joann Levy (Archon Books: $27.50; 222 pp.) </i>

The popular image of the Gold Rush similarly onesidedly presents the lone prospector, an unshaven man in dirty clothes staking out his claim far from the reaches of civilization, and therefore far from the presence of women. In “They Saw the Elephant,” Joann Levy argues that, on the contrary, women played an important role in the California Gold Rush. Her colorful stories of the adventuresome ladies who traveled West, with or without men, will quickly change the old view.

Drawing on letters, journals and memoirs, Levy tells the tales of women who came by land and by sea, drawn by the same lure that brought out the men. Many came across the country and lived the familiar tales of pioneer hardship: buried children, extremes of weather, hostile attack and starvation. But they came in other ways as well--round the Horn by sailing ship, or by steamship and mule across Central America, for example; Levy chronicles the travails of one family which had to abandon three ships on their journey.

Some of Levy’s intrepid adventuresses accompanied their men, but many came by themselves, and their professions were as widely varied as those of the men; there were cooks, entrepreneurs, prostitutes, actresses. They ran boarding houses and mining camp laundries, and one even drove a stagecoach. The women Levy sketches had as much to do with establishing the character of mining towns as any crusty miner with his mule, and the stories she has reconstructed certainly add drama to an already colorful chapter of California history.