Aunty Lane--as Unsinkable as Molly Brown

The unsinkable Molly Brown married into a fortune and survived the Titanic disaster, but she had nothing on California’s equally imperishable Aunty Lane.

In fact, for Zerviah Maxwell Lane--the onetime “Backwoods Belle” of the 1850s--surviving an 1854 shipwreck off Santa Barbara was just one more chapter in a dramatic life that found her outlasting blizzards, desert heat, Indian attacks, eight episodes of childbirth and a roving husband.

Lane’s fortitude and style made her the hard-working heroine of lumber and mining camps from the foothills of California to Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

New York-born in 1814, she was orphaned at 4 and begrudgingly taken in by unsympathetic relatives, who barely fed and clothed her. At 20, eager to get away, she hastily married an ironworker and jack-of-all-trades named Nathan Lane.

By 1852, after moving his growing family around Wisconsin and Michigan more than two dozen times in 18 years, he decided to let his wanderlust take him to California three years after the Gold Rush had begun.

Leaving all eight of her children behind with friends gave Aunty Lane--as she was known to her associates--an aching heart.

“I’ve always been lucky in my friends,” Lane said in an 1882 magazine story written by novelist Helen Hunt Jackson. “I’d a good home to leave each of the children in; else I couldn’t have gone, no ways, for we couldn’t take them with us. I felt worst about leaving the baby. He wasn’t quite 16 months old, and I knew he wouldn’t know me when I came back, if I ever did.”

Placerville, where the couple settled after a four-month wagon train journey west, left her husband no less restless than Michigan or Wisconsin had; gold mining was too hard and the yield too little.

Moving again to a mountaintop seven miles from the Pacific, a spot that overlooked a redwood forest and San Francisco, Aunty Lane finally felt at home--even though she was the only woman in the tiny logging community.

Making a home in a shack, she earned a small wage by washing and cooking from sunrise to midnight for a bunch of lumberjacks. Her husband was their foreman.

In the only moments she had for herself, she jumped on her pony and rode down to the beach, where she enjoyed watching the sea lions play. Then she took a brief dip and dashed back up the mountain before her absence was noted.

Even the vistas from above and the sea lions below weren’t enough to hold her. She gave up trying to reform her devil-may-care husband and, with the little money she had saved, fled down the mountain and, in San Francisco, boarded a ship named the Yankee Blade, headed for the East Coast.

“I never knew if I done right to leave him,” she said of her husband, “but I reckoned that I’d die if I stayed there another year without seeing how the children got along; and he said I might bring one back with me. I don’t know how I’d ever have picked out which one to take, but it wasn’t to be.”

Twenty-four hours after the deckhands had pulled up the Yankee Blade’s gangplank, the sleek side-wheeler steamer carrying nearly 1,000 passengers, crew and a few stowaways struck a submerged reef just up the coast from Santa Barbara. Passengers began to panic as water gushed through a 30-foot gash into the ship’s underbelly.

Several of the lifeboats capsized in the violent waves, drowning men, women and children. Many of the men who drowned were weighted down by their money belts, their take from the Gold Rush.

One of the many bodies washed ashore was that of Mrs. Thomas Brennan, who was found with her arms clasped tightly around her dead infant. She and her child were buried, like many of the shipwreck’s victims, on the bluff above the beach. The next day, her husband, who had survived, dug up their bodies and kissed them both before placing them back in their grave.

But the worst losses were aboard the ship itself.

The captain, Henry Randall, had left his teenage son in charge of the sinking vessel as he shuttled passengers to safety. In his absence, a gang of 20 passengers--all armed thugs led by an escaped criminal--ransacked the cabins for money and gold. They collected all the life preservers on board and offered them to desperate passengers for extortionate prices. And they beat or shot anyone who interfered.

Aunty Lane witnessed some of this from the bow, where she had fled, and which was soon pointing skyward as the ship sank. A stranger with a taut face had helped her to the precarious perch, and there she sat, trying to calm the fearful men and women around her.

“He asked me if I wasn’t afraid,” she said. “I told him, ‘No, I didn’t feel afraid, whichever way it went.’ ” Afterward, in San Francisco, the man told her “that he never thought anybody could be so composed as I was; he said it ‘most made him think we wasn’t in any kind o’ danger.”

From her seat on the dying ship, she watched the criminals dump their booty into a lifeboat and cast off for shore. But as they neared the beach, fierce waves sent them and their stolen treasure crashing into the surf, drowning several thugs.

The next day, the steamer Goliah, returning to San Francisco from Los Angeles, picked up the 300 or so survivors from the beach and 600 others still aboard the desperately listing Yankee Blade. About 100 of the passengers had drowned.

The Goliah turned south to drop off the shipwrecked survivors, but Lane stayed aboard when it headed north again to San Francisco.

“They all thought it was so strange of me to be willing to go right back by sea. Some of the women said they’d walk every step of the way first. But I told them I never heard of anybody’s being shipwrecked two voyages running. Besides, the captain said he’d take anybody back free to San Francisco that wanted to go. I expect my husband would be almost crazy” with worry.

It took her almost another year of hard work to save enough money to again set sail for the East and return to her children, which she did in 1855. She soon found that they needed her more than her husband had. Moving them from Wisconsin to Chicago, she supported them all by running a boardinghouse. Several years later, when her husband showed up for a visit, the fed-up Lane divorced him and moved to Denver.

It was there, in 1864, while her two eldest sons were away fighting in the Civil War, that a unit of Yankee soldiers, fresh from a victory over Confederates, led an unprovoked raid on an Indian village, killing more than 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho, mostly women, children and elderly men.

She watched the men ride triumphantly back from what would become known as the notorious Sand Creek Massacre, with Indian scalps hanging from their bridles and other gory tokens of their barbarities proudly displayed from their saddles.

“Not that I ever loved Indians, but I do say they were treated shameful,” she said. Even on her first journey west, she said, “We saw bands of Indians every day, sometimes 400 to 500 at a time. The worst there was to [say about] those Indians on the Plains was that they were thievish; they would drive off our stock, nights. . . . But I never blamed them for that; I guess we’d have done as much as that in their place.”

In the remaining years of her life, Lane opened a rooming house in the Colorado mining burg of Georgetown. In the winter, miners boarded with her. In the summer months, she lived north of Georgetown in a logging cabin she turned into a mountain refuge near Gray’s Peak, where she offered hikers a bed and home-cooked meal for a price.

It was there, in the unspoiled wilderness, that Jackson found 67-year-old Aunty Lane in 1881. “Never had much, but always plenty, and never had to be beholden to anybody,” Lane told the author.

The unsinkable Aunty Lane died in 1888, three years after Jackson, and is buried in Iowa near one of her daughters.