49ers’ Darling Wasn’t Clementine

Between them they were bigger than Britney Spears and more daring than Janet Jackson.

They were as much a part of 19th century California history as gold and guns. Though they are largely forgotten today, one woman is devoted to keeping their memory alive -- well, at least the memory of one of them.

Lotta Crabtree and Lola Montez, protegee and teacher, became rivals for the informal title of “San Francisco’s Favorite” in Gold Rush California.

Both were long dead by the time Judith Helton was born. But Helton, a professional actress and storyteller, has made it her mission to bring audiences a real feel for Gold Rush days. She sings, plays the banjo and tells tales of the 49ers in her one-woman show based on the life of Lotta Crabtree.

“Most people have never heard of Lotta Crabtree,” Helton said in an interview. “But she’d be the equivalent of the biggest rock star today.”

The “other woman,” the California female whom she can’t depict, is Montez. The mistress to Bavaria’s King Ludwig I and the mascot of the San Francisco Fire Department is just too scandalous to portray to schoolkids.

So Helton specializes in Lotta Crabtree, “La Petite Lotta,” possessor of what one critic called “the most beautiful ankle in the world.” Lotta began making money singing for miners when she was 6 years old and, as an adult, she became the highest-paid performer in America. The gold that the miners paid her is still funding the education of needy students, including medical and agricultural students at the University of Massachusetts.

She was born Charlotte Mignon to English immigrants in 1847. Her father, who owned a bookstore in New York City, left for the California gold fields in 1851. The next year, her mother sold the shop and sailed for San Francisco, with 5-year-old Charlotte, nicknamed Lotta, in tow.

Her father failed at gold mining and didn’t even meet them at the docks. He eventually summoned them to Grass Valley, where they managed a boarding house for miners -- two doors from the home of the infamous Lola Montez.

In 1853, Montez was 31, a beautiful, voluptuous woman who had scandalized much of Europe. She was an Irishwoman who billed herself as exotically Spanish. Dressed in flesh-colored tights, she thrilled and shocked several countries with her provocative tarantella “spider dance.” Men packed theaters and overlooked her lack of talent just to get a look at her as she seductively shook cork spiders from frills around her tiny waist.

She “has a very small foot and unusually pretty legs,” one critic wrote. “Her use of these is another matter.”

Both notorious and famous, she was an uncrowned queen who brought about a king’s abdication. Her arrival in California was preceded by stories of her violent temper and romantic liaisons with such notables as Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt and King Ludwig I of Bavaria, who made her a countess, refused to give her up and finally abdicated his throne. She was banished from Bavaria. The tales only enhanced the public’s appetite to see her.

She reached San Francisco in 1853 and married Patrick Hull, wealthy publisher of the San Francisco Whig and Commercial Advertiser. But after a particular dance performance received a bad review in the Daily Californian, she challenged the editor to a duel. When he ignored her, the offended Montez and Hull moved to Grass Valley, about 100 miles northeast of Sacramento.

There, two doors down from the struggling little English family, Montez smoked Cuban cigars and drank expensive liquor, bathed in champagne and dried herself in rose petals, according to local lore. She kept a pet bear chained to a tree and walked around with a white parrot on her shoulder.

Soon she threw Hull out and took up dancing again. She became enchanted with Lotta, then 6, who had strawberry-blond curls and an infectious laugh. Little girls were almost as scarce as beautiful women in Gold Rush California. Montez taught the child to sing ballads, dance to Montez’s German music box and play dress-up in her costumes.

By 1854, Lotta was ready to debut. As Helton describes it:

“In a blacksmith shop in the town of Rough and Ready, three miles from Grass Valley, Montez stood Lotta on an anvil, clapped her hands and had her jig and dance in what became Lotta’s first public appearance,” before a roomful of cheering miners.

Montez wanted to take Lotta on tour in Europe, but her mother refused. Instead, when Lotta was 8, mother and daughter toured mining camps with names like “Port Wine” and “You Bet.” After each of Lotta’s performances, her mother swept the stage to collect the gold nuggets the miners tossed, then shrewdly invested the money in real estate.

Montez died of pneumonia at age 40 in New York, a few months before the Civil War.

Soon, Lotta and her mother left the miners behind for the big city of San Francisco, where Lotta became known as the “California Diamond” and starred in several benefits for local rifle brigades and the Fire Department.

The city’s chief impresario, Tom Maguire, always conducted business in front of his prestigious opera house on Portsmouth Square. Lotta’s parents approached him and suggested that Lotta be given a chance to perform.

When he refused, supposedly with a harsh comment about her talents, Lotta’s father pulled out a revolver and fired, grazing Maguire’s arm. Soon after, Lotta appeared at his opera house.

In June 1868, when Lotta was 20, her father made off with a trunk of her gold. When she found she couldn’t get him sent to prison, she sent him back to England with enough money to keep him until he died.

Lotta toured the nation with her mother in tow, singing and dancing in burlesque and comic acts. In 1875 she returned to San Francisco, rich and renowned.

Her early philanthropy took the form of public art: a fancy cast iron, 20-foot drinking fountain in what was then the center of the city near Market, Kearny and Geary streets. It survived the 1906 earthquake and fire, serving as a meeting place for separated families. “Lotta’s Fountain” is still a landmark.

In the early 1880s, Lotta was brought to Los Angeles by impresario L.E. Behymer, who had introduced music and opera to the City of Angels when it was just a cow town.

Behymer had a room decorated for her at the Nadeau Hotel at 1st and Spring streets, where the Los Angeles Times building stands today.

In 1891, she retired from the stage at 45 and moved to a New Jersey estate built by her mother. Its name was “Attol Tryst,” “Attol” being Lotta spelled backward.

Rejected by high-minded society ladies for wearing short skirts and smoking, Lotta only laughed and shook those skirts. She painted seascapes, working with a dog at her feet and a black cigar clenched in her teeth.

She became a devoted animal rights activist who, among other things, wandered the streets putting hats on horses.

She bought Boston’s Hotel Brewster in 1909 and lived there until her death in 1924, at 76.

She never married or had children, yet more than 100 people contested her will, claiming to be children or relatives.

From her $4-million estate, she designated some money for disabled World War I veterans and some for “dumb animals,” “destitute thespians” and “discharged convicts.”

But the bulk of her fortune went to a little-known agriculture school that evolved into the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She wrote in her will: “Educated farmers would be kinder to animals.”