Working women
Economic Opportunity On The Frontier
In 1849, thousands of people rushed to California to search for gold. The few women who came west found fortunes by running hotels, restaurants, and clothing shops, or doing sewing and laundry. With money in hand, women branched out into banking and financial services.
Wells Fargo founder Henry Wells believed that ability should trump tradition. “Give her the opportunity,” he declared as he opened Wells College for women in 1868, and Wells Fargo  & Co. followed his lead. Beginning with Mary Taggart in Palmyra Nebraska in 1873, Wells Fargo relied on female agents to handle financial services. Wells Fargo’s express division hired over 350 women agents between 1873 and 1918 (the year the company left the express business) to manage Wells Fargo offices. The company hired hundreds more women for shipping, clerk, auditing, and customer service positions, especially in cities such as San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, and New York.
Sisters Julia Jones and Lucy Jones Miller shared the job of Wells Fargo agent in Mariposa, California, from 1885-1909. Daily duties included loading mail, packages and gold aboard the daily stagecoach that left town at dawn.
Cassie Tomer Hill
 An Iowa girl, Cassie Tomer immigrated to the Nevada territory with her family just before the start of the Civil War. In 1867, the Tomers reached California by wagon.
Cassie traveled with her father Henry and mother Susan, and four siblings. At least two other relatives made the trip out to Yolo County with Cassie’s family: The brood worked a ranch near the present town of Woodland. Cassie appears on more than one report in the 1870 census, and is listed with more than one age. It’s likely this was the result of her industry — she worked as a housekeeper for a local brick mason and may have wanted to seem older.
The Tomers moved from Yolo County to Roseville California, in Placer County. It was there that Cassie met railroad telegrapher George Washington Hill, who at 21 years of age may actually have been her junior. (Cassie listed herself as 19 years old at the time of her marriage in 1876, when according to her birth certificate she would have been 22.) George and Cassie's first child, a boy, was born in 1877.
George Hill moved his young family to Tulare County, then back to Roseville in 1881 to take over the telegraph duties there. At some point in the time, George Hill died. There are some discrepancies in the records as George’s death was not recorded in Placer County. By the time of George’s untimely death, Cassie was taking care of their five children.
One thing we know for sure is that Cassie Hill was appointed Wells Fargo agent in Roseville on May 14th 1884. She had assisted George, as she could, when he was agent, and effectively took over his position when he died. She received a “Certificate of Appointment,” and as instructed, she displayed it “conspicuously” in the office.
While it is true that Wells Fargo employed over 160 female express agents during the 19th century, the telegrapher’s trade was almost exclusively male. The fact that Cassie was a widow probably sat well with telegraph giant Western Union, who implicitly expected that female telegraph operators should quit upon marriage.
Some of Cassie’s children moved into jobs at the depot as they got older. From the time he was a boy, her eldest son Forrest sold fresh fruit to rail passengers passing through the depot. For 23 years, Cassie kept up her duties as railway agent; “retirement” was forced on her when the Southern Pacific dismantled her depot/home and constructed a larger station elsewhere.
Lamenting the occasion, Cassie Hill wrote a poem, which read in part;
The old home is not what it used to be
The thoughts lurk near me still
Tis but the fleeting past I see
Where all is calm and still
Cassie Hill still had 47 more years of life ahead. She remained in Roseville after her retirement, where she built a two-story commercial building downtown on Lincoln Street — the Cassie Hill Building. She lived to the ripe old age of 100: She died in Sacramento in 1955.
Unlike many women of her era, Cassie did not devote all her energy to the traditional “women's sphere” of domestic pursuits. She remained energetic throughout her working career and retirement, and claimed to be “way too busy to remarry.” Cassie owned one of Roseville’s first automobiles, which she drove until she was 85 years old! |
In 1910, men held 95% of banking jobs. Most also held the belief that women were mentally unsuited for handling financial transactions, and physically unable to lift heavy bags of gold and silver coins and account ledger books. Even before World War II, most city banks had resisted putting women behind banking counters. 
With wartime labor shortages, however, banks desperately needed women workers, but still debated height restrictions and whether or not policies requiring women to resign their jobs upon marriage ought to be suspended.