Author: Dame Shirley (Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe)

Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe (1819-1906) was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and raised in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she was orphaned as a teenager and studied at Amherst Academy. In August 1849 she sailed from New York around Cape Horn with her husband, the physician Fayette Clapp, reaching San Francisco early the following year. The fourteen months she spent in the Feather River gold camps produced the twenty-three letters she published as Dame Shirley in Ferdinand Ewer's magazine The Pioneer in 1854-55, the work for which she is remembered. After her marriage ended she taught in San Francisco's public schools for about two decades before returning east, where she died in 1906.