From the golden beaches of Nome to a Disney movie: The story of prospector Frances Ella ‘Fizzy’ Fitz

Part of a continuing weekly series on Alaska history by local historian David Reamer. Have a question about Anchorage or Alaska history or an idea for a future article? Go to the form at the bottom of this story.

“I came to Nome in the late spring of 1900, a New York stenographer lured by tales of Alaskan gold. Coincidence, circumstance and plain luck had brought me there, armed with only my typewriter. And several years passed before I could decide whether that luck had been good or bad. There were times when it looked very bad indeed.”

So begins the 1941 book “Lady Sourdough,” the assisted autobiography of Frances Ella Fitz (1866-1950), Fizzy to those who knew her. After her father died, she and her brother, Albert, supported the family. As Fitz wrote, “My mother had never worked — had never so much as washed a dish — and both Albert and I vowed she never would.” Albert was a composer and sold songs, though his income was understandably erratic. Fitz was the family bulwark, supporting them with bookkeeping and stenography work. In her free time, she sometimes played the banjo.

She was also a typist. Patents and prototype writing machines had existed for decades, but the first commercially successful typewriter entered production in 1873. This was the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer, also known as the Remington No. 1. It not only established the “typewriter” as a term but featured a QWERTY layout, the direct ancestor of our keyboards today. By the 1890s, the typewriter was an increasingly common feature in American offices. However, the supply of people who could effectively use the machines lagged. In this gap, Fitz found steady employment.

Stenography, bookkeeping, typing and even the occasional banjo performance paid the bills but were dreary occupations. Fitz harbored a different, if familiar, dream. All she wanted was enough money to never do any of that again, to never do any work again. She declared, “I wanted to earn money in the business field — wanted fiercely to earn huge amounts, which I could enjoy while I was still young.”

The gold rushes of the frozen north captured her imagination as they did thousands upon thousands of others. In 1900, the favored destination was Nome, rumored to have beaches made of gold. The gold fever was a craze, a social disease, and Fitz caught it bad. In her defense, she had some slight familiarity with mining. As of the beginning of 1900, she worked for a mining company in Montana before the facility closed due to a fire, forcing her to return to New York. Yet, she worked there as a bookkeeper in an office, literally close but effectively distant from the mine itself. And she was ever so tired of it. “At heart, I wanted to pan gold,” she wrote, “to take my wealth right from the earth, not spend more weeks and months cooped up in a stuffy office.”

She lacked the funds for a solo adventure to Nome and so joined a company of like-minded fortune hunters, a common practice at the time. Every company member paid $400 to cover travel costs while outside backers financed the mining operations in Nome. Half the profits went to the company with the participants, including Fitz, splitting the rest.

The not-exactly-silent partner in the operation was Faust, Fitz’s small, brown water spaniel. Faust accompanied Fitz across the country, to Alaska, and throughout her adventures north. The steamer out from Seattle offered the first difficulty along the way. Per Fitz, “Dogs belonged in the hold, but I wanted Faust with me. At the height of the jam, I concealed him as best I could, hurried up the gangplank, and managed to sneak him into a storeroom on the hurricane deck, which had previously been fixed up as a place for some of our boys. Faust spent the entire trip in there.” In Alaska, Faust was an alarm, defender, companion, friend and relic from another world.

The little dog endured the transition from urban to frontier life better than most prospectors, surviving and thriving. When the spaniel died in 1906, the Seattle Daily Times ran an obituary. She was a part of gold rush lore well known by locals, the pampered pooch done good. Fitz buried her in a Seattle dog cemetery near Beacon Hill.

Fitz experienced many new, harsh realities on her trip north, but her dreamy vision of Nome held until she finally saw the ugly reality. “When we reached the shore, we realized how crowded conditions actually were,” she wrote. “Tents and freight jammed the beach. We had difficulty even to walk at high tide. Waves broke just short of the tents and the piled cargo. I saw one man pay another ten dollars simply to move his small boat a little nearer to the water. So the other would have room to pitch his tent.” The marvelous-sounding concept of scraping gold off a miraculous beach had appealed to many other fellows and ladies. Her first two days in Nome included a flooded tent, a resultant cold, and an attempted sexual assault by the doctor summoned to treat her cold.

While the mining operation struggled to find its footing, Fitz begrudgingly took work as a typist for a law firm. Unfortunately for her, the lawyers she worked for were at the center of a claim-jumping scheme given legal cover by the crooked Judge Arthur H. Noyes. The widespread corruption of early Nome is, apart from the gold itself, the defining aspect of that rush. It is a central plot element in every movie about the Nome Gold Rush, including “The Spoilers” (1914), “The Spoilers” (1923), “The Soilers” (not a typo, 1923), “The Spoilers” (1930), “The Spoilers” (1942), “The Spoilers” (1955), and “North to Alaska” (1960). Two of those movies starred John Wayne.

After resigning from the law firm, Fitz’s trials on the Seward Peninsula continued. She rejoined her original mining company. There were blizzards, accidents and food shortages but never any money. She partially financed a telephone line to Nome and bought a share in a newspaper, but neither of these investments paid off. She also had a log cabin in Council, northeast of Nome. No laborers were available when she realized she needed a cellar for winter stores. She told reporters, “So I did the work myself, and the only tools I had to excavate with were a tin spoon, a trowel, and a dust pan.” When Fitz wrote in the opening of her book, “And several years passed before I could decide whether that luck had been good or bad,” this is what she was talking about.

After a couple of years of such mixed fortune, she received a fateful tip. Unknown to all the mining companies in the district, a portion of the profitable Ophir Creek was unclaimed, what she would call the Hidden Treasure. She filed her paperwork and invested thousands of dollars into the operation. Buried in debt, she almost lost it all. The nadir came in August 1902: one week to pay off the debt, or the mine would be forfeited.

She wrote, “The week passed in a roar of water and a clatter of stones over the riffles of the sluice boxes and the clank of machinery. I was wet continually, but couldn’t even take time to dry myself.” After seven days, she had accumulated just enough gold to maintain ownership.

Other than an epilogue, the book ends here. It notes that she netted over $100,000 from the Hidden Treasure claim, very roughly $3.5 million in 2024 dollars after accounting for inflation. In 1906, she married John Sanger in Boston 17 days after meeting him. She made one last trip to Alaska with him, which did not meet to his tastes. With fortune obtained, marriage was her new adventure, and she sold her properties in Alaska. By the early 1910s, they were in the Phoenix area, where they opened the first dude ranch in Arizona. They subsequently moved around, a few years in California here, a few years in New York there, before Sanger died in 1930. After publishing “Lady Sourdough” in 1941, she wrote two novels before passing in 1950.

In 1998, Disney adapted her story for a television movie, initially broadcast as part of The Wonderful World of Disney. “Goldrush: A Real Life Alaskan Adventure” stars Alyssa Milano — of “Who’s the Boss?” and “Charmed” fame — as Fitz. Bruce Campbell — of his chin and “Evil Dead” fame — co-stars as the unscrupulous leader of the mining company she joined at the beginning of her adventure. In very broad terms, the movie is accurate. For a gentle Disney adaptation, the film does spotlight the general lawlessness and claim-jumping of early Nome. Fitz’s typing background, Faust, the Ophir Creek claim and other crucial details of her life are likewise showcased with something at least approaching historical accuracy.

In the little ways, the movie gets Alaska as wrong as possible. Though several sources claim the film was shot on location in Alaska, primary shooting took place north of Vancouver, in Canada. Anyone familiar with Alaska would not be fooled. Most notably, Nome is not a sheltered cove surrounded by hills and dense trees down to the waterline as depicted in the film. There is also a very clean, polite and historically inaccurate Wyatt Earp cameo, when he should have been drunk, gambling or fighting.

The funniest moment of the movie is unintentional. During an arduous trek across the Seward Peninsula, one group member chops wood while Milano works nearby. The noise triggers an avalanche, both a myth and well-established movie trope. As the tumbling snow accumulates, Milano tries to warn her companion. He can hear her, if not clearly, but has no clue about the rapidly approaching wall of snow, ice, rocks and trees. When he turns back around, the apparently silent avalanche hits him with the suddenness of a horror movie killer doing a jump scare. Darn sneaky avalanches.

Overall, it is a very positive and pleasing film, a tale of personal perseverance mostly backed by the historical record. And Fitz would have absolutely loved it. In New York, she lived with her mother in an apartment directly underneath the mother of Lillian Russell, one of the most famous actresses of the era. When Russell visited, Fitz and her mother would peek from behind curtains, drinking in the stage star’s elaborate clothing, gems and general presence. Fitz’s own desires were simple. She wrote, “I wanted plumes and jewels and ease like Lillian Russell.” In a way, Milano provided that glamour, if a century later.

Key sources:

Cheney, Diane Holloway. Arizona’s Historic & Unique Hotels. Columbus, OH: Gatekeeper Press, 2022.

“Faust, a Famous Dog, Passes Away.” Seattle Daily Times, May 3, 1906, 9.

Fitz, Frances Ella, and Jerome Odlum. Lady Sourdough. New York: Macmillan Company, 1941.

“Frances E. Fitz Is the Only Girl Mine Owner in Alaska.” St. Louis Republic, February 8, 1903, 11.

Murphy, Claire Rudolf, and Jane G. Haigh. Gold Rush Dogs. Fairbanks: Hillside Press, 2015.

Murphy, Claire Rudolf, and Jane G. Haigh. Gold Rush Women. Portland, OR: Alaska Northwest Books, 1997.