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Finding Aid to the Ella Sterling Mighels papers, 1870-1934
MS 1470
MS 1470
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Title: Ella Sterling Mighels papers
Date (inclusive): 1870-1934
Collection Number: MS 1470
Creator:
Mighels, Ella Sterling, 1853-1934
Contributing Institution:
California Historical Society
678 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA, 94105
415-357-1848
reference@calhist.org
Language of Materials: Collection materials are in English.
Physical Description:
13 boxes
(6.5 linear feet)
Abstract: Correspondence; diaries (1900-1927), called
"soulbooks"; literary manuscripts; four scrapbooks; and miscellaneous papers. The
bulk of the collection consists of typescripts and manuscripts of Mighels' writings
and stories. Correspondence includes letters to and from her second husband, Philip
V. Mighels, an author, mainly about personal matters, including finances, real
estate purchases, and literary sales. Many of the letters are from Mrs. Mighels to
friends and fellow writers, often identified by first name or nickname only.
Includes papers of Ark-adian Brothers and Sisters of California, a cultural and
educational group for neighborhood children, established by Mighels in her home; and
papers of the California Literature Society, of which Mighels was secretary.
Correspondents include Ina Coolbrith, Ann Clark Hart, Clarence M. Hunt, Rockwell D.
Hunt, David Starr Jordan, Carleton Kendall, James D. Phelan, Richard E. White, and
League of American Pen Women. Also includes a small amount of genealogical material.
Diaries include two by Mighel's daughter, Genevieve (Viva) Cummins Doan, chronicling
a trip to England (1900-1901). One of the scrapbooks is organized by Mighels' first
husband, Adley Cummins (1873) and contains clippings and information about his
mother's death.
CHS is not taking appointments for research at this time. Please check the Library's website updates:
https://californiahistoricalsociety.org/collections/north-baker-research-library/
Copyright has not been assigned to the California Historical Society. All
requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted
in writing to the Director of Research Collections. Permission for publication
is given on behalf of the California Historical Society as the owner of the
physical items and is not intended to include or imply permission of the
copyright holder, which must also be obtained by the reader.
[Identification of item], Ella Sterling Mighels Collection, MS 1470. California
Historical Society, Manuscript Collection.
National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections Number
NUCMC 82-431
Photographs, two postcards, and one lantern slide shelved as MSP 1470.
The Postman's Song, with words by Ellas
Sterling Cummins, shelved in Sheet Music Collection, Box 6: 1890-1899.
The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in
the library's online public access catalog.
Ark-adian Brothers and Sisters
of California.
California Literature
Society.
Cummins, Adley
Hooks
Doan, Genevieve (Viva)
Cummins
Mighels, Philip V.
American fiction--Women authors
Diaries.
Scrapbooks.
Women authors, American--California
Women authors, American--California--Correspondence
Women Authors, American--California--Diaries
- California Literature Society
- 1919 May 28
- 1926 March 22
-
Coolbrith, Ina Donna, 1842-1928
- 1913 October 7
- 1914 September 21
- 1914 September 23
- 1914 October 6
- 1914 October 11
- 1916 January 25
- 1916 March 1
- 1916 March 7
- 1916 March 8
- 1915 July 17
- 1916 December 2
- 1916 December 7
- 1916 December 19
- 1917 January 13
- 1917 January 24
- 1917 March 16
- 1917 December 19
- 1918 January
- 1918 May 7
- 1928 March 12
-
Fischer, Frank
- 1928 April 21
-
Hart, Ann Clark
- 1921 May 14
- 1921 August 8
- 1926 May 6
-
Hearst, Phoebe Apperson
- 1916 July 24
-
Jordan, David Starr, 1851-1931
- 1914 December 29
- 1924 July 22
- 1924 December 10
-
Kendall, Carleton
- 1928 March 12
-
Mighels, Philip Verril
- 1911 October 16
- 1912 February 14
- 1928 March 12
-
Older, Fremont
- undated
-
Phelan, James Duval, 1861-1930
- 1914 January 21
- 1917 September 1
- 1920 October 19
- 1925 August 17
- 1928 January 1
- 1928 January 13
- 1928 June 13
- Race discrimination
- 1911 June 25
- 1916 January 15
- 1920 November 25
- 1920 November 29
- 1924 February 7
- 1926 October 3
- 1927 January 15
- 1927 March 28
- 1928 April 21
-
Sterling, George
- 1916 November 26
-
Tilden, Douglas
- undated
-
Wagner, Harr
- 1926 April 18
- 1932 April 15
- Women - Suffrage
- 1906 July 18
- 1917 September 1
- 1917 October 16
- 1920 June 21
- 1928 April 21
- undated
Gift of Edson Adams, Ernestine Adams, and Mrs. Hutchins.
No additions are expected.
Processed by CHS staff.
Ella Sterling Mighels, California pioneer, author and literary historian, was born
Ella Sterling Clark in Mormon Island, the first established California gold mining
camp, near Sacramento, on May 5, 1853.
Her father, Sterling Benjamin Franklin Clark of Rutland, Vermont, came to California
in 1849 and was propertied, prosperous and the Alcalde, or judge, of the Sacramento
district within three years. He then returned east to marry and bring his bride, the
former Rachel Hepburn Mitchell, to California. Rachel was a native of Philadelphia
and the daughter of John Mitchell, the County Superintendent of Schools.
Several months before Ella's birth, as her parents arrived in California, her father
died. Rachel opened the first school in the Sacramento area and, in 1854, married
Dudley H. Haskell, a 49er and member of the first Nevada Legislature (1864).
The Haskells, including Ella's baby stepbrother and stepsisters, lived in Sacramento
until 1863 when Rachel and the children moved to Pennsylvania. Three years later the
Haskell family reunited and moved to Aurora (or Esmeralda), Nevada, a Comstock boom
town. They maintained a toll road during the waning years of the town and Mr.
Haskell was pleased to accept the position of railroad land agent in Reno, offered
by Leland Stanford in 1869. The Haskell family moved back to Sacramento where Ella
remained until her marriage to Adley H. Cummins in 1872.
Adley Cummins, a native of Chester County, Pennsylvania, came to California in 1869
at the age of nineteen and worked for several years for the railroad. Cummins was a
well known philologist, author, lecturer and lawyer. He was the love of Ella's life
and the father of her only child, a daughter named Genevieve or Viva, born October
17, 1875. The Cummins family traveled a great deal but maintained a base in the San
Francisco Bay Area. In 1889, at the age of thirty-nine, Adley died of heart
disease.
Ella had spent much of her life writing articles and short stories, but now,
following her great loss, she began to work on a mammoth project, a compendium of
early California journalism and literature to be published in 1893 as
The Story of the Files. This same year Ella was
appointed Lady Commissioner from San Francisco to the Columbian Exposition.
During the writing of
The Story, Ella met Philip
Verril Mighels, a native of Carson City, Nevada, a lawyer by education and a
newspaper artist and writer by trade. They were married in 1896 and moved to London
the same year.
In 1901, following the death of Ella's mother, the Mighels family returned to the
United States and lived in New York for several years. Here Ella claims to have
persuaded her husband to develop his literary skills. Regardless of her influence,
Philip became an acclaimed novelist and playwright while he continued to work for
newspapers.
Viva Cummins married Augustus Doan in 1896 and spent several years at music school in
London on a scholarship provided by Phoebe Hearst. Viva performed as a “Race
Impersonator”, singing and dancing in the style of the Native American, Hungarian,
Hindu, etc.
Both Viva and Dudley Haskell died in 1905 and two years later Ella returned to
California, never to leave her San Francisco home again. She and her husband grew
apart in temperament and career aspirations, and Ella divorced him in 1910. Philip
died in 1911 as a result of a hunting accident.
During the later part of her life, Ella developed a philosophy called “Ark-adianism”,
which reflected her pioneer California and Victorian up-bringing. She described
Ark-adianism as, “...a system of philosophy which substitutes normal things for
abnormal things in every department of life especially the home life” (letter,
5/19/11).
Ella believed in kindness and humanism, in Church and the Bible, in the purity of the
white race, in democracy and freedom, and in the benign dominance of men. She was
opposed to moral corruption, “chaos and socialism”, Jewish, Japanese and Black
immigration, scientific education and the medical profession.
She believed that children, who were in a conspiracy against authority, should be
kept disciplined, innocent and happy. She identified a child's seven friends--work,
bread, music, art, letters, invention and common sense--and believed that women
should dedicate their lives to the upbringing of children as their mothers had
before them. She did not believe in women's suffrage (“They have no caution, no
principles, when it comes to voting”, letter, 9/1/17), and she was opposed to birth
control (“Parents who lend themselves to exercising `Birth Control' are punished for
interferring with Nature and they fall victim to epilepsy, nervous prostration,
insanity or lingering death”, letter, 12/28/16).
Children loomed large in Ella's life, and in her later years she developed a
neighborhood literary program for the moral uplift of young people which she named
the “Ark-adian Brothers and Sisters”. Her program included providing “books one
ought to read”, and organizing both annual burnings of “bad” books and “potlatches”
or gift giving parties. The motto of her little club was “Thou shalt keep the peace”
and she stressed the importance of innocence and happiness among her young
neighbors.
In order to bring the children of her club into association with “nice friends”, Ella
organized the California Literature Society which met monthly at the home of Ina
Coolbrith, California'a first poet laureate, until 1916, and then met elsewhere
until Ella's death.
As did other writers of her time, Ella identified herself with the early California
pioneer spirit, writing constantly, if not brilliantly, about the kind of pioneer
Californians who had rocked her “to sleep in a goldrocker once used to wash the pay
dust from the American river sands” (O'Brien, 1946).
Ella tended to focus more on self-identified “fairy tales” and the mythology of the
gold rush than on historical fiction. Yet whe also wrote as a chronicler of early
California literary history and was named “first historian of literary California”
by the state legislature in 1919.
Ella's literary career began at the age of ten, when the Aurora
Union published a fairy story she had written, and
she was the first native Californian to publish a novel,
Little Mountain Princess, in 1880. Her best known later works were
The Full Glory of Diantha (1909),
Literary California (1918), an expansion of
The Story of the Files; and
The Story of a Forty-Niner's Daughter (1934). She
also authored a play,
Society and Babe Robinson
(1914) and persuaded James Phelan to publish her father's travel diary,
How Many Miles From St. Jo? (1929).
Ella occasionally wrote on other subjects of interest to her, such as the importance
of maintaining the purity of the white race (“The Fairy Tale of the White Man”) and
the benign dominance of men (“The Mid-Victorian Man”). Most of her works on these
other subjects were in the form of fairy tales or common sense discussions and only
a small number were published.
Ella died in 1934 following the publication of
The Story
of a Forty-Niner's Daughter,
written under the pen name of Aurora
Esmeralda. Her autobiography reflected Ella's life long belief that “she was
destined to be the link between the Gold Rush days and the 20th century's brave new
world” (O'Brien, 1946).
References:
Cummins, Ella Sterling,
The
Story of the Files.
World's Fair Commission of California,
Columbian Exposition, 1893.
Esmeralda, Aurora (Ella Sterling Mighels),
The Story of a Forty-Niner's Daughter. San
Francisco: Harr Wagner Publishing, 1934.
Gudde, Erwin G.,
California
Gold Camps.
Berkeley: University of California Press,
1975.
O'Brien, Robert, “Riptides”,
San Francisco Chronicle, December 18, 1946.
Who's Who of Literary America,
1927.
The Ella Sterling Mighels collection consists of correspondence, diaries,
genealogical material, writing and stories, miscellaneous material and
scrap-books.
The
correspondence includes personal letters between
Ella and her family, particularly her second husband, and other personal and
business letters. Some of her letters to others are handwritten or typed, but many
are carbon copies of typed letters.
Ella's correspondence with Philip Mighels reflect and describe the course of her
second marriage, which ended in divorce in 1910.
Ella's other correspondence was generally with authors, publishers, newspaper editors
and politicians, including Ina Coolbrith, James Phelan, David Starr Jordan, Phoebe
Hearst, George Sterling, Ann Clark Hart, Harr Wagner, Fremont Older, Douglas Tilden,
Frank Fischer and Carleton Kendall.
She regularly discusses her current literary projects, complaining about her
difficulties and frustrations with writing and publishing, and assigning her works
great social and moral value.
She also draws from her background in the California gold rush to discuss her
childhood and the history of her family. She often laments the passage of the
pioneer mothers and fathers, their stories, their customs and their memories, and
she writes about being involved in many pioneer remembrance displays, including the
erection of a statue of the “Pioneer Mother”.
Throughout much of her correspondence are discussions of her personal philosophy
“Ark-adianism”, particularly as it concerns women, the family and the raising and
education of children. Her correspondence also contains references to her
neighborhood neophytes, known as the “Ark-adian Brothers and Sisters”, including
several men and women who continued to inform her of their lives and literary
adventures long after they had left her fold.
The
diaries include two written by Ella's dauthter,
Genevieve (Viva) Cummins Doan, chronicling her trip to England (1900-1901). They
contain descriptions of her boat trip, daily activities, studies, entertainment and
dance productions as a “Race Impersonator”.
Ella also contributed a number of diaries or “Soulbooks”, which chronicle her
thoughts, concerns, writing and daily activities between 1904 and 1927. The
“Soulbooks” contain little sayings (i.e., “Marriage is a custom invented by man for
the protection of woman and the conservation of the family”); copies of her
published letters to editors, articles and short stories; letters received and
written; notes to herself (i.e., “Doe the next thyngge”); hand-bills, reviews,
articles and ephemera concerning her published works and her activities; material
concerning the construction of a “Pioneer Mothers” statue; descriptions of family
and friends such as Adley Cummins, Philip Mighels, Ina Coolbrith and the Ark-adian
Brothers and Sisters; material concerning the California Literature Society and her
title confirmation as “first historian of literary California”; discussions of her
current literary works and publishing problems, her health and financial
concerns.
The
genealogical material includes two family trees of
the Mighels family, questions regarding the Clark family and “The Book of the House
of Mitchell”, which contains a genealogy of the Mitchell, Clark and Haskell
families. In “The Book”, Ella states, “The descendents of William Mitchell[UNK]her
great-grandfather[UNK]...have produced a race with such marked characteristics that
they are a source of constant inquiry to themselves and to others.”
The
writing and stories include typed and handwritten
drafts of numerous lectures, stories, fairy tales, poems, plays and novels by Ella,
such as “Wawona”, “The Deathless Romance of Herman and Thusnelda”, “The Seven
Faithful Fairies”, “Society and Babe Robinson”, “Killarg and Thotha”, “Seven Men of
Borealis”, “The Full Glory of Diantha”, and “Ar Vyvah”, as well as “thoughts and
scribblings” on miscellaneous subjects such as Ark-adian education.
The
miscellaneous material includes unorganized writing
by others, particularly Ella's first husband, Adley Cummins; ephermera, reprints of
Ella's articles, newspaper clippings, and material relating to the California
Literature Society and the Ark-adian Brothers and Sisters.
The
scrapbooks include a scrapbook organized by Adley
Cummins (1873), containing newspaper clippings and information about the death of
his mother.
Several scrapbooks organized by Ella are also included (1893-1930). These contain
published articles by Ella concerning various subjects, particularly her travels to
Alaska, London and the Chicago World's Fair of 1894; reviews of her works,
particularly “The Full Glory of Diantha”; newspaper clippings concerning her divorce
from Philip Mighels, and her other activities; and photographs, letters and
ephemera.
Twenty one photographs, two postcards and one lantern slide were transferred to
California Historical Society's Photograph Collection. They include one postcard
displaying the “Original idea of the `Children's Statue of the Pioneer Mother”', and
one of the statue “The Nations of the West” from the Panama Pacific International
Exposition. They also include two photographs of a mother an children (posing for
the Pioneer Mother statue), one of Ella with her family (?), one of “Hal Haskell,
Auburndale, Mass.”, two of John Mitchell (?), two of Ella, two of Genevieve (Viva)
Cummins, one of James Phelan, one of a “Group of Citizens of Aurora, California (now
Aurora, Nev.) taken 1865”, and nine of unknown individuals and places. Also included
is one lantern slide of an unknown individual.
Arranged into six series:
Series 1: Correspondence
Series 2: Diaries
Series 3: Genealogical Material
Series 4: Writing and Stories
Series 5: Miscellaneous Material
Series 6: Scrapbooks