Sierra City was booming when young Mabel Thomas arrived in this California gold mining town in 1885. Her father was part of a Cornish diaspora that sent a generation of men from the declining copper and tin mines of southwest England in the mid-19th century to mines opening around the world. Mabel remembers her girlhood at the Sierra Buttes mine, where her home was bolted to the mountain to withstand fierce winter winds. Gold Miner’s Daughter offers a young girl’s view into makeshift towns where one could dine on fresh oysters and fine liquor one day, then...