In 1828 Bridget Miranda Evoy escaped famine-stricken Ireland with her children for a better life in America. But the relief she desperately sought was elusive. Within two years, she was a widow and was left raising her five children after the untimely death of her husband. Finding herself in dire straits in "The Gateway to the West," Bridget's Gambit tells the story of how this remarkable young widow managed to make her way to California and became an entrepreneur during the Gold Rush. In this engrossing family saga, Craig S. Harwood recounts the adventures and accomplishments of this singularly determined woman and her daughters, from a harrowing overland crossing in the winter of 1849 to innovative efforts to build an empire in defiance of the social and gender constraints of the Victorian Era.

When Bridget and her family arrived in the California Territory, they saw opportunities where others did not, charting a path rooted in a prescient view of the rapidly evolving western economy. By pursuing commercial ventures that served emerging communities in Northern California, the family was able to ascend the social ladder and exert influence, doing business with many early shapers of California statehood. Bridget's Gambit captures the stark reality of the patriarchal world of business in the Old West-and the extraordinary lengths to which Bridget and her daughters went in creating a diverse web of financial enterprises that brought some of the most prominent American businessmen into her orbit.

Harwood's spirited biography of an audacious, persistent woman brings to the forefront the largely unheralded contributions of women in the forming of California statehood-and restores a lost chapter to the history of the American West.