Eilley Bowers

Who was Eilley Bowers?

Alison "Eilley" Oram Bowers was a Scottish American woman who was, in her time, one of the richest women in the United States, and owner of the Bowers Mansion, one of the largest houses in the western United States. A farmer's daughter, Bowers married as a teenager and her husband converted Mormonism before the couple immigrated to the United States. After briefly living in Nauvoo, Illinois, she became an early Nevada pioneer, farmer and miner, and was made a millionaire by the Comstock Lode mining boom. Married three times and divorced twice, she raised three children but outlived them all.

Following the deaths of her last husband and her three children, and the collapse of the Nevada mining economy, she became bankrupt and destitute, reinventing herself as "The Famous Washoe Seeress", a professional scryer and fortune-teller in Nevada and California. Worth over $4 million at the height of the Nevada mining boom, she died penniless in a care home in Oakland, California.