Mabel K. Young: Renaissance Woman of Midas
By Dana R. Bennett, PhD

This photo shows Dr. Mabel Young ready to perform in a Midas play. Subsequent photos indicate that Dr. Young preferred to wear knickers (“knickerbockers”), a tie, and a cap throughout the rest of her life.
According to the Oxford dictionary, a renaissance person is one “with many talents or areas of knowledge.”
That definition certainly applies to Dr. Mabel K. Young who lived in Midas from 1908 to 1916. This biography expands on (and corrects, where necessary) the one published in “A Century of Enthusiasm.”
Mabel Katherine Young was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on March 8, 1877, the youngest of the six children of William Philo Young, Sr., and his second wife Helen. It is not known why her older brothers William, Dean, and Richard and sister Genevieve moved from Wisconsin to Nevada, but Mabel visited them often as a young girl. She was 12 years old when she first appeared in an Elko newspaper. In September 1889, Elko’s Weekly Independent lamented her return to Milwaukee after having spent the summer with her three older brothers on Van Duzer Creek, noting that “Miss Mabel was exceedingly popular among a wide circle of friends in Mountain City and Tuscarora.” Mabel’s brothers never left Nevada. William and Dean are buried in Tuscarora; Richard in Elko. Genevieve, fondly known by her family as “Jinky,” married Herbert Thompson in Mountain City, Nevada, in 1898 and moved to Colorado.
Mabel Young graduated from the Dental Department of the Milwaukee Medical College, one of two women in a class of 50, in 1904. She began her dental practice in Cripple Creek, Colorado, where Herb and Jinky Thompson were then living. All of them soon left for Nevada.
In December 1906, the new dentist opened her first Nevada dental office in Elko’s Carville Building.
The Elko Free Press explained that Dr. Young was also a post graduate of the Chicago Northwestern Dental Surgery College and noted that she had “passed with such a splendid examination before the [Colorado] State [Dental] Board that Governor McDonald of Colorado wrote Governor Sparks [of Nevada] requesting him to issue a permit for her to practice in Nevada until the meeting of the [Nevada] State Dental Board, when she will take the examination.” Mabel was one of eight applicants, and the only woman, examined by the new Nevada State Board of Dental Examiners in September 1907.
In addition to her Elko office, Dr. Young began traveling by horse and buckboard to nearby mining camps and ranches to provide dental services. Throughout the 23 years she practiced in Nevada, she could be found in a wide variety of locations, such as Winnemucca, Paradise Valley, National, Lovelock, and Pioche. She was constantly on the move.
When the rush to Midas, in the Gold Circle Mining District, began in earnest in 1908, Mabel Young and the Thompsons were among the early fortune-seekers.
In June 1908, the Elko newspaper reported that Mabel and Jinky were headed for Midas; the town was not even a year old yet. According to the 1910 census, Mabel and her 16-year-old niece, Genevieve Young (daughter of Dean and Mamie Young), were living with the Thompsons in Midas. The location of their residence has not yet been determined.
Dr. Young opened a dental office on North Main Street in 1908. On June 25, 1909, she paid $550 (roughly equivalent to $21,000 today) for a lot on North Main Street, presumably for her office. With the information available, it is not possible to confirm whether her 1908 and 1909 office locations were the same. Dentistry was not her only occupation, however. On July 16, 1909, Mabel was appointed as the town’s third postmaster, a job she held until August 13, 1911. Her niece, Genevieve, was employed as assistant postmistress.
As if she were not busy enough, Mabel Young was also the President and Manager of the Dunscomb Townsite Company, which sought to establish a town near the Esmeralda Mine about two miles east of Midas. On April 20, 1909, Edward Dunscomb, M.D., and Albert Gabbart, transferred the surface and water rights of the Lucky Chance group of mining claims to Mabel. It is possible that Dr. Young and Dr. Dunscomb knew each other in Cripple Creek—they were there at the same time–before they each showed up in Midas. Dr. Dunscomb provided medical services in Midas from his arrival in 1907 until his death in 1915 at age 77. He was buried in the Midas Cemetery. Gabbart, a prospector, also arrived in 1907 and lived in Midas until his death in Golconda on July 12, 1939, at 84 years of age.
The Elko County Commission approved a plat map for Dunscomb in May 1909, and Mabel began advertising widely. The two men had granted her sole authority to develop and sell lots in the townsite in exchange for one-quarter each of the proceeds from lot sales. Despite her best efforts, including frequent advertising in regional newspapers for more than a year, no record of a sale has been located. The scheme soon fizzled.
At the same time, Mabel Young was a mining reporter and town correspondent for the Elko newspaper, producing the “Gold Circle Items”
column over several months in 1909. Her columns focused on mining-related news from the Gold Circle Mining District, but she also included some notes about town life. In the column published on July 9, 1909, she reported that “[t]he home Dramatic Company’s little Drama entitled ‘TULU’ was well attended. Each and every one of those taking part deserves great credit.” One of those was Mabel herself.
This photo might be of the cast of TULU. The only man in the photo is Mr. Leslie Savage dressed in his wife Alice’s clothes, seated far right. The woman on the far left was identified as “Gen’s sister”; likely, she was Nellie Young of Tuscarora. Mabel Young is in the dark suit, hands on hips, and Alice Savage is standing behind her. In the center, wearing an obviously large man’s suit, is Mabel’s niece Genevieve Young. The woman in white behind her was not identified. On the far right in the light-colored clothes with dark tie was “Piff, a girl visiting from Golconda.”
Her interest in the theater appears to have been a lifelong one.
A popular community event in the early 20th century was masquerade balls, and Mabel left an unforgettable costumed memory with one young man. Recalling such an event that occurred in the mid-1920s in Eureka, Albert Biale said during a 1993 interview: “Mabel Young was a very tiny person, but strong, but she wasn’t too young at that time. But on one masquerade ball this person came in dressed as a monkey. As I say, she wasn’t very big, and she was active, and everybody thought it was some young boy. She ran around the floor, went up on the balcony, and there are those poles that hold the balcony up [in the Eureka Opera House], and she was climbing those right to the ceiling. Everybody had no idea who it was, but they knew that it was a young boy – someone who would be strong, you know. Boy, talk about a surprise when she [unmasked]! [laughter] I’ll bet you she was close to 50 at that time. But she was active.”
In 1913, Josie Alma Woods joined Dr. Young as her assistant and companion in her itinerant dental practice. A year later, they traded in the horse for a Model T, and the Midas newspaper reported that residents were waiting with great anticipation for the arrival of the dentist in her new car. Years later, Alma Woods recalled that she paid a mechanic $50 to take that car’s engine apart and show her how everything worked. She wanted to be able to fix any mechanical problem the two women might encounter on the rough and remote Nevada roads. Considering that Dr. Young’s dental fees ranged from $1 for a cleaning to $10 for a single crown, $50 was a considerable sum.

Operator of general stores in Golconda and Midas, Margaret Brady was appointed to succeed Mabel Young as Midas postmaster in 1911. She served until 1915. (Photo courtesy of North Central Nevada Historical Society)
It is probably safe to assume that Mabel and Alma also participated in the town’s woman suffrage campaign. In 1914, local storekeeper Margaret Polkinghorne Brady led the Midas chapter of the Nevada Equal Franchise Society, but the names of other members have not yet been located. The group clearly had an impact on Midas as the men overwhelmingly supported suffrage by a vote of 69 to 8. While Mabel and Alma do not appear on any surviving records regarding suffrage, both women later ran for public office. In the 1940s, Woods became the first woman elected to represent Eureka County in the Nevada Legislature and the first woman to chair the Assembly Committee on Taxation.
Mabel was not as successful. In 1922, she ran as an Independent for Eureka County Clerk and Treasurer, the first woman to seek that office. Following is her statement of qualifications: “I am absolutely free from all political affiliations or combinations, and consider myself capable in every way to fulfill the duties of the office. I have had experience in various branches of the business world, starting as assistant bookkeeper for the Western Union Telegraph Company; then bookkeeper; learning telegraphy; working in many commercial offices as operator, and took Associated Press report for the Cripple Creek Times; later was manager of the Victor, Colorado, office. Worked at telegraphy during vacations until I graduated from the Dental Department of the Milwaukee Medical College; have practiced dental surgery in Eureka County; been a taxpayer in the county a number of years, and am at present interested in the ranching business here.” But she lost the race.
By 1915, Mabel and Alma were not spending much time in Midas.
They were traveling an itinerant dental route that included Buckhorn, Ft. McDermitt, Austin, Round Mountain, Manhattan, Lund, Preston, Silverton, Duckwater, Tonopah, and Eureka. Woods later fondly recalled their travels: “We had a regular route and visited each place twice a year. Would send our cards a month in ahead so the ranchers and sheepherders would have a chance to hear about when we would be there…No roads you might say, but we would get there. She was only 5 ft tall, so could not crank it [the Model T] very good and I am 5-4 ½ so I had to do all the cranking and pushing it up every hill or mountain we came to, and she doing the driving, and seemed [sic] killing the engine going up those steep mountains. I would have to put a rock under the back wheels and run around and crank the engine, then run back to push. We had a lot of fun and could laugh about it after we got on top of the mountain.” In 1916, Mabel sold her Midas property to her brother-in-law, Herb Thompson.
Around 1918, the two women began homesteading a ranch at the Willows 40 miles west of Eureka. It had been a Pony Express station in the 1860s, and when they stopped there for lunch one day, Alma declared that she “would love to have my home right here.” Within six years, they had constructed a log house and other ranch buildings on the place they called Almabel Ranch. Alma lived on the ranch until she sold it in 1954 and moved to Texas. She was respected by her Eureka ranching neighbors for her expertise with cattle, especially bulls.
During their early years building Almabel, Mabel wrote several semi-autobiographical short stories that were not published but the surviving drafts provide marvelous details about daily life on the ranch. Mabel did not stay on the ranch long, however. She continued her traveling dental practice, and in 1921, opened a somewhat permanent office on Spring Street in Eureka. One of her patients later recalled that, because Dr. Young was such a small woman, she sometimes sat in the laps of her patients to extract their teeth. Young also continued prospecting and recording mining claims in Eureka County.
While Alma remained at The Willows as ranch manager, Dr. Young had established another (again, somewhat permanent) dental office in Tonopah by 1926 possibly because Nevada’s first woman dentist, Helen Rulison Shipley, had recently moved from Tonopah to Reno. In April 1928, Mabel Young suffered a heart attack and moved to Los Angeles, California, for health reasons and probably to be near her older sister Jinky and second husband Louie R. Keyse. The Eureka newspaper began cataloguing Alma’s frequent visits to Mabel over the next decade. In 1933, Mabel fully deeded The Willows to Alma, and it does not appear that Mabel ever returned to Nevada. She died in L.A. on January 17, 1939, with Alma by her side. Dr. Mabel Katherine Young—dentist, rancher, actor, author, prospector—was buried near her beloved sister Jinky in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.
The photos of Dr. Young with this article were donated to Friends of Midas by B.J. Matthews whose great-grandfather, Dean Young, was Mabel Young’s brother. The grandmother of B.J. was Mabel’s niece, Genevieve Young Roseberry, who also lived in Midas. In 2024, the estate of B.J. Matthews provided a generous bequest to Friends of Midas in honor of Dr. Mabel Young. Friends of Midas is grateful for B.J.’s support and delighted to showcase her remarkable aunt.