Lotta's first public performance came at a tavern in Rabbit Creek, a mining camp in the Sierra foothills, with support from a traveling troupe called the Robinson Family. She was eight years old. Her mother, Mary Ann Crabtree, recognized what Lola Montez had seen -- the girl had a gift, an irresistible energy that made rough miners put down their whiskey and watch. Mary Ann became her daughter's manager, a role she would hold for decades, and began booking Lotta into camps and saloons across the gold country. The child danced, sang, and played the banjo, performing on makeshift stages for audiences of men who had left their own families thousands of miles away. They threw coins and nuggets at her feet. Mary Ann collected every one, reportedly carrying the earnings in a steamer trunk that grew heavier with each stop. In 1856, the family moved to San Francisco, where Lotta quickly became a local sensation.

By 1859, San Francisco knew her as Miss Lotta, the San Francisco Favorite. By 1864, she had left for the East Coast, where she began acting in theatrical productions -- The Old Curiosity Shop, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Little Nell and the Marchioness. At twenty, she was a national star. By her thirties, she was touring with her own company, performing comedy, song, and dance to packed houses across the country. The 1880s saw her perennially as the highest-paid actress in America, earning up to five thousand dollars per week at a time when a laborer might earn five dollars. She was famous for her energy, her red hair, her cigar smoking -- which flouted every convention of Victorian femininity -- and a warmth that audiences found irresistible. From her first appearance as a six-year-old in the mining camps to her retirement at forty-five, she entertained continuously for nearly four decades.

Mary Ann Crabtree never stopped managing the money. As the steamer trunk gave way to investment accounts, Lotta's earnings went into San Francisco real estate, racehorses, and bonds. By the time Lotta retired in 1891 -- forced off the stage by a fall during a performance in Wilmington, Delaware -- she was one of the wealthiest women in America. She made one final public appearance in 1915, at Lotta Crabtree Day during San Francisco's Panama-Pacific Exposition, standing beside the ornate fountain she had donated to the city at the intersection of Market and Kearny Streets in 1875. When she died in 1924 at the age of seventy-six, she left an estate of four million dollars -- roughly fifty-nine million in today's money. She never married. She had no children.

Lotta's will directed her fortune into a charitable trust that reflected a lifetime of empathy shaped by growing up among working people. Half went to veterans -- the plight of World War I soldiers had particularly moved her. She set aside funds for aging actors who had fallen on hard times, for recently released prisoners trying to rebuild their lives, and three hundred thousand dollars for what she called a Dumb Animal Fund, dedicated to animal welfare. One million dollars went to the Lotta Agricultural Fund, bequeathed to the Massachusetts Agricultural College -- now the University of Massachusetts -- to provide interest-free farm loans and agricultural scholarships. The trust still operates today. At 238 Mill Street, the boarding house where it all started is California Historical Landmark number 293, registered on August 15, 1938. It sits ten feet from Landmark number 292, the home of Lola Montez. The teacher died penniless at thirty-nine. The student died a millionaire philanthropist at seventy-six. Both are remembered on one block in Grass Valley.