She published a number of excellent short stories in the Ingleside, the San Franciscan, "The Argonaut", Drake's Magazine, the Chicago Current, and the Overland Monthly.

She then turned her hand to fiction with The Man Who was Guilty, which initially had local reputation, before being taken up by a Boston house in 1886.

While living in Santa Barbara, California in the early 1890s, she wrote for the syndicates, as well as occasional correspondence in the New York Post.

She edited a volume of "Hebrew Folk-Lore Tales" and wrote a California story, "The Abandoned Claim," published in 1891.

It was a simple and winning story of the five years' experiment of two brothers and a sister in developing an abandoned claim in California.

[5] "The man from Nowhere" (San Francisco, C. A. Murdock & Co., 1891) was the first of a series of short stories by Loughead, issued every month, in uniform style and averaging about the same length.

The inaugural issue was a story of an inventor who, when just upon the brink of success, was injured in the head by the bursting of an engine, then spending 16 years in an insane asylum.

[6] Her next career started in 1915 when she was sent to investigate the discovery of opals in Virgin Valley, Nevada, 400 miles (640 km) from San Francisco.

She was reporting for the San Francisco Chronicle but she decided to buy 15 claims years after homesteading on Sagebrugh Creek at the Green Fire Mine (Sinkakis- Gemstones of North America).