In her life as a politician's wife, Pacheco lived in Sacramento and was, for ten months in 1875, the First Lady of California. (Her husband became the state's first California-born governor when he finished the term of Newton Booth.)"Governor Romualdo Pacheco" National Governors Association. She hosted a literary salon in San Francisco, drawing "all that were worth knowing in California", according to Western writer Bret Harte.Bret Harte, "Mrs. Romualdo Pacheco" Overland Monthly (January 1914): 23. She was a member of the Pacific Coast Women's Press Association.
