Captain Jack ⛏️ Mining Queen of the Rockies ⛏️ Ellen Elliott Jack

Ellen Elliott was born in 1842 in Nottinghamshire, England. As a young girl, she met a "gypsy queen" who foretold a life of tragedy and treasure. These predictions came true (in some ways), as she wrote in her self-published autobiography "The Fate of a Fairy or Twenty Seven Years in the Far West". Her adventures in Colorado read like a dimestore novel, and are about as believeable~ gold and silver strikes, facing down claim jumpers, gunfights, hatchet fights, fist fights, arrests, amourous miners, mountain lions, rattlesnakes, avalanches, massacres, a violent con-man (ex)husband, and prophecies and philosophies of her own. Whew!

Truthfully, Ellen met Charles Jack on a ship bound for America. They married and settled in New York City. During the Civil War, Charles served in the Union Navy as a captain, Ellen Jack would later use the title for herself. Tragically, three of the couple's four children died of scarlet fever, and soon after, Charles died of an enlarged heart. Devastated by so much loss, Ellen placed her surviving daughter in the care of her sister-in-law and headed west.

At 37, Ellen set out for Denver to find her fortune, She learned of gold discoveries in the Gunnison area, and there in 1880, she opened a boarding house. With the income, she bought into a partnership in the Black Queen Mine, between Crested Butte and Aspen. Ellen traveled into the hills (often alone) to prospect and stake claims around the Gunnison Gold Belt, and later by 1900, in the Cripple Creek and North Cheyenne Mining Districts (near Colorado Springs).

By 1903, Ellen resided near Colorado Springs along the High Drive, a scenic drive above North Cheyenne Canyon, and developed several claims nearby. Now in her 60s, she found that she could mine the pockets of tourists looking for the "real" wild west, selling herself as the "Mining Queen of the Rockies". Ellen posed for and published photo postcards (with her burros, cats and parrots) and sold them, and her self-published autobiography, in the curio shop of Captain Jack's Place. She rented cabins, and cooked and served a fried chicken dinner to guests. In 1905, she claimed to have discovered a cave to "rival that of Cave of the Winds". In 1920, while Ellen was in town, a flood washed out the road to the High Drive and she was unable to return home. She lived one year longer. 🖤

She was certainly eccentric, but I see Captain/Ellen Jack's tall tales with some real nuggets of truth. She took a life of hardships and independence, amplified it into legend, and told that story for her survival. 🖤⛏️✨️