Ellen E. Jack

Colorado's Eccentric Captain Jack Ellen E. Jack

Of all the women who came to Colorado to start a new life in the 1860s and 1870s, Ellen E. Jack (also known as "Captain Jack") could well have been the most unusual. As a young woman, she was touched by tragedy with the deaths of her husband and two of her three children. Leaving the sadness, she said goodbye to her "civilized" life and moved to Colorado. She lived briefly in Pueblo and Denver and then moved to the new gold discoveries in the Gunnison Country. There, she ran several businesses, including a series of boarding houses that she ruled with an iron fist; and she became a partner in the successful Black Queen Mine, located between Crested Butte and Aspen. According to her writings, she took part in gun fights, fought off "amorous" Native Americans, and traveled through avalanche-prone mountains that kept everyone else off the trails. In her later years she moved to Colorado Springs and filed several mining claims nearby, but she mainly catered to tourists - taking them on mine tours, hiring out her burros for rides, telling tall tales, and selling her self-published autobiography, The Fate of a Fairy. It is doubtful that you will ever read a wilder tale of the life of a woman in early Colorado. What is fact and what is fiction is for you to decide.