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We are delighted to present a biography of Christine's great great aunt, Lena Allen Webster Stoiber Rood Ellis.  Lena was an extraordinary woman in an extraordinary time, an accomplished and colorful character who lived a life that was often bigger than life.

• She and her first husband moved from the civility of Litchfield, Connecticut to the mining “boomtowns” of the wild west.

• She began life on the frontier in a tiny clapboard house and went on to build mansions in the forests of the San Juan Mountains and on Cheesman Park in Denver.

• She was a full partner with her second husband in one of Colorado’s most successful silver mines.  They sold it to the Guggenheims in 1901for $2.3 million.

• The miners called her “Captain Jack” because she rode in open ore buckets, hauled them out of saloons, and turned back strikers with a rifle in her hand.

• Yet, at the same time, she was a member of Denver society’s “Sacred 36,” a founder of Mesa Verde National Park, and a leader in the General Federation of Women’s Club movement.

• Her third husband was a creosote baron from Seattle who went down with the Titanic.

• Her fourth was a career U.S. naval officer and the hero of one of the worst cases of sabotage on American soil.

• She spent la Belle Epoque in a magnificent apartment in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe, and her last years in a villa on Lake Maggiore.

• She watched Lillie Langtry gamble away 1,000 franc notes in Monte Carlo and saw miners gamble away their gold mines in Leadville.

• If she had chosen to, she would have been the Queen of Serbia before the start of WWI. 

This is the only biography that can be written of Lena Stoiber, an extraordinary woman whose life began in the Indian wars in Minnesota and ended in Mussolini’s Italy. Like a character in an E.L. Doctorow novel, she engaged with many of the seminal historical events of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the settlement of the American West, the Colorado Silver Boom, the elegance and pretentions of America’s Gilded Age, the exuberance of la Belle Epoch in Paris, the advent of Women's Suffrage, the Federation of Women’s Clubs movement, the sinking of the Titanic, the events that immediately preceded WWI, the Influenza Pandemic of 1918, the Teapot Dome Scandal of 1922, and the American Colony in Paris. In a time when the roles women were permitted to play were few and their achievements seldom recognized, Lena chose to play by rules made for and applied by men.  She emerged a very successful business-woman, a respected mine owner, the second woman member of the American Association of Mining Engineers, a founder of Mesa Verde National Park, a doyen of Denver Society’s “Sacred 36,” and a woman whose wealth could have made her the Queen of Serbia.  

If Lena had been born a man, it is likely that the record of her accomplishments would be more voluminous and the judgement of history more generous. The portrait offered by her contemporaries, even her friends, was that of a woman who shouldered her way through life with a “hard edge,” more demanding and confrontational than others of her gender, certainly more masculine in character than was thought to be ideal.  But, although probably accurate, she was very much a woman those characterizations make it too easy to overlook the feminine side of her character.    She was very much a woman.  The man who knew her best in her later years wrote that, when he gave himself up to his “recollections and reminiscences [of her], I become obsessed with her image and cannot shake the spell she always imbued upon me.”

At the end of her amazing journey she was asked by a fortune teller if, in an earlier life she had been Cleopatra or Helen of Troy.  “No,” she replied, “I was none of those.  I was Alexander the Great.”  Perhaps it is true.