“I do not fear man or devil; it is not in my blood, and if they can shoot any straighter or quicker than I, let them try it, for a .44 equalizes frail women and brute men, and all women ought to be able to protect themselves against such ruffians.” – Ellen “Captain Jack” Elliot, Queen of the Rockies.
She was a tough lady, eccentric and legendary as one of Colorado’s most colorful pioneers. Ellen Elliott was born on Nov. 4, 1842, in New Lentern, Nottingham, England. By the time she made her way to Colorado in 1880, the woman had suffered tragedy and loss.
In 1860, Elliott boarded the “James Foster” ship bound for America. While aboard, she met Charles E. Jack. The two were soon married after they settled in New York. When the country erupted in Civil War, Charles Jack served the Union, eventually rising to the rank of captain. During the war, Ellen gave birth to their first child, a girl. Not long after the war ended, the couple welcomed their second child, a boy. Tragedy struck the Jack family when both children later died of scarlet fever. The couple eventually had two more daughters. Sadly, one of the daughters died, again due to scarlet fever. Then not long after the death of their third child, Charles died in 1872, of an enlarged heart.
Devastated by so much tragedy and loss, Ellen Jack eventually placed her surviving daughter in the care of her sister-in-law and headed to the West. Her first stop was Denver where she learned of the gold discoveries in the Gunnison area on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. In Gunnison, she opened a boarding house and with the income she was able to buy into a partnership in the Black Queen Mine, located between Crested Butte and Aspen.
It was at this time that history records her name as “Captain Jack,” which she had taken from her deceased husband. This was also the time when her colorful Colorado legend took on a whole new persona.
According to her autobiography, Fate of a Fairy or Twenty-seven Years in the Far West, Captain Jack was well accomplished with firearms, including pistols, shotguns and rifles. She wrote she was involved in several gunfights, including a few with local Indians. Traveling alone through the heavy snows in the mountains, she always carried a pistol and pick-ax to get her through the snow-packed passes.
She later said, “I do not fear man or devil; it is not in my blood, and if they can shoot any straighter or quicker than I, let them try it, for a .44 equalizes frail women and brute men, and all women ought to be able to protect themselves against such ruffians.”
Among the many events related in her book is a somewhat fanciful tale involving gypsies. Captain Jack relates that at the age of 7, she attended the Goose Fair in her hometown of Nottingham, where she met a gypsy queen who supposedly said to her mother, “The child will meet with great sorrows and be a widow early in life.” Whether the event is true or not, the prediction certainly proved to be correct.
