Overview

Lena Allen Webster Stoiber Rood Ellis, was one of the American West's most colorful and compelling women. She was born in Minnesota during the Civil War, died in Mussolini's Italy on the eve of WWII, and played a larger-than-life role in many of the seminal events in between. By grit and ambition, she found her way from a boardinghouse in Minneapolis to mansions in the San Juan Mountains and Denver, a magnificent apartment on the Champs Élysées, and a beautiful villa on Lake Maggiore. Lena's first husband deserted her in a rough town in western Colorado when she was only a teenager. With her second husband, she owned and operated one of the country's most successful silver mines. Her third husband was a creosote baron who went down with the Titanic. Her fourth was the hero of one of the worst cases of sabotage on American soil. If she had so chosen, she could have been the Queen of Serbia. Equal parts Molly Brown, Auntie Mame, and Scarlet O'Hara, Lena was tough and often profane, gracious and generous. She was ""Captain Jack,"" who rounded up miners from local saloons to haul them back to work, and ""the gentle wife of Halifax"" who placed flowers on the caskets of the victims of the Titanic. With only nine years of formal education, she was the second woman elected to the American Institute of Mining Engineers, a founder of Mesa Verde National Park, and a leader in the General Federation of Women's Clubs. When a fortune teller told her that in another life, she had been Helen of Troy, she replied, ""No. I was Alexander the Great.""

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