Once upon a time, in the mountains of Colorado Springs, there lived a woman who wore a candlestick atop her hat, who carried a pickax in one hand and a pistol in the other.

She dug for treasure around these mountains, burros in tow. Otherwise, she could be found at her cabin with her cats and parrots. She’d take pictures with tourists and tell tales at her place along High Drive.

That old carriage route is now silent, free of motors, left for hikers and mountain bikers to roam. Some say a spirit resides there — the spirit of that woman who died a century ago but maybe never left.

Or maybe it’s a fairy, as Ellen Jack knew herself to be. She titled her autobiography “The Fate of a Fairy,” published before her death in 1921.

By then, she was well known as Captain Jack.

She was “one of the West’s most remarkable personages,” read her obituary in The Gazette. Her legend first grew in Gunnison, where the newspaper ran another remembrance: “The history of this remarkable woman reads like a page from some thrilling romance and all the more interesting because it was true.”

Or mostly true, says Leah Davis Witherow, curator of history for Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum.

Several parts of “The Fate of a Fairy” are “exaggerated, if not wholly fabricated,” Witherow says. After all, there on High Drive, Captain Jack was selling a story, a persona.

“I don’t think we can separate fact from fiction with Captain Ellen Jack,” Witherow says. “But I don’t think we necessarily need to.”

Because beyond some of the questionable details — beyond the gypsy that supposedly foretold Captain Jack’s destiny; beyond her story of meeting Abraham Lincoln before pursuing that destiny out West; beyond the gunfights and poison tomahawk that supposedly scarred her forehead — what ultimately matters is what the woman represents, Witherow explains.

“The lives of women in the 19th century West were inherently shaped by race, class, gender and ethnicity,” she says. “Captain Ellen Jack is an example of a woman who sought to live life on her own terms, even if she had to become a caricature of the old or imagined West to do so.”

It’s a sentiment shared by Jane Bardal.

With her 2023 book, “Colorado’s Mrs. Captain Ellen Jack: Mining Queen of the Rockies,” she aimed to parse fact from fiction more than any writer ever had. Bardal pored over documents and newspaper accounts that piled up through Captain Jack’s life. And also court records.

“She wasn’t always a likable person,” Bardal says.

She was always “feisty” and “independent,” the author says — “someone who forged her own path” and “followed her own inner light throughout her life.”

Her life began in England. She was said to be born to a well-to-do family on a homestead settled by a founder of the Quakers. Ellen clearly developed her own spirituality — perhaps shaped by a childhood encounter with a gypsy.

According to “The Fate of a Fairy,” that gypsy declared Ellen a Rosicrucian, among that secret sect of ancient, powerful people: “[T]his child was born to be a great traveler, and if she had been a male would have been a great mining expert. … She will meet great sorrows and be a widow early in life.”

She would be a widow in 1874, Bardal found. Ellen had been married to Charles Edward Jack, whom she recalled as the first officer of the ship she took to New York — “my captain,” Ellen called him.

In her book, she recalled him serving the Union during the Civil War. She recalled an aristocratic life with him, a life of church-going and party-going, including a reception hosted by the Lincolns.

She wrote of the home she and her captain built and the children they raised. And she wrote of great sorrows.

She wrote of sickness claiming the lives of two children. She wrote of her husband on his deathbed, of him seeing their daughter in heaven: “Come, papa, come and leave this world of sin and sorrow and come to your God.” Not long after his death, Ellen wrote of losing another sick daughter.

One might be reading a dramatization. Fact or fiction, it’s true that sickness and death swept society at the time.

“Loss was common in the 19th century in a way that’s hard for us in the 21st century to imagine,” Witherow says.

Also true, she says: “People saw the West as a place of economic and social opportunity. And for a woman who has suffered great loss, the West is a place to recuperate. It’s a way to make a living and reimagine yourself in a new identity.”

Ellen Jack would become Captain Jack. It would be a name known around the West years before her arrival in Colorado Springs.

Bardal’s book places her in Gunnison in 1880. She opened a boarding house and restaurant there, continuing a line of work from back East.

Her Bon Ton Hotel on Coney Island had burned in 1876. She suspected friends of arson, prompting a long court battle, Bardal writes: “She said of this experience, ‘I began to see that the only friend on Earth was money, and not only a friend, but power; that I must stir and do something or go somewhere.’”

That somewhere was Gunnison. More enemies awaited, more than just the bandits she wrote of fighting en route to town. Some of the first of her many court battles in Colorado regarded accusations of her assaulting crazed men with a bottle and her hiding a fugitive.

And there would be more sorrow.

Ellen lost another husband, a hard-drinking man. She reluctantly married again, to a man named Walsh.

“Ellen hoped that Walsh would protect her,” Bardal writes, “but he soon became her adversary.”

While fighting in court for divorce, she also fought Walsh from acquiring the mine near Crested Butte that brought her initial fame and fortune. Maybe more than that, Black Queen Mine brought her turmoil.

Walsh was but one man who claimed rights. Reported the social justice-minded Queen Bee newspaper in Denver: “There is a band of masculine thieves … who have clubbed together to rob Mrs. Captain Jack.”

She was not exactly innocent. Regarding a claim she oversaw a brothel, “It is possible that charges against Ellen were true,” Bardal determines in her book, which also recounts her winding up in jail for drawing a gun on a man.

That legal trouble constantly followed Captain Jack could have been partly due to her “audacious personality,” Witherow says. She could have also been a victim of an intensely litigious time for mine owners, the historian notes.

“It’s often said the folks who made money were the ones who mined the miners, and that would be attorneys,” she says. “But certainly as a woman who fought to retain ownership, she would’ve been seen as incredibly challenging and nontraditional. She would’ve perhaps been a larger target.”

Captain Jack left Black Queen Mine behind when she settled in Colorado Springs, after other mining ventures around Ouray and the far western desert. She established new claims around High Drive, calling them Mars.

Writes Bardal: “She regarded herself as a daughter of Mars, born under that sign, which symbolizes strife and war.”

Strife continued in Colorado Springs between business partners who sued her and police who came after her for selling booze at her tourist stop. She lost battles before apparently losing everything toward the end of her life. In 1918, she filed for bankruptcy.

“In the meantime,” Bardal writes, “Captain Jack refused to give up staying at her cabin on High Drive.”

There high in the forest, the Rocky Mountain News found her to be “the epitome of the sublime and the ridiculous.” She was found to be gazing upon the stars: “Anon she communes with the elements … Messages flash from the skies.”

She shared some messages in “The Fate of a Fairy,” writing of “a power far stronger than that which forces us to our destiny.” There was a light in us, she wrote, and “some people carry a straight light around them that is destruction to one that carries the opposite light.” And all moved through “a triangle of three powers … electricity, vibration and this force power. I know not what to call it …”

Call it fortune and misfortune, blessings from above and troubles from a broken world. Captain Jack knew both, especially the latter it seems.

Having endured loss after loss, there was one more she could not take before her death in 1921.

High Drive had been wrecked by a flood, Bardal says. “What the newspapers said contributed to her death was leakage of the heart and stress caused by not being able to go back up High Drive.”

That place “meant her freedom,” Bardal says. There, she could be whoever she wanted to be — “the Mining Queen of the Rockies,” as she proclaimed herself, the oddly dressed and armed woman seen in the postcards she made.

“She became a character in her own story,” Witherow says.

Whatever that “force power” was, she could never control it. But there on High Drive, “she controlled the terms,” Witherow says. “It was her sanctuary.”