Lena

Introduction: Lena and Her Circle Just before she died at the age of seventy-three, Lena Allen Webster Stoiber Rood Ellis finally decided who she was. There were many identities to choose from. Twice widowed, twice divorced, she was married to one of the most ingenious and successful silver miners of his age, to a victim of the greatest maritime disaster in history, and to the hero of one of the worst cases of sabotage on American soil. At age eighteen, without even a high school education, she followed her first husband from the civility of Connecticut into the mountains of Colorado, living and working for the next twenty years in rough, isolated mining towns on the edge of the western frontier. Remarkably, she emerged a very successful businesswoman, a highly respected silver mine owner, and a refined and fabulously wealthy member of the highest of societies. Everywhere she went, she was the center of attention, a constant subject of the society and business pages of regional, national, and international newspapers. Yet her final years were spent in relative seclusion in a villa in northern Italy. When she first arrived in the new state of Colorado as a young wife, she insisted that she be called “Madame Webster.” While she was the business manager of a silver mine and still in her twenties, the miners, some of whom she had turned away from her mine with a rifle in her hands, called her “Captain Jack.” When she felt that the name “Lena” was too inelegant for the society she wanted to join, she called herself “Helen.” If she had chosen to, she would have been the Queen of Serbia. She loved at least one of her four husbands, had affairs with a number of other men, was a devoted daughter and sister, and passed in and out of strong friendships with numerous women. Throughout all of it, she continually reinvented herself as she adopted a persona that she thought befitted the kind of person she wanted to be at the time. But in the end, she chose to be Lena Allen Stoiber and to be buried next to her second husband in the extravagant mausoleum she had built for him in Denver. In hindsight, it is who she always was. If Lena was a woman of many names, she was also one of many conflicting personalities. She was rough and refined, hot-tempered and cool, self-confident and insecure. A friend described her as “a moody person and if she happened to like you, she would invite you to lunch . . . and again, if she and my husband locked horns, as the saying goes, we didn’t have dinner there.” But 20 years later, a reporter wrote that “[she] has a personality as valuable as the bonds she clips. It is like a magnetic sunbeam.” Above all else, the qualities that carried her through her remarkable voyage and enabled her to make a life out of all the contradictions were her fierce independence and her outsized ambition to be recognized as better than even she perceived herself to be in the moment. She refused to be consigned to roles in which women of her day were cast and she pushed herself forward with little regard for the past and no evident sense of regret. When a fortune-teller told her that “in her other lives she had been Helen of Troy, or the Queen of Sheba, or Cleopatra,” she corrected her, saying, “No. I was none of those; I was Hannibal, or Alexander the Great, or Napoleon.’” She was, if nothing else, convinced that she was destined to be something grand. The portrait of Lena offered by her contemporaries, even her friends, is that of a woman 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, those characterizations make it too easy to overlook her feminine side. 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.” Although she came from strong Yankee stock, Lena was never much of an Easterner. She was not particularly religious, was never driven to reform her world, and certainly wasn’t one to hide her light under a bushel. But neither was she a taciturn Midwesterner who blended easily into a community of equals, and few would ever call her naive or artless. She had, instead, a fiery temper and a demeanor that was often seen as arrogant, a mix that throughout her life offended at least part of nearly every social group with which she interacted. Yet there was also a humanity about her that often seemed to appear despite herself, and a charisma that particularly appealed to other self-confident women. She was a self-reliant and wholly independent person who did as she chose and seldom looked back. In short, she was the archetype of a Westerner. Just four months after she was born, a war with the local Dakota-Sioux Indians killed five hundred settlers across her native state of Minnesota and local banks were still being robbed by cowboy gangs on horseback. She was married just one year after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the same year Wild Bill Hickock was murdered in Deadwood, and five years later the last big gunfight took place at the OK Corral. Frederick Jackson Turner declared in 1893 that the American frontier was gone. At least the more vivid examples of it, perhaps, but by then Lena’s character was cast and she stood as one of its exemplars for the rest of her life. Lena’s story is also the story of her era, particularly of the time in which her character-formation took place and in which she most prospered -- roughly from the time of her first marriage in 1877 to the end of her third marriage with the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. It was later dubbed “The Gilded Age” by Mark Twain, a time when extraordinary wealth became concentrated in the hands of a very small elite whose mission seemed to be simply to flaunt its privileges. It was a time when industrial output in the United States surged ahead of that of all other countries, when soaring American wages attracted millions of European immigrants, when capital came to be controlled by the so-called “Robber Barons.”