Businessman Spencer Penrose ~ Julie Lence

 

Spencer Penrose
courtesy of Wikipedia

One of the most notable buildings in Colorado Springs is the Broadmoor Hotel, a 5 Star resort that sits below Pikes Peak. Complete with its own pond and golf course, the hotel has hosted major golf tournaments as well as local banquets thanks to its founder, Spencer Penrose. The 5^th of seven sons, Penrose was born November 2, 1865 in Philadelphia. His father, Richard Alexander Fullerton Penrose was a doctor and founded Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. His mother, Sarah Hannah Boies, favored the simple life. Spencer and his siblings attended Harvard, but unlike his brothers who graduated with high honors, Spencer graduated at the bottom of his class. He didn’t have the academic drive to become doctors or lawyers that brothers did. Rather, the west and frontier life beckoned him and after graduating, he made his way to Las Cruces, New Mexico where he opened several business and sold them for just enough to cut his losses and move on to something else. In 1892, his brother, Richard and childhood friend, Charles L. Tutt (who was a real estate developer in Colorado Springs), informed him of a potential gold rush in Cripple Creek, Colorado. Penrose made his way to Colorado, where Tutt loaned him the money to buy a ½ stake in Tutt’s Cripple Creek real estate business, to include the Cash on Delivery Mine. The mine was one of the most successful in Cripple Creek, thus solidifying Penrose and Tutt’s partnership that took them to a new business of ore processing in Old Colorado City.     

 

courtesy Colorado Springs 
Gazette

To become successful in ore processing, Penrose and Tutt sold their Cash on Delivery Mine, formed a new company, Colorado-Philadelphia Reduction Company, and brought in partner Charles Mather MacNeill. MacNeill was considered an expert in ore processing and in 1899, the three met with success; their plant was treating over 3 million worth of ore from Cripple Creek annually. The trio’s partnership continued (and enabled them to create a mining, milling, and real estate empire) and took them to Bingham Canyon, Utah where they followed the advice of Daniel C. Jackling regarding success in mining copper deposit. A survey of the canyon’s ore deposit revealed the deposit contained 2 percent of copper that could efficiently be extracted from the ore. Penrose formed the Utah Copper Company in 1903 and worked with a new team to design a mill to extract the copper at a rate that was considered extremely fast, but the gamble paid off and Penrose and his team mined and milled more copper than imaginable. His success in Utah led him to invest in copper mining in Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada.

 

Julie Penrose
El Pomar Foundation

Having made a sizeable fortune in the mining industry, Penrose returned to Colorado Springs. It was here that he met widow Julie Villiers McMillan. The two became friends and later married April 1906 in London, England, despite Penrose claiming he would always remain a bachelor. Spencer and Julie honeymooned throughout Europe. Their stay in grand hotels inspired Spencer to build his own in Colorado Springs. Before that occurred, Spencer and Julie bought and renovated a home near a close friend, to include adding two stories, marble tiles, carved wood panels and crystal chandeliers, and hiring the Olmsted Brothers to design the grounds around the home. (Today, the home is known as the Penrose House, is on the National Register of Historic Places and free for conferences and other such gatherings.)           

 

Broadmoor Hotel
Colorado Artifctual

Penrose again partnered with Tutt and the two came up with a plan to build a road to the top of Pikes Peak in an effort to promote tourism. The road cost $283,000 and was completed in August of 1916. That same year Penrose organized the first car race to the top of the peak. (The Broadmoor Pike’s Peak International Hill Climb still runs today, on the last Sunday in June, and competitors are by invitation only). While working on the road to the top of the peak, Penrose also wanted to build his hotel, or rather, purchase the Antler’s Hotel from Colorado Springs founder William Jackson Palmer and rebuild it. But Palmer wouldn’t sell and Penrose ended up buying a site outside city boundaries for $90,000. He hired several architects to design the hotel of his dreams, and after careful consideration, went on to choose a design from the Warren and Wetmore Firm, who are known for their work on Grand Central terminal in New York City. Ground was broken in April 1917 and in June 1918, the Broadmoor hosted its opening ceremony.      

Will Rogers Shrine
Pinterest

 The Broadmoor hotel wasn’t Spencer’s only claim to fame for Colorado Springs. He and Julie were avid supporters to several civic events, including the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, the Will Rogers Shrine and the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, not to mention the Glockner-Penrose Hospital, which was the 1^st hospital in Colorado Springs and is now known as Penrose-St. Francis Health Services. Spencer and Julie also founded the El Pomar Foundation to promote the current and future well-being of the people of Colorado. The organization is still in existence today, supporting the Penrose-St. Francis Health Services and operating The Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun and the Penrose Heritage Museum. Spencer Penrose passed two years after founding the El Pomar Foundation. Julie served as president of the organization until her passing in 1956. Both are entombed at the Will Rogers Shrine of the sun. Spencer was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners and the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in 2001.     

Penrose House
El Pomar Foundation 

Bingham Canyon Copper Pit
SAH Archipedia

  

  

KEEPING PROSPERITY ALIVE By Kathleen Lawless @kathleenlawless

Mining has always been a dangerous occupation, but for Western Pioneers life presented so many dangers that one more hardly seemed relevant if it meant prosperity.  Gold and silver lured prospectors West, after which they discovered the value of copper, lead and zinc.  Boom towns flourished and fell as the mines prospered or petered out.

Trying to prevent such an occurrence and foster the longevity and prosperity of Bullet is top-of-mind for my hero Brody, the senior Mason brother in the series Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.  Unfortunately, Brody made a death bed promise to his dying uncle to keep the presence of copper on their ranch a secret.  But some things, like valuable minerals, can only stay buried for so long.  Especially as the demand for copper grew in the late 19^th century with advancements in the electrical and telecommunication age.

This is how I picture the crew of miners who arrive in Bullet to work the mine.

For a limited few days, you can download BRODY'S BRIDE for Free from Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07SRHCQK8

 

Meanwhile, I am super excited for everyone to meet Shane and Lacey from the Proxy Brides series.  A BRIDE FOR SHANE is brand new today.

Tuesday Teaser: 

“I’m not afraid of dying,” Shane told Jones, the smartly-dressed lawyer who had been a frequent visitor to his jail cell lately. 

   “Only a foolish man would die for something he didn’t do,” Jones said.  “And I don’t consider you a foolish man.”

  “Just unlucky,” Shane muttered.

  “Whoever stole those horses deserves to be the one staring down the hangman’s noose, not you.  The true thief will keep right on thieving, and get away with it because you took the fall.”

  “I don’t need to be rehabilitated,” Shane said stubbornly.  “I’ve got no truck with a bunch of stuffy church ladies going all preachy on me and minding my business.”

  “Taking on a wife will help prove to society that you’ve reformed,” the lawyer said.

  Shane half-snorted, half-laughed.  “Who’d marry me?”

  “Apparently, Lacey Collins has agreed to that honor,” Jones said drily.

  Shane straightened.  “Lacey Collins!  Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

  “So, you agree?”

  “Heck, no.”  He tamped down the image of Lacey that drifted into the recesses of his memory.  A cascade of wavy dark auburn hair and a temper to match.  Beautiful, willful, and used to getting what she wanted.  As his best friend’s twin sister, Lacey was out of his league and completely off limits!

  “She’s agreed to save your sorry hide, allowing me time to find the real perpetrator and get you pardoned,” Jones continued.  “As long as the union isn’t consummated, it can be annulled later.”  The man gave him a closer look.  “Judging by your reaction, that doesn’t seem like it should be an issue.”

  Shane eyed him straight back.  Clearly, the lawyer had never met Lacey. 

Claim your copy here.   https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08WRNS4P7

 

If you love Mail Order Bride stories, you won’t want to miss A BRIDE FOR RILEY on May 28^th, one of the Mistaken Identity Brides Series.  Notice how plain my heroine looks, on her way to become a nun.    

She was headed for the convent.  How did she wind up married instead?

You can pre-order Riley here  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08YXZY8CQ

And check out the entire series here  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08YYZSHYQ

Female Outlaw Pearl Hart By: Julie Lence

Pearl Hart was born in 1871 in Canada, with the birth name of Pearl Taylor. One of several children, and her parents of French descent, she was raised in a middle class home and sent to boarding school when she was 16. While at school, she met smooth talker Frank Hart, who filled her head with romantic tales of an exciting life in the wild west. In reality, he was nothing more than an abusive drunk, but Pearl fell in love with him and married him. The two left Canada and eventually landed in Chicago.

Women's Bldg at the Fair, Pinterest

Chicago was a changing point for Pearl. She attended the 1893 World’s Fair, featuring a Women’s Pavilion. A large array of females spoke on the Women’s Suffrage topic and Pearl took to heart that she could be more than just a wife, as her upbringing taught her. She also attended a Wild West show featuring Annie Oakley. Pearl was in awe of Annie’s shooting skills, and accompanied with the what she learned at the fair, she got up the gumption and left her abusive, unable-to-hold-a-job husband. She landed in Trinidad, Colorado, but soon found out she was pregnant and went back to Canada. After giving birth, she realized the lure of the west still beckoned and lit out for the states, leaving her son with her parents.

Pearl met up with her husband again and took him back on his promise that he was a changed man and capable of holding a job. For a while he held a maintained the positions of bartender and manager at a hotel, but all too soon, he and Pearl began partying, with Pearl learning to drink and smoke and use drugs. Problems arose between them again, and Frank left shortly after she gave birth to their daughter and joined Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, stating home life wasn’t for him. Pearl traveled back to Canada again and left her second child with her parents.

Courtesy of American Cowboy 

She found her way to Arizona and worked the mining camps as a cook, taking up drinking and opium use and not finding the romance and excitement of the west she longed for. Rumors suggested she tried to commit suicide several times, but was always saved by the miners, one of whom she formed a partnership with. Joe Boot was from German descent and he and Pearl began working their own claim when Pearl received a letter that her mother was gravely ill and needed money for the doctor’s bills. To acquire the money, Pearl and Joe thought to rob a train but decided to rob a stagecoach instead. Pearl cut her hair, dressed in Joe’s clothes, and together, they held up a stage. They came away with over $400 and the guard’s revolver and took off on their horses. But not knowing the land, they rode for two days then made camp and fell asleep, and woke to a posse surrounding them.

Courtesy of Pinterest

In Jail, Pearl became an instant celebrity. A lady bandit was rare. Remembering everything she learned from the Women’s Suffragette talks in Chicago, she began spouting she wouldn’t be tried in a court of law under rules men made and not women. Signing autographs and posing for pictures from her cell, the press loved her, and so did civilians. Ed Hogan was so smitten with her, he helped break her out of jail. She was found and brought back, and eventually went to trail. The jury found her innocent, especially after her defense lawyer brought into play she’d never been in trouble in the past and the only reason she robbed the stage was because of her mother’s health. The judge was furious with the decision and tried her on charges of stealing the guard’s gun and unlawfully carrying of a weapon. She was found guilty and sentenced to 5 years in Yuma. Joe received a 30 year sentence to Yuma.

Pearl became an even bigger celebrity and legend while in Yuma, earning the nickname Lady Bandit. The warden liked her and gave her a larger cell, and she again posed for pictures and signed autographs. She was released after serving 18 months and moved to Kansas City. Her sister wrote a production based on Pearl’s ‘Lady Bandit’ persona of which Pearl was to star in, but it never really caught on and Pearl disappeared from the public eye. A few years later, she was arrested for purchasing a stolen can of food. After that, she disappeared again and surfaced in 1924 at the Arizona courthouse she was tried in. She remarked to the attendant that nothing had changed since her last visit. He asked who she was and she replied, Pearl Hart, the lady bandit.

Rumors have abounded as to what happened to Pearl after this. Some say she died in Kansas City after operating a cigar shop. Others hint she lived in San Francisco until her death in 1952. A third suggests she married a rancher in Arizona and died under the name Pearl Bywater in 1956. She is wrongly credited with being the last person to rob a stage. The last stagecoach robbery was in 1916 in Jarbridge, Nevada. She is also not the only woman to ever rob a stage. Jane Kirkham was killed robbing a stage between Leadville and Buena Vista, Colorado in March 1879.

Such and interesting woman, and such a hard life Pearl led. 

Navigating a Silver Mine by Zina Abbott

The past two summers my travels have taken me to--and into--two historical mines. The Broken Boot Gold Mine is just outside Deadwood, South Dakota. The Lebanon Tunnel mine is in Silver Plume, Colorado, and can be part of your Georgetown Railroad train tour.

Since many of my Old West romances feature mining towns and miners, I found these tours very interesting and educational. A big part of my education included realizing that many of the words I used to describe mines are flat-out wrong.

This post is not going to be everything you ever wanted to know about mining terms. However, it will include a few terms to describe navigating within a mine, as well as a few structures you may find inside mines. The images I've used were taken by me, inside mines with poor lighting, during fast-paced tours involving 20-30 people. Please keep that in mind when judging photo quality.

First of all, most mines are not tunnels, although many of us think of them as that. Tunnels enter one side of a hill, cliff, or mountain and have at least one exit elsewhere. Also, you do not enter a mining shaft unless you are on top of the ground and entering the mine by going down, down, down or down at an angle. The two mines I toured had horizontal entrances. So I entered by what is called an ADIT.

Here is some basic terminology:

Adit – a horizontal opening from the surface into a mine, usually into a mine drift.

Original adit to the Broken Boot Mine

Shaft – a vertical opening from the surface into a mine, tunnel or drift. 

Drift – Similar to a tunnel in appearance, a drift goes only partway through a solid surface, but has no outlet.

Drift in Lebanon Mine

Raise – A vertical or inclined passageway driven between levels of a mine. They are used as manways, ventilation passages, for support lines such as pipes and electrical lines, for hauling ore from a lower level to another for removal from the mine, and as ore dumps for transporting ore to lower levels.

Winch with lines down a raise to bring up ore from lower level of mine.

Back – ceiling of a tunnel or drift.

 

Miner on top has hand on drift back and chalk marker on a rib of drift.

Rib – wall of a tunnel or drift.

Working face – a wall of rock in which miners will set charges to break it into small pieces, the working surface.

Miners in a drift preparing drill holes on working face of mine.

Stope – a large, underground room from which ore is removed. They are formed when miners drill numerous holes in the working face, then fill them with explosives which they then detonate. Said blasts breaks up the working face into pieces small enough to be loaded into mining cars and taken out of the mine. Often the area between two levels of the mine and sometimes accessed through a raise.

Crib/Crib Sets – in hard rock mining, cribs are the heavy wood supports that protect and support the drift.

Cap – top timber of the crib set.

Post – side pieces of a crib set that provide vertical support for the cap.

Posts - no caps or stringers in this section of the mine.

Stringer – connecting pieces that join the crib sets.

 

Stringers

Square-set Timbers – massive notched beams designed to form an interlocking series of cubes.

Square-sets – cubes formed by square-set timbers

Back-filling –partially filling open stopes that are no longer actively mined with waste rock taken from other areas of the mine. This was done for safety as well as disposal of waste rock.

Test Pocket - Removing rock from the working face far enough to see if there is any sign of ore. 

Test pocket

Slag - waste rock.

Slag

Silver Ore - tends to be black in appearance in its raw state.

 

Examples of silver embedded in rock.

I have written seven books for the multi-author series, Sweethearts of Jubilee Springs. Jubilee Springs is a silver mining town set in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. My most recent book in the series, Two Sisters and the Christmas Groom, is currently available. Please CLICK HERE.

My eighth Sweethearts of Jubilee Springs book, and my next book to be released, Nathan's Nurse, is the first book in which I wrote a scene that took place inside the Prosperity Mine. I went out of my way to be sure the descriptions I used were understandable to those readers who, like I was, are not overly familiar with mining terms. I even asked some authors in my Gold Rush Writers group to give suggestions, which I followed. Still, I hope you found these mining terms above helpful. You may want to refer to them again when this book is published. 

Nathan's Nurse is currently on pre-order and is schedule for release on December 27, 2019. You may access the book description and purchase link by CLICKING HERE.

Sources:

Broken Boot Gold Mine in Deadwood, South Dakota

Lebanon Tunnel Mine in Silver Plume, Colorado

Quartzsite-La Posa Mining History

Quartzsite lies on the western portion of the La Posa Plain along Tyson Wash. The Dome Rock Mountains overlook the town on the west with Granite Mountain on the southwest edge of the town and Oldman Mountain on the northwest. The Plomosa lie across the La Posa Plain to the east.

The town has a hot desert climate with mild to warm winters from November to March and hot to extreme summers for the remainder of the year. In the middle of summer, Quartzsite is one of the hottest places in the United States.

Quartzsite was originally known as Fort Tyson. Fort Tyson was a privately owned fort built in 1856 by Charles Tyson to protect the local miners and a water supply from the raids of the Yavapai (Mohave-Apache), a Native-American tribe. They resented the arrival of the Anglo-European settlers on their land and raided the early settlements. The water supply in the area became the target of the Yavapai tribe.

In the early years of the American gold rush, pan handlers began to arrive in the La Paz valley of Arizona searching for the precious metal. Many of the early pioneers and miners who settled the area arrived from California and other places in the United States and aboard. Gold deposits were discovered in the desert mountains of Plomosa and Dome Rock in the area and a boom in the mining industry followed.

Plomosa Mountains at sunrise to the east of Quartzsite

The famous placers that surround the town of Quartzsite are known to have been successfully worked by individual prospectors since the 1860's and it continues to this day. Gold placers are found in the Dome Rock Mtns west of Quartzsite, in the Plomosa Mtns east of Quartzsite and scattered on the La Posa Plain which lies in between the two ranges. Both mountain ranges are highly mineralized and contain numerous lode mines bearing many different types of valuable ore.

Dome Rock Mountains to the west of Quartzsite

When known as Fort Tyson or Tyson’s Well, the community served as a stage stop for those traveling from Prescott, Arizona’s state capital at the time, and Riverside, California. The coming of the railroad affected the commercial aspect of the area. The town fell under a complete state of abandonment when the stage lines stopped running in the area. 

Abandoned mine near Quartzsite

However, there was a minor mining boom in 1897, which revitalized the town. That year the town was officially named Quartzsite and Tyson owned three stores, two saloons and a post office. Tyson’s Well stage station continued to provide rest and refreshment to travelers and freight drivers. However, the mining boom faded by 1900 and the town was once more abandoned and left with only 20 residents.

Mining is active, but dwindling in the region, mostly due to the scarcity of water. Instead, it has become a haven for "snowbirds" who live in their recreational vehicles, usually "dry camping," for months at a time during the winter.

Sources

Wikipedia

http://minerdiggins.com/qzh.html

http://hitchitch.com/qz.html

My Independence Day 1881 – Zina Abbott’s Sweethearts of Jubilee Springs is available both as an ebook and in print on Amazon. If you have a Kindle Unlimited account and have not yet read all three of my first three books, this book containing three novellas will count as one book on your KU queue. You may find the book description and purchase link by CLICKING HERE.

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