Queen had been born Mary Lincoln Mellen in Prestonburg, Kentucky, on the 26th day of March 1850. When she was only five years old, her mother Isabelle died of heart failure. Queen and her two brothers were principally raised by her grandmother, Charlotte Clarke (who is said to have bestowed on her the nickname 'Queen') and by her father William, who soon married her maternal Aunt Ellen some twenty-two years his junior. Ellen bore William seven more children.
Queen grew up in southern Ohio, where - like her mother before her - she seems to have attended the Cincinnati Institute for Young Ladies. There she learned to write poetry, paint, play the piano, and sing in a lovely, mezzo-soprano voice.
During the Civil War, while Queen and her grandmother made bandages for wounded Union soldiers, her father worked for the Secretary of the Treasury, handling the confiscated cotton trade. When agents under him succumbed to bribery, William Proctor Mellen was libeled and slandered, his honesty questioned. Soon after, he resigned from his government post and moved his growing family to Flushing, New York, where he took up private practice as a lawyer. It was while on a business trip to St. Louis that he introduced his eldest daughter to his future business partner and son-in-law, William Jackson Palmer.
William Palmer had been born on the 17th of September 1836 to Quaker parents at Kinsale Farm, Kent County, Delaware. His family moved to Philadelphia when he was five. There he was educated in Quaker grammar schools and attended a boys' high school. By the age of seventeen, he was working in the engineering corps of the Hempfield Railroad, and helping his father - a schoolmaster turned tailor - support the family. Two years later, the young Palmer was traveling through Europe, studying the newest ideas in railroads, including the burning of coal instead of wood for fuel. On his return to the U.S., he was hired by J. Edgar Thompson, President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, as a private secretary to experiment with the use of coal. By 1861, his Pennsylvania engines were chugging along at thirty miles an hour, more than twice their previous speed.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, William Palmer agonized long and hard over joining Lincoln's volunteers. At length, an "inner light" led him to take up arms. When he announced his intention to his little Quaker mother Matilda, she is said to have replied: "If thee must fight, fight well." Shortly after, he organized his first cavalry unit, and was read out of the Quaker Church. Before the war was over, he had become in turn a prisoner of war, a cavalry hero and Medal of Honor recipient, and one of the youngest Brigadier Generals in the Union Army.
Before he met Queen, William Palmer seems to have had little time or interest in romantic involvements. Not that he was shy around women. On the contrary his later letters reveal a courteous attention to female companions and an eye for a beautiful face. But until he finally met the one woman who possessed the qualities he most admired - originality, sincerity, and spirit - Palmer was simply too busy for romance. In a letter to the friend of his youth, Isaac Clothier, he had once suggested: "When you write, do not forget to mention the latest idol that you worship, the last daughter of Eve in whom your soul has seen written perfection." Clothier had replied: "When you write, do not forget to mention the latest idol that you worship, the latest locomotive in which your soul has seen written perfection."
It was an insight that Queen would soon come to realize for herself. By the time the train on which they met reached Cincinnati, she had the young General head over heels in love with her. Pressing railroad business, however kept him from visiting her as often as he might have wished. Instead, he wrote her several short, stiff letters - full of insignificant daily details, of introspection, and of sermons he had recently heard. Queen herself seems to have been somewhat in awe of the great man, continually addressing him as "General." Finally, he felt compelled to write her:
St. Louis April 16, 1869
"I note that you persist in calling me by the rank I had before I was promoted to the noble grade of American citizen...General indeed."
When the General visited New York City in late May of 1869, business forced him to break a date with Queen. She sent him a teasing letter of protest:
to General W.J. Palmer
No.2 Astor House
New York, N.Y.
"My dear Will (am I good?)
"You may imagine my disappointment on the receipt of your note Saturday - still I suppose I may as well get used to these sudden moves of yours and accept my fate with mild indignation - I had anticipated such a pleasant Sunday. However - I know it was right for you to go - and where duty interferes with pleasure, pleasure must always give way and I shall try to make it easy, instead of difficult as I have done on two or three occasions where you move so strong that I am ashamed of my weakness...
"(I) hope to see you sometime before the Christmas holidays - if the railroads and tunnels can share you! But I console myself with the thought that you will not suffer as much as I will, for you have your wife with you. You can't be very sad at the thought of your forsaken sweetheart, when your beloved 'wife' is with you; I suppose she has hardly left your arms since you left me! - How pleasant it must be to enjoy her society without any Queen to interfere with her complete monopoly of you - Street thing! let us fervently hope she will never 'wear out' that her love will always be as warm as it has been hitherto... Three cheers for such a faithful 'wife.'
Love... 'Queen'"
The General hastened to re-assure his Queen that she would always remain the one true love of his life.
August 7, 1869
"Are the Roads and tunnels your 'Rivals?' All I can say, my Sweetheart, is if they are, they had better give up the race and contest once for all - for they will not have Even the ghost of a chance in the struggle. Excuse My grammar when I say you are unrivalled."
Queen and her General became engaged just a few weeks after their first meeting. Marriage itself would have to wait until completion of the Kansas Pacific line all the way to Denver. In the meantime, General Palmer returned west to oversee the thousands of details involved in the laying of rails. Nearly every day - whether in the field, in his office at Fort Sheridan, or traveling by horseback, stage or train - he managed to dash off a few lines to the girl left behind in Flushing, New York. One of these letters was addressed "To The Queen of Roses," another "To The Queen of Hearts."
"My dear Queen
"I thought of you and wondered what you were doing what you were thinking of - when we should get married. Where we should live - whether we should be poor or rich - whether it made the least difference...."
In his letters to Queen, the General drew aside the curtain that had so long shrouded his innermost resolves, doubts and aspirations. He let down his reserve, and allowed his deeply romantic nature to take over. Queen, on the other hand, seems to have had a more difficult time expressing her true feelings. Finally, the General felt compelled to encourage her.
Chicago June 11, 1869
"Do not hesitate, my Darling, to tell me how much you love me. You cannot spoil me in that way. You would not fear to if you knew what an inspiration it is to me - and not only an inspiration, but a shield."
As the Kansas Pacific rails inched ever closer to Denver, the General's thoughts began to turn to future enterprises. In a long letter to Queen he laid out his dream:
"January 17, 1870 - On the Kansas Pacific Road - Salina.
"I had a dream last evening while sitting in the gleaming at the car window. I mean a wide-awake dream. Shall I tell it to you? I thought how fine it would be to have a little railroad a few hundred miles in length, all under one's own control...In this ideal railroad all my friends should be interested, the most fitting men should be chosen for the different positions, and all would work heartedly and unitedly towards the common end...."
Queen's letter of response has been lost, as have most of the letters she wrote the General (misplaced perhaps in his many travels), but she seems to have encouraged him, as indeed she would in his many future enterprises. Two weeks later he wrote: "You do not know how glad I was to find that you believe in and sympathize with my 'dream at the car window.' We will talk it over fully and have the finest sort of time when you come out, working it up in detail, but your letter has almost determined me."
Queen's trip west was scheduled for April 1870. In the three months before she arrived, the General hoped to find somewhere along the Front Range what he had called "some charming spot which might be made a future home." He finally found such a spot near the base of Pikes Peak, in the valley known early on as Monument Park, today as Woodman Valley. The General renamed the place Bijou, and wrote to Queen of how he would build a castle "on top of the bold pine-topped hills," with fountains and lakes and lovely drives, with a deer park and a buffalo range, and with plenty of space for the homes of their friends.
In February of 1870, Palmer's friend and business associate, ex-governor Hunt, had Bijou surveyed and secured for him. A month later, Hunt also purchased for him several thousand acres lying at the junction of Monument and Fountain Creeks. Monument Dells they first called it - today's Colorado Springs - and Hunt immediately built a log cabin to serve as townsite headquarters. The General described the site in a letter to Queen:
"American House, Denver. March 9, 1870
"It lies beautifully and is not far from the Soda Springs and the Garden of the Gods and every foot can be cultivated and the soil is very rich. Moreover it lies along the direct line of 'our railroad' and there will be a town built on it. It is a nice spot to put about one hundred families on. It has coal on it too, and most superb grass. Do you think you can look after this colony also? It will be about nine miles from our home, a nice horseback gallop of an hour until the railway is built and then it will be much nearer. You will have plenty to do will you not, in looking after all these colonies? I wonder which will be the busiest, you or I?"
In April of 1870, Queen brought a trainload of investors to the end of the line at Kit Carson. In the days that followed, she and the General managed to slip away from the group long enough to thoroughly inspect his proposed homesite at Bijou. Queen was somewhat disappointed with the windswept valley, and suggested instead that they have their house built just to the north of the Garden of the Gods, in a canyon the General had recently purchased from Sheriff R. Scott Kelley and re-named Queen's Canyon. The General agreed with Queen's suggestion, and almost immediately the two of them began planning a three-story frame house, with a series of four hexagonal rooms clustered around a central chimney.
Queen returned to Long Island to make final arrangements for their wedding, and the General went back to work, congratulating himself that "he would have such a wife who," as he said, "was broad enough, earnest enough, wise and good and pure enough to think that a wild home amidst such scenery was preferable to a brown stone palace in a fashionable city."
The rails of the Kansas Pacific were finally connected on August 15, and the General immediately rushed to Denver aboard the first passenger train to telegraph his fiance so that she might be the "first one in the East to know it." In September, word that Queen had rejected the last "piteous appeal" of a former suitor brought forth a fresh outpouring of the General's love:
"September 10, 1870 - St. James Hotel, Kansas City.
"My Darling Queen. How I wish I had you sitting on my lap this long, lowering Sunday. What difference would the clouds make then, with my arm around your waist (to prevent you from losing your balance you know) might I presume to take a kiss just to show you how much I love you & how happy I am to see you again - My fresh, charming, loving, honest-hearted little Sweetheart.
Wm."
Thursday, December 22
"Rose in time for breakfast - After which Ettie Bell and I went to find a poor child to make warm - I found one boy (for whom I got a new strong pair of Boots and Stockings), and a little girl whom I made very comfortable with knit woolen jacket - tipper - stockings - gloves - etc. In the afternoon we went into the church to decorate it for Christmas....
Friday, December 23
"In the morning I received a telegram saying that Will would be home at eleven! As soon as he came we went shopping for Christmas presents and I returned very tired....
Sunday, December 25
"In the morning I found Kriss Krinkle had really been to my stocking - for I found a beautiful watch in it! - I told Will to thank Santa Claus for me - if he should ever meet him - which he promised to do - We were very late for breakfast...from which we went directly to the Abbey...the services were conducted after the very high church customs and I did not like it at all. We returned home about an hour before dinner and Will took a little nap while I arranged for Christmas...."
After a short stay with the Kingsleys - where Queen met and liked their tall, spinster daughter Rose - the Palmers returned to New York. Queen remained there, while the General rushed west with the newly-raised money to speed the construction of the Denver & Rio Grande.
Throughout the spring and early summer of 1871, the General kept Queen informed of the latest developments in Colorado. On June 27, he wrote: "General Cameron and myself slept in our cabin in Glen Eyrie last night...(He) began suggesting some names...but I stopped him by saying that you were going to name everything in the Glen." On July 7, he sent Queen the final plan and dimensions for their new home, along with a list of questions from the builder, Mr. Whipple, about such things as shutters, grates and paints. Two days later, he sent her the plan and street names for his new town of Colorado Springs.
The intention was that Queen and her family would remain in Flushing until October, until after the General and his engineers had mapped out a railroad route into New Mexico, but the impatient Queen could not wait. Leaving the Mellens to follow later, she took the train west, arriving in Colorado on July 31, 1871, the very day when the first stake was being driven in the townsite of Colorado Springs. That same day, the General was scrambling with his mule through the southern mountains. He did not return to Glen Eyrie until early October. Three weeks later, the first of his baby engines puffed into Colorado Springs.
Not much would be known of Queen and the General's early married life together were it not for the fortuitous arrival of their friend from England, Rose Kingsley. Rose had come to Colorado Springs to visit her brother Maurice, who had been appointed Assistant Treasurer of the Town Company. Maurice had been living at the townsite in a tent; to accomodate his sister he added a 12 by 16 foot shanty. The shanty served as Rose's bedroom, the tent as a sitting room by day and Maurice's bedroom by night. During her stay, Rose wrote several long letters, which were later published in book form:
South by West, by Rose Kingsley, Colorado Springs, November 1, 1871.
"Here I am located at last, and the best thing I can do is to describe our arrival here...We pulled up at a log cabin by the side of the track, and from the door-way came a voice saying, 'Dinner's on the table.' ...we were doing ample justice to oyster soup and roast antelope, when in came General and Mrs. Palmer. It was pleasant to find well-known faces among so many new ones.
"November 13. Mrs. Palmer has undertaken to begin a school for the colonists' children, and opened it this morning. I went up before she arrived, and found seven children all in great excitement about their teacher. The school is some way up the town side, a pretty three-roomed house which Mrs. Palmer has rented till a regular school-house can be built.
"November 23 ...I was left alone again, and went over to the school to see Mrs. Palmer. She is going on most perseveringly with her self-imposed occupation. I heard the children's spelling match, and the length of the words and the correctness of the spelling quite alarmed me."
Rose herself got a taste of teaching a short time later, when the Palmers were unavoidably detained in Denver. The English schoolmarm found young America a good deal too strong for her. She was delighted, as she said, when twelve o'clock came and she could send "her young tormentors home with a tremendous scolding." Enrollment at the school on the corner of Cascade and Bijou soon reached 20 children. Queen remained as their teacher until the first of the year, when Rachel Liller (wife of the newspaper editor) took over and moved classes to the second floor of the Out West building. Queen's parting gift to the schoolchildren was the town's first Christmas tree.
Just before Christmas, the Mellen family moved out from Flushing, New York. Since the great house at Glen Eyrie was not quite finished, 58-year-old William, his 35-year-old wife Ellen, and their six boisterous children were put up at the drafty Temporary Inn in Manitou. Queen had the General set up their own tents nearby. When Rose Kingsley moved over in early January, she and Queen began to explore the beauties of Ute Pass. A friend later described Queen on these and other mountain climbing excursions:
Heritage of Years, by Frances M. Wolcott
"Finding unknown heights and following streams to their sources, was to make excursions of rare delight. Queen Palmer, climbing stock in hand, rebellious curly hair flying, cheeks aglow, moving as on winged feet, was the spirit incarnate of inaccessible heights."
When not climbing the foothills, Rose and Queen found time to improve the social life of the little town of Colorado Springs. Together, they arranged for the first Episcopal Church service and for a concert to raise funds for the reading club. Both events were held on the second floor of Foote's Hall. At the concert, Queen sang an aria from one of Verdi's operas as well as a couple of popular ballads. She is said to have received rapturous applause.
By early February, the house at Glen Eyrie was nearing completion, so the Palmers, Rose Kingsley and the Mellen family moved in. The second floor was set aside for the Mellens, with a room for the boys and another for the girls, a large school room and space for a live-in teacher.
By early March of 1872, all was in readiness for the trip. Leaving the Mellens to look after Glen Eyrie, the General, Queen and Rose Kingsley left by train to meet the U.S. Minister to Mexico, General Rosecrans, at San Francisco. There they took the ship Alaska south along the coast to Manzanillo. Aboard ship, Palmer taught the two ladies how to handle a gun. A stranger - observing this - offered his assistance. He turned out to be Porfirio Diaz, who was returning to Mexico to start a revolution. His friendship may have saved their lives on the road from the coast to Mexico City. Several times their coach was threatened by the local ladrones. On one occasion, the rebel Pronunciados confiscated their weapons, all except for the pistols Queen and Rose had hidden beneath their dresses. The trip was especially hard on Queen, who was pregnant at the time and suffering from morning sickness.
After more than a month on the road, the party reached Mexico City, where the General left the ladies at the Hotel Iturbides, while he rode north with his engineers to survey the route of his proposed railroad. In his absence, Queen and Rose learned the local customs, went sightseeing with an old German priest (the past confessor to Emperor Maximilian), and made friends among government officials and the staff of foreign embassies. Queen would later confide that the three months she spent in Mexico were among the happiest of her life.
Hotel Guillon, Mexico. January 23, 1873
"My Darling Pet
"What would I not have done to have averted your suffering. If I had remained at home I could have looked after you and prevented you from overexerting yourself & becoming an invalid. (Yesterday I sent a telegram, asking you to come to Mexico) which I trust will result in my folding you in my arms within a fortnight.
"Then I will not let my dear child tire herself & and get sad & restless & uneasy, but I will cheer her up & make her gay & bright & well once again - in this pleasant sunshine & among these beautiful flowers. And our little one will thrive & grow & smile more winningly than ever."
Fearful of the effect a mid-winter's voyage might have on her own and her newborn's health, Queen decided to await the General's return at the home of friends in Philadelphia. On his way north, the General wrote Queen a long letter of 13 pages, describing his frustrations in Mexico. As his ship neared the Atlantic coast, he paced the deck, impatient to see the woman whose love he called his "rock of ages."
The General's reunion with his Queen was all too brief. After only a few weeks together, business again forced him to rush off - first to Colorado where the rails of the Denver & Rio Grande were stretching towards Pueblo, then once again south of the border on a third fruitless mission to Mexico. On his return in mid-June of 1873, the General and Queen were finally able to settle down to what he hoped would be their "Constant honeymoon" at Glen Eyrie. They brought west with them his little Quaker mother Matilda as well as Queen's grandmother Charlotte Clarke. Mrs. Clarke barely survived the trip. She died just a few weeks later, and was buried under a granite stone in the Glen.
Whenever possible, the General took Queen along on his business trips. In February of 1875, he needed to raise additional capital for the Denver & Rio Grande in Europe, so he and Queen set off together for Paris. There Queen began to write a second diary:
Paris, France February 3, 1875
"Four years ago we crossed the ocean when we began a journal as so many people do - thinking that we would keep it up as long as we travelled! We have been travelling nearly constantly since, and the journal so bravely begun came long ago to an untimely and abrupt end!
"Being again in a foreign country - no less interesting than England - in same respects - I begin again alone - not so boldly, - and not with the least faith in my perseverance - a chronicle of the facts and fancies which occur to me as we go.
"I have, to tell the truth, no plan in this my beginning - perhaps I will close the book in disgust, when I find how impossible it is for me to describe satisfactorily my impressions...."
That entry was Queen's first and last. Her thoughts of Paris were not recorded, and the General's mission was not successful.
Back in Colorado, trouble was brewing with the Santa Fe Railroad. By 1877, a mining boom had hit the Leadville area, and both the Santa Fe and the Denver & Rio Grande wanted to build a railroad there through the Royal Gorge. A dramatic railroad war ensued. Men were armed and placed in forts in the Gorge. There were threats on the General's life and on the lives of his family. The General moved the Mellens back to the great house, and had a schoolhouse built so the children could go to school within the safety of the Glen. He also had a tunnel dug from the house to the stable so the horses could be reached in case of emergency. Each morning, his servant Old George would tuck an extra pistol into the General's saddlebag, and each evening the family would watch by the windows for his safe return from town.
The Royal Gorge issue was eventually settled in the General's favor by the Supreme Court of the United States, and the rails of the Denver & Rio Grande began to stretch towards Leadville. In July of 1880, Queen decided to see the new city for herself, so she stuffed a pistol in her picnic basket and, with her English friend Alma Stretell, set out for the mountains. On their return home from Leadville, the 30-year-old Queen suffered a heart attack. Though it alarmed and distressed her and the General, the true seriousness of the attack was not immediately apparent.
Queen was pregnant at the time and, later that same year, she gave birth to her second daughter. The baby remained nameless for several months. Finally, in March of 1881, the General sent a telegram from New York saying that he needed a name to insert in a property deed. Queen promptly wired back: "Dorothy is her name." On his return home, the happy General named a waterfall in Queen's Canyon in the baby's honor, calling it "Dorothy Falls."
In the fall of 1881, the great house in Glen Eyrie was scheduled for remodeling. The General took this opportunity to move the Mellens to England so that the three boys might attend Oxford. He also took Queen and the girls along. Queen was pregnant again and, on November 12, she gave birth to a third baby girl, whom she tentatively named "Marjory" while she searched through a book of girls' names for a better.
In January, the General was forced to return to New York on railroad business. Profits of the Denver & Rio Grande were down, and the Board of Directors were carrying out a campaign of criticism and complaint which would eventually lead to his resignation. While his boat lay off New York, the General's thoughts turned to the business at hand and to the family he had left behind in England.
January 2, 1882 On Steamer Arizona
My Darling Queenie
"I have taken it easy aboard Ship which Shows me dearly that all I require is rest from business. I shall plunge into the Maelstorm however tomorrow. My single purpose now is to rescue the various Enterprises from the gulf which seems to yawn for them and save my friends and the other investors from a final loss if possible. If I could only have a years rest first, I would devote the rest of my Active life to this, but the reverse has come before I could get into condition. Not a word of this however...because I must appear well & keep cool for the sake of all the interest.
"My little family is the oasis - the only green spot to which my mind can turn without distress & disappointment. The Gentle Elsie on her Pony - the Sagacious Eager little Dorothy. And the innocent sleeper in the cradle. And you my dear wife whom I have so often cruelly distressed & whose young affections I allowed to be Estranged because I was hard & cold & blind and stupid & wretchedly wrong altogether, and Reckless.
"What a heaven would life seem now, if with vigorous health, one had nothing to do but start without a penny to make a home for this beloved flock...."
(Childrens' schoolhouse in foreground)
1884 - Newport, Rhode Island.
1885 - Glen Eyrie, Co.
1886 - Dakota Hotel.
1886 - Morristown, New Jersey.
1887 - Home of Ellen Timp, London, England.
1887 - Ightham Mote, England.
Queen and her three girls moved to the manor house of Ightham Mote in April of 1887. They were to stay there for three years. Ightham Mote had been built in 1340. It was somewhat drafty, dark and forbidding, and had a mote around its damp foundations.
The Mote October 6, 1890
"My Dear Will
"The children are all as happy at their work as possible. Miss Plumbler certainly has a rare gift for teaching - and lately has been unusually nice - in all ways. Elsie has never been so interested in her work - and as for the babies they dance with delight at the mere thought of going to school. Miss Plumbler is most judicious...and her system is very much on kindergarten principles. She never lets them sit more than a few minutes at a time - and varies their lesson with games and marching and jumping about. It is nor so much for what they learn that I have begun this; (rather) it is to put them into (good) habits - and to occupy their minds....
All send love
Lovingly, Queen"
"My darling - I will make an engagement with you for a 'cuddle' tomorrow morning from 7:10 to 7:20.
"Oct.30, 1888 - All of the Waverley habits - which my darling eldest daughter will find in her - at home - with sixteen times as much love as she had 16 years ago.
"Aug. 1, 1889 - Any beauty we have once felt is our's always - and nothing can take it from us, so long as we can think. This is an eternal Now- and is a joy forever. My own darling - you know why Mother says this on the 1st of August 1889 - Ightham Mote. Mommy
"Oct. 30 1892 - Welcome ever smiles and farewell goes out sighing. Motherling."
Queen's heart condition, meanwhile, continued to trouble her. Fearing that her time with the girls was drawing short, she began to counsel them through a series of endearing in-house letters. In 1886, she wrote a short note instructing them not only to be generous, but also to learn to accept the generosity of others. "Search for the truth," she wrote, be kind, be kind because kindness may always help out someone who is suffering. I am always with you, waiting for you. Mutterlain."
Queen instructed her daughter Elsie to read this note to her two younger sisters because, being the oldest, she alone knew how very tired her mother had been. In 1890, Queen addressed another letter to Elsie, saying she really had nothing to add to her first letter. She was feeling better, stronger, and was glad she had been given "four more years to spend with them."
"I must begin my day's account by saying that I am almost wild with delight!!! A new hunger is discovered in me - by myself! Which has been gradual - ever since I left Nice - it has reached its climax in this great beautiful Florence. -I do not mean to grow too entusiastic in these little notes of daily doings - but I really could not write a word of facts until I had said just this much - let me say it once more - I am almost wild with the joy of living and seeing and - in this air - Saturated with the beauty of past and present! Art has a new meaning to me...I write, become calm...but I wish-wish-wish I had my Elsie and some archetectural help."
After her return to England, the home at Ightham Mote was sold, and Queen and her daughters found it necessary to move - first to Blackdown in Sussex, then to London, then to little Oak Cottage in Frant, and finally to Losely Park.
There is no record that the General ever made a final assessment of their married life together; but it is clear from his many previous letters that Queen always remained the one true love of his life, and that - gentleman that he was - the General never once blamed her for any of the difficulties they might have encountered.
After the General's own death in 1909, Queen's ashes were buried next to him at Evergreen Cemetery in Colorado Springs. They lie there together still, under simple granite stones brought from the mountains.
2. William Jackson Palmer Collection, Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum.
3. Palmer Papers, Colorado State Historical Society.
4. Elsie Palmer Myers, 1909 Photography Book, formerly on loan to the Colorado Springs Pioneers Musem.
5. Rose Kingsley, South by West, (London: Isbister & Co., 1873).
6.Chase Mellon, Sketches of Pioneer Life and Settlement of the Great West, (New York, 1935).
7. John S. Fisher, A builder of the West, (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers Lt., 1939).
8. Frances M. Wolcott, Heritage of Years, (Denver, Sage, 1961).
9. Rhoda Wilcox Collection, Penrose Library, Colorado Springs.
10. Kerr's Scrapbooks, Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum.
11. Marshall Sprague, Newport in the Rockies, (Denver: Sage, 1961).
Palmer was thirty-two when he first met the love of his life. He was a slight, wiry man, standing just five foot eight inches tall, with a large, weather-beaten face, dominated by bushy eyebrows and a bristly moustache. His hands were bony and large, freckled, and a little awkward. Though at first meeting he often appeared somewhat reserved and stiff, there was a restless energy about him, an inner determination and strength of will, and a quiet, dry humor.
After the war, Palmer returned to the Pennsylvania Railroad. J. Edgar Thompson had a vested interest in the fledgling Kansas Pacific line and assigned William to the St. Louis office as secretary and treasurer. His years in the saddle, however, had made him too restless for a desk job. In 1867, Palmer asked to be put in charge of a survey to California along the 32nd and 35th parallels. On his return to St. Louis, he was given a choice of positions, either at New York in charge of the financial operations of the Kansas Pacific, or out west as manager of construction. He chose the west.
April 11, 1869 On RR near Coyote, after a 14-mile horseback ride inspecting the rails near Sheridan.
Queen and her General were married on November 7, 1870, in Flushing, New York. Two days later, the newlyweds left for a three-month stay in England. The trip was as much a business venture as a honeymoon, with the General and his associate Dr. Bell almost constantly engaged in money-raising efforts on behalf of the newly-formed North and South Railroad, later known as the D. & R.G. Queen was often left to her own devices, but she quickly made friends with the Bells, the Gourards, the Wards, and the Kingsleys, filling her days with shopping and visits to art galleries, her nights with singing, dancing, the opera, and a card game called Besique. She also kept a daily diary of her comings and goings:
"November 2 - Drove up to Glen Eyrie with Mrs. Palmer and General Palmer and Maurice followed us up to tea...The Palmers are building a most charming large house; but till it is finished they live in a sort of picnic way, in rooms 10x12, partitioned off from the loft over the stable! There was just room for us all four to sit at tea, and we had great fun. Here were four cups, but no saucers; and we had borrowed two forks from the restaurant, so that we each had one. Their colored servant had cooked some excellent venison and flapjacks for us, and we had Californian honey, blackberry preserve, first-rate coffee, and baked potatoes.
In between furnishing the house and keeping out of the way of the painters, Queen and Rose occupied themselves sewing cotton dresses, learning Spanish, and reading up on Mexico for their trip south of the border. Some six months previous, the General had asked Queen to accompany him to the Mexican Republic, promising "to fix her up in a very comfortable outfit" if she would go.
On their return to the U.S., the party traveled up the east coast to New York City. There, Rose Kingsley left for England, the General rushed off to Colorado, and the pregnant Queen settled in with friends to have her baby. A frail little girl was born to her on October 30, 1872. As with her later children, Queen left her baby nameless for several months, until finally deciding to call her "Elsie." Queen herself remained unwell, and this worried the General who had returned to Mexico to confer with Rosecrans.
It has often been said that on Queen's return to Glen Eyrie, she and her stepmother Ellen had a falling out. This might very well have been the case, although there is little evidence of it in any of the Palmer letters, except perhaps for a passage early on in their engagement, when the General had promised Queen that he would "always take her part" in any disagreement she might have with her stepmother. True to his word, the General moved the Mellen family out of the Glen, first to a hillside home in Manitou, later to a house on Cascade Avenue adjacent to the McAllisters. In November of 1873, William Mellen died, after having received from the General a promise to rear and care for the numerous Mellen children as his own.
The nine years that Queen spent at Glen Eyrie were anything but the tranquil honeymoon her husband had envisioned. The General was constantly called away on railroad business and, when at home, his time was often taken up by business associates, visiting friends, and of course the Mellen children, with whom he explored Queen's Canyon and to whom he supplied a menagerie of pets and ponies. On occasion, the Glen was invaded by parties of sightseers from Colorado Springs, who wandered about the lawns, peered in the windows, and even explored unembarrassed the hall and corridors of the 22-room mansion.
Queen's refuge from all these comings and goings was in some quiet corner of the Glen where she could settle down to read, or in her spacious study on the third floor, "where she gathered books, heard musicians and never permitted any but an invited friend to enter."
Besides hosting the General's dinner parties and looking after their daughter Elsie, Queen continued to be actively engaged in the area's social life. She supplied the vocal music for visiting Grace Greenwood, the nationally-reknowned poet who gave a recitation at Manitou House. Later, Queen served as a trustee for the Library Association.
In New York, the General managed to retain his position as President of the Denver & Rio Grande, at least for the time being. That accomplished, he made a fourth trip to Mexico, where he tracked the progress of his railroad line finally being built north from Mexico City and south from Laredo. On his way back to England he stopped off to bring his mother with him and, in the late spring of 1883, Queen and the girls returned with them to the remodeled house at Glen Eyrie.
Back in the rarefied air of Colorado, Queen began to experience chest pains and a general sleeplessness. These were attributed to a faulty valve in her heart, a condition similar to that which had killed her mother Isabelle some thirty years before. It soon became clear to Queen that she must return to sea level. She put off her departure for more than a year living quietly with her three Girls in the Glen; but finally, in the summer of 1884, she began a 10-year quest for health, which would make her virtually a wanderer for the rest of her life. There are few letters or diaries remaining from that trying period, but there is Elsie's 1909 Photography Book, recently on loan to the C.S. Pioneers Museum. Through its dated photographs, we can still trace the many wanderings of Queen and her girls:
Nevertheless, at the Mote Queen found the setting for which by nature she seemed most inclined: "The world of books and music and flowers, the company of people whose tastes were much like her own." To the Mote came her friends from London: Alma Strettell, Ellen Timp, the Jamesons, bringing with them the likes of Oscar Wilde, George Meredith and the painter John Singer Sargent. Sargent would later paint a portrait of Elsie called "Young Lady in White."
Once or twice a year, the General would come for extended visits, and with him came a touch of Colorado: stories of his endless travels, of horses and mountains, of railroad tunnels and hanging bridges. Elsie would later recall that his visits were eagerly awaited events, though his coming inevitably disorganized out of all knowing the quiet routine of their lives, what with his restless energy and with the financiers and businessmen of his acquaintance, who contrasted sharply with his wife's friends.
At Ightham Mote, Queen was finally able to provide a suitable teacher for her three girls. Their education had for some time been the one area in which Queen and her General were not in agreement. Queen seems to have preferred a strict regimen of study, while the General - remembering how he himself had been pushed on too early as a child - thought that they should be brought along "quietly and slowly," writing that the "nearer to little kittens children can actually be kept, the better." In one of her last letters to the General still preserved, Queen seems to have finally come around to his way of thinking:
At Ightham Mote, 16-year-old Elsie began writing in her first diary. The diary served as a means of bringing Elsie and her mother even closer together. In one passage, Elsie described "a most spiritual day with mother," in which they had spent the entire day talking. Queen - a warm woman, who passionately loved her children - often added a few notes of her own to her oldest daughter's diary:
In March of 1889, Queen joined a couple of friends on a trip to France and Italy. The trio left London on March 8 and journeyed to Paris, Marseilles and Nice before arriving in Italy eight days later. Queen was not in the best of health, needing to be carried up any flights of stairs in a specially-built chair. Italy, however. seemed to revive her. On reaching Florence on March 28, she felt as one re-born:
Losely Park was an Elizabethan Castle, originally the home of the More-Molyneux family. Queen and her girls stayed there for three years, until the U.S. financial panic of 1893 forced the General to ask her to move back into the cheaper dwelling of Oak Cottage. Elsie later remembered that when her mother came to tell her daughters of the intended move, she treated it as a thrilling and amusing surprise, as though the change from grandeur to simplicity was really an adventure.
It was at cottage at Frant that Queen's heart condition took a turn for the worse. She soon thought it necessary to separate herself from her daughters so that they might not witness her suffering. In one of the last pictures of her, with her friend Katie Dunham, Queen appeared tired and unwell.
Not long after writing a final letter of instruction to her daughters, Queen's weakened heart finally gave out. She died shortly after Christmas, on the 28th of December, 1894. She was just forty-four years old.
On learning of Queen's worsening condition, General Palmer had immediately set sail from America to be by her side. His ship, however arrived too late. Grief-stricken, he and his three daughters returned to Colorado, bringing with them Queen's ashes, which were placed on the fireplace mantle in the Tower Room at Glen Eyrie.
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1. Elsie Queen Nicholson Collection, Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum.