was a slim, fine-boned fifteen year old boy who, despite his age and
small frame, could drive an ore wagon because of his knack with horses
and excellent driving hands. He sometimes had trouble setting the brake
and, after we knew him better, he would get Harvey to go along and apply
his stocky strength. Link had been born in Blackhawk and lived there all
his life. He knew who I was from seeing me in Jake’s store and hearing
Harvey call me by one of my family nicknames—Baby, which was also the
one the miners in camp had spontaneously adopted.
“You’re too little to do heavy work like that,” Link said. “You better
let me give you a lift home.”
I felt the truth of what he had said in my bones. Suddenly, I was very
tired, a new feeling for me and not a sensation I liked. While Link
loaded my pick and shovel in with the ore, I climbed up on the high
front seat.
From that day, one calamity followed another. My only friend was Jake
and soon Harvey and I were quarreling about him, too. The year before in
March, when Harvey had been working night shift, Jake had wanted to take
me to the opening of the Opera House. The amateur players staged a gala
two nights, putting on a concert the first night and two plays, “School”
and “Cool as a Cucumber,” on the second. Special trains had been run
from Denver and the cream of society of the two most important towns in
Colorado, Denver and Central, had attended, their festive gowns being
reported in the _Rocky Mt. News_ and the _Central City Register_ the
next day. It had been a thrilling occasion.
But Harvey had been indignant when I had suggested that I might go with
Jake.
“No respectable married woman would think of doing a thing like that!”
he had said hotly.
So I had watched the event, longingly, standing on a boardwalk across
the street and yearning to be one of the gay throng, to be wearing a
beautiful evening dress or even better, to be one of the amateur
actresses from Central City playing on the stage. But I had been a good
wife and obeyed Harvey—I had not gone.
Now it was different and I was defiant. Harvey could not support me and
Jake had given us too many groceries and presents of merchandise not to
admit the friendship openly.
“I’d be dead—starved to death—if it wasn’t for Jake. He’s helped us out
over and over again when you didn’t have a dime. I won’t let you say
things against him!”
Harvey was surly but said nothing more and soon took his bad temper out
to dramatize in a saloon. But the next quarrel was the end. He
insinuated that my baby wasn’t his and I picked up a specimen of Fourth
of July ore that we kept on the table and threw it at him with all the
strength I could muster. The rock hit him on the neck, scratching him
badly, and, as he felt the injured spot and the trickle of blood, he
blurted out,
“Why, you common Irish hussy!”
He glared at me briefly, turned in awkward anger and stamped out the
door. I did not see him again for months. I heard later that he had
hitched a ride on a freight train out of camp.
When I told Jake what had happened, he said,
“Never mind, Baby, I’ll see you through—and what you need now is some
gayety to forget about your troubles. Let’s go to the Shoo-Fly tonight.”
The suggestion shocked me and I peered at my friend suspiciously but he
only shrugged his shoulders and asked laconically:
“What difference does it make?”
I could see his point. If I went to the Shoo-Fly who was to know or
care? My husband didn’t value me enough to stay and protect me and he
had been the first to unjustly impugn my good name.
The Shoo-Fly was Central’s one flashy variety hall. It was in a brick
building on Nevada St. (and still stands, beside a dignified residence
shaded by a fine tall spruce tree in its front yard). It housed a
reception room, bar, a dance hall, and a stage. Several private rooms
for gambling and bedrooms were toward the back. Its entrance was off the
street, up a long flight of wooden steps hung on the side of the
building. These steps led to the rear of the second floor and into the
reception room. There was also another entrance down from Pine Street,
darker and less conspicuous.
The whole lay-out emphasized discretion but was the crimson spot of the
town, dedicated to the flattery of weakness. Unattached men, of whom
there were a great many in the camp, liked to come to this favorite
rendezvous of sensational women. No nice, married lady would be seen
there. But, so far, had any matron of gentility extended me the
slightest kindness? If I met any in the streets they regarded me with a
distrustful air, and passed on. It was their men who wanted to meet me.
“All right!” I determined. “I’ll go.”
I was terribly depressed and perhaps Jake was right that I needed
cheering up. That night I put on my prettiest blue and pink foulard for
it brought out the unusual blue of my eyes and the soft, fresh tints of
my hair and cheeks. Together, we sallied forth.
When we turned off Main Street toward the Shoo-Fly stairs, I had one
moment of panic as if I were taking an inevitable step, a step from
which there would be no return, something like Caesar crossing the
Rubicon. But I laughed the moment away—I was twenty-four years old,
pretty and gay, and my friends said I had Irish wit. Surely life should
give me more than a drab boarding house and the charity of one Jewish
friend? I tossed my curls and stepped on.
Once inside, Jake ordered champagne. He enjoyed watching the dancing
girls in the variety show and indulging in a little gambling. Later he
brought several well-known men to join us at our table. It was fun to be
laughing and talking with several new acquaintances.
“So you’re Baby Doe!” one of the merry men with bold eyes reflected. “I
hear the manager of my mill tried to pick you up in the street one day,
and you snubbed him!” He laughed as though greatly amused.
“I am Mrs. Harvey Doe, if you please. My husband is out of town on
business.”
“Well, you’re Baby Doe to all the miners in camp! They all know you—your
beauty’s enough to advertise you, even if you didn’t spend so danged
much time walking all over the place. They’ve also told me how
unfriendly you are.”
“I’m not unfriendly. I’m delighted to meet people if they are properly
introduced—”
“What are you doing here then? This is no place for a nice girl.”
“I know it. But I’m so lonely that my good friend, Mr. Sandelowsky,
offered to watch out for me if I came.”
Baby Doe I was from that night on—and nearly every night I was at the
Shoo-Fly under Jake’s protection. It was lively and gay and I made lots
of friends among the men and girls who frequented the place. As I got to
know these sporting girls, I liked them much better than the girls I had
known in Oshkosh. They weren’t very well educated, but they had a great
zest for living. Their generosity was genuine—their courage tremendous.
None of the girls at home possessed such qualities. I really felt I
understood them and when they seemed to like me, I knew they really did.
That meant a great deal to a lonely girl.
“Why don’t you get rid of that mama’s-boy husband of yours? Why, with
your looks, you could get any man you wanted!” one of them said to me.
Most of the talk at the Shoo-Fly that summer and autumn was about the
sensational rise of silver and Leadville and Horace Tabor. It was like a
fairy tale. For years, placer miners at the head of the Arkansas River
had been irritated by peculiar black sand which was very heavy and could
not be separated from the gold easily. A decade passed without their
recognizing its true worth but during the ’70s several miners worked on
secret assays which proved the sand was eroding from carbonates of lead
and silver ore. Quietly they began to look for veins and by 1877, after
several mines had been located, the news was out.
A mad rush was on and many an odd fluke of luck followed. The veins did
not outcrop on the surface. This made it possible for a prospector to
start sinking a shaft almost anywhere and hit an ore body from a few
feet to three hundred and fifty feet beneath the surface. That fact
created some fantastic and astonishing fortunes.
Living in this locality for a number of years had been Horace Tabor, a
middle-aged storekeeper. He and his wife were New Englanders who had
come West in the first wild gold rush of ’59 and after failing to make
any money out of mining despite repeated attempts, had dismissed the
gold bug from their heads. They had settled down with their one son,
Maxcy, now grown, to a steady respectable middle-class life at Oro City,
three miles from the site of what was later to be Leadville.
But silver was to change all that. During July, 1877, Tabor recognized
the excitement in the air and moved his grocery stock and supplies from
Oro City to a fairly large log cabin in Leadville. By January, 1878,
about seventy cabins, shanties and tents made up the camp and during the
next month the inhabitants held a town election in which the
forty-seven-year-old Tabor was chosen mayor. During the next few months
the town grew and prospered and so did Tabor’s store profits.
One spring day, two German prospectors, August Rische and George Hook,
dropped into the grocery and asked Tabor if he would put up supplies for
them to search for a vein of carbonates. Tabor had grubstaked many a
miner to no avail but he was naturally generous. He probably expected no
better this time, but he made an outlay of some seventeen dollars in
return for an agreement that he was to have a third interest in any mine
they found. Off they went and located a claim on Fryer Hill which they
named the Little Pittsburgh.
They worked along steadily for some time and when their shaft was but
twenty-six feet deep, they broke through the layer of hard rock they had
been drilling into a body of soft, black, heavy ore. The next day, a
fine May morning, Tabor left the grocery store in charge of Augusta, his
efficient, managerial wife, and with pick and shovel wielded in
vigorous, high anticipation, helped his partners dig and hoist the first
wagon load of ore. The smelter bought it immediately for over $200!
By July nearly a hundred tons of ore were being hoisted and shipped each
week and the three partners had an income of about fifty thousand
dollars a month. Toward fall, Hook sold out to Tabor and Rische for
$98,000 and Rische later sold out his interest plus some adjoining
claims to Jerome B. Chaffee and David Moffat for over a quarter of a
million dollars. Tabor clung to his share and the talk now was how he
and his new partners had consolidated all their claims on Fryer Hill and
incorporated for twenty million dollars. The fabulous story of silver
and Leadville and Tabor—you heard it every night!
Everybody at the Shoo-Fly said Central was dying. Prof. N. P. Hill had
taken his family to Denver and moved his smelter from Blackhawk to Argo,
outside Denver. They quoted his opinion that no new strikes would be
made in the district although the established producers might maintain
their output for decades. In any case it would be cheaper hauling ore
downhill to the smelter than coal up. Other top families were deserting
the district. The Frank Halls, J. O. Raynolds and Eben Smiths had
already gone and it was said that the George Randolphs, Henry
Haningtons, Frank Youngs, Joseph Thatchers and Hal Sayres were
contemplating departure. This kind of conversation was very depressing
for me in addition to all my other troubles.
After that, things happened fast. I don’t know what would have become of
me if it hadn’t been for Jake.
My baby boy came July 13, 1879, and was still-born. It was Jake who paid
the bills and made all the arrangements. He was a marvelous friend. By
then he was talking about opening a store in Leadville, and he told me
he thought that was where I should go, too, that is, if I no longer
loved Harvey. Rich strikes were being made there every day.
“Looks to me like he’s deserted you. You have your own future to look
out for now. First, see if you like it over there. Then, if you do, you
can get a divorce for non-support and you’ll be free to build a new life
for yourself. Anyway, let me give you the trip and then decide.”
My love for Harvey _was_ dead, but I hated to think of the disgrace of
divorce. That ignominy would kill Papa and Mama!
I had hoped that when Father Doe reached Central, matters would
straighten out. The family moved just at the time that alone and
destitute, I was having the humiliating, heart-rending experience of
giving birth to a dead baby, attended only by a negro mid-wife. If the
baby had lived, maybe my story would have been entirely different; but
without that bond, I could not live down the calumnies that Mrs. Doe
believed.
Father Doe opened a mining office in Central in 1879 and Harvey turned
up again from wherever he had been to live with his parents. I suspected
that he had spent the time in Oshkosh since Mrs. Doe proved more bitter
about me than she had been before we were married, probably influenced
by Harvey’s lies. Father Doe came to see me several times and gave me
money. He liked and felt sorry for me and tried to offset the contention
of his wife that I had disgraced the Doe name.
I thought it was Harvey who had disgraced the Doe name by deserting me
when I was pregnant; but for everyone’s sake, that autumn of 1879,
Harvey and I patched up our quarrel and tried to make a go of it again.
A few months later, I thought I saw him go into a bagnio and I
immediately ran across the street to demand: “Who’s disgracing the Doe
name now?” He said he was just collecting a bill ... that he would never
be unfaithful.... But I wasn’t sure....
The elder Does decided to move to Idaho Springs, inasmuch as Central was
declining and there seemed to be no way of straightening out Harvey. For
the next five years until he died in 1884, Father Doe was one of the
pillars of the town. In 1880, he was elected to the legislature and in
1881, he was chosen Speaker of the House. He was president of the Idaho
Springs bank and owned two houses, one for revenue. The large bargeboard
trimmed frame house in which they lived was the scene of many a social
function written up in the Clear Creek _Miner_. But after 1880, Father
Doe refused to support Harvey or pay his debts.
Harvey and I moved to Denver where he ineffectively looked for work. I
sold the last of my furniture and clothes to keep us alive. After we
were divorced, he drifted off. Evan Morgan said he saw him in Gunnison
in 1881 and at the time of Father Doe’s death, he was in Antonito,
Colorado, with Flora, one of his sisters. After the estate was settled,
Mrs. Doe moved back to Oshkosh and Harvey went with her. There, and in
Milwaukee, he lived out his life, running a cigar store and acting as a
hotel detective, and fulfilling the epithet used about him at the
Shoo-Fly, “Mama’s Boy.”
I could not forget nor forgive the painful, galling humiliation of
having to have our baby alone in a mining camp. Save for Jake
Sandelowsky I had been without friends, without money, and was
disgraced, since my husband’s absence was talked about everywhere.
Harvey’s failure to attend to these primary needs for his own wife and
child I could not forgive—my heart was emptied of his image for years.
“I think maybe you’re right,” I told Jake before the second break with
Harvey. “I’ve been here in Central City for over two years, and very
unhappy ones. I think a change would do me good.”
Jake sent me over to Leadville on a visit to see what it was like in
December, 1879. At the time, although he had moved to Leadville already,
he was back in Blackhawk to talk business with Sam Pelton. I traveled by
the Colorado Central narrow gauge from Blackhawk to the Forks and then
up to Georgetown. From there I went by stagecoach, over lofty Argentine
Pass, through Ten Mile Canyon and into the “Cloud City.” The stage coach
ride was fifty-six miles and the fare, ten dollars. In Leadville I
stayed at the then fashionable Clarendon Hotel, built by W. H. Bush,
formerly manager of the Teller House in Central City. It was on Harrison
Avenue, right next door to the newly opened Tabor Opera House.
Everyone was talking about Tabor and his gifts to Leadville when they
weren’t exclaiming about the silver discoveries on Fryer and Breece
Hills. The air was full of the wildest conversation and buzzing
excitement everywhere you turned, and the camp itself made Central look
like a one-horse town.
“Oh, I’m sure something marvelous will happen to me here!” I exclaimed
as I surveyed busy Harrison Avenue down its four-block length to the
juncture with Chestnut Street.
Concord stages, belated because of the recent heavy snows, were rolling
into camp hauled by six-horse teams. Huge freight vans, lumbering
prairie schooners and all sorts of buggies and wheeled vehicles were
toiling up and down the street, separated from the boardwalk by parallel
mounds of snow piled in the gutter three and four feet deep. Everywhere
was noisy activity, even lot jumping and cabin-jumping, since the
population that year had grown from 1,200 to 16,000!
The boardwalks on each side of the street were filled with a seething
mass of humanity that had sprung from every quarter of the globe and
from every walk of life. Stalwart teamsters jostled bankers from
Chicago. Heavy-hooted grimy miners, fresh from underground workings,
shared a walk with debonair salesmen from Boston. The gambler and
bunco-steerer strolled arm in arm with their freshest victim picked up
in a hotel lobby.
I had bought “The Tourist Guide to Colorado and Leadville,” written by
Cass Carpenter in May of that year. The pamphlet said that at the time
of writing Leadville had “19 hotels, 41 lodging houses, 82 drinking
saloons, 38 restaurants, 13 wholesale liquor houses ... 10 lumber yards,
7 smelting and reduction works, 2 sampling works for testing ores, 12
blacksmith shops, 6 livery stables, 6 jewelry stores, 3 undertakers and
21 gambling houses where all sorts of games are played as openly as the
Sunday School sermon is conducted.”
As I now regarded the town, this description seemed to me to be already
outdated and the camp to be three times as built up as the guide said.
H. A. W. Tabor, who had been elected Leadville’s first mayor and first
postmaster, had also organized its first bank. The building stood at the
corner of Harrison Avenue and Chestnut, a two-story structure with the
design of a huge silver dollar in the gable. The First National Bank,
the Merchants and Mechanics Bank and the Carbonate National had also
been built. Tabor had already erected a building to house the Tabor Hose
Co. (for which he had given the hose carriage) and the equipment of the
Tabor Light Cavalry, which he had also organized. Two newspaper offices
were already built and a third was preparing to start publishing in
January.
“What do you think of our camp?” a stranger said to me somewhat later,
accosting me in the lobby of the Clarendon.
I no longer resented the efforts of men to pick me up. Two years in
Colorado mining camps had taught me some of the carefree friendliness of
the atmosphere. I knew now it wasn’t considered an insult.
“Oh, it’s wonderful!” I answered, “and has such a beautiful setting.”
“Yes, those are marvelous peaks over there, Massive and Elbert—it’s a
stunning country. I’ve never seen anything like Colorado. I’m from the
South. The man I bunked with was from Missouri. He was scared of the
wildness and casual shootings we have around here—so he took one look at
that sign over there and beat it home to Missouri to raise some.”
I peered across the street. A feed and supply store had a high false
front on which was painted in big letters, HAY $40 A TON.
The idea tickled me and I laughed out loud. As I laughed, a great weight
fell from my shoulders. It seemed as if it had been a long time since I
had really laughed, almost as if my gayety had been boxed in by the ugly
gulches of Blackhawk and crushed in the cramped space of Central. But
here the whole atmosphere was wide and different!
The man sat down in a rocking chair beside me in the lobby and was soon
entertaining me with the many colorful stories of the camp, of the wild
nights where everyone whooped it up till dawn, in the saloons, in the
variety theatres, in the gambling houses, in the dance halls, in the
bagnios and in the streets, milling from door to door.
He also told me of the unusual characters of the town, all the way from
the popular Tabor who was Leadville’s leading citizen down to “the
waffle woman” who could be seen any night regularly at twelve o’clock
going from saloon to saloon and from dance house to gambling and other
dens selling hot waffles. He had stopped her once and spoken to her. She
had replied in a cultured voice:
“My best trade is between two and three in the morning after the
theatres are out. It is not pleasant being out so late among so rough a
class as is found on the streets after midnight and about the saloons. I
have led a pleasanter life. Should I tell you who I am and what I have
been, you would not believe me....”
His tales fascinated me. But his stories of Tabor and Augusta, Tabor’s
severe New England wife with whom he was not getting along, interested
me more than any others. Tabor, he said, could be seen almost any
evening he was in camp in the lobby or across the street in the Board of
Trade which was the gambling house and saloon that got most of the
after-theatre trade from the Tabor Opera House, opened a month before in
November. Tabor was a splendid poker player and was fond of gambling of
all sorts. Since he had made so much money in the last two years, he had
started playing roulette for enormous stakes.
“Every night?” I asked. “What does Mrs. Tabor do?”
“Don’t know—she’s down in Denver. But he’s gone pretty wild lately. She
don’t like it and I guess nags him terrible. So he just stays out of her
way. He likes his liquor and women, too, and naturally that don’t set so
good with her. Wouldn’t with any wife. But he spends a lot of time on
the move nowadays.”
“What’s he doing in Denver?”
“Oh, he and his right hand man, Bill Bush, are making real estate
investments mostly. He’s building the Tabor block at 16th and Larimer
Streets—costing two hundred thousand dollars—of stone quarried in Ohio.
Expects it to be finished in March. And he bought the Henry P. Brown
house on Broadway last winter for a residence. Paid $40,000 for it.”
“He must be a very great man.”
“Some says he is and some says he isn’t. I’ve played poker with him a
time or two and he’s right smart at that game. But some of the folks
around here say he’s too fond of show and throwin’ his money around. I
reckon the Republican politicians trimmed him a heap of money a year ago
before they gave him the lieutenant governorship!”
“My, I would love to meet him,” I remarked, thinking that never had a
description of any man so captured my imagination. “How old is he?”
“Must be right close to fifty. He was one of the early prospectors out
here—came in an ox-wagon across the plains in ’59. Mrs. Tabor was the
first woman in the Jackson Diggings. That’s where Idaho Springs is now.
He had a claim jumped at Payne’s Bar and never done anything about it.
An awful easy-going sort of fellow.”
Our conversation ran along like this for some time and was continued
again in the afternoon. That evening my new friend suggested he take me
next door to the Opera House where Jack Langrishe’s stock company,
brought from New York a month ago, was playing “Two Orphans.” He seemed
such a pleasant companion and so well-informed on this particular camp
and mining in general that I accepted his suggestion with alacrity.
“Thank you very much. I should be delighted and won’t you let me
introduce myself? I’m Mrs. Doe.”
“Not the famous beauty of Central! Most of us miners have already heard
about you.”
He then introduced himself. But since he is still alive I won’t give him
away after all these years. We always remained good friends, although on
a rather formal basis and never called each other by our first names. In
the course of the evening, I asked his opinion about the quartz lodes of
Nevadaville, still having in mind that something could be done with
Harvey’s mine.
“Most of my Colorado mining’s been done down in La Plata and San Juan
counties. I wouldn’t be much help. But my advice to you is to hang on to
it and maybe work it on shares with some man in the spring when the snow
breaks.”