_Her reddish gold hair, of which she had masses, was worn in a large
chignon at the nape of her neck until about a year before she married
Tabor. She frizzed the front hair for a fluffy effect; but later she
wore the back hair high and had the whole elaborately curled. Many men
succumbed to her charm and looks; among them, Carl Nollenberger,
popular Leadville saloon keeper, who had a beer tray made, portraying
her dainty profile. Her earlier photos have naturally arching
eyebrows; but later she pencilled these blacker and straighter. She
preferred color; the black is mourning for her father who died May,
1883. By then, she had also had her ears pierced._]
[Illustration: Another portrait.]
[Illustration: The wedding dress.]
[Illustration: Another portrait.]
[Illustration: Another portrait.]
[Illustration: BABY DOE TABOR’S DREAM HOUSES
_The second house that Tabor bought was on the south side of 13th and
ran from Grant to Sherman. Shown are Tabor with his favorite horse and
Baby Doe beside a disputed statue. Three of the scandalous nude
figures can be seen, too, at the left by the spruce tree and in the
center of the pool. The interior shows a playing fountain, crystal
chandelier, heavy walnut furniture, oriental rugs and hangings, oil
paintings, mirrors, a loaded buffet, silver pitcher and every sort of
bric-a-brac, dear to those of the Victorian era._]
[Illustration: Interior view.]
[Illustration: THE FIRST BORN
_No baby had such lavish belongings and such wide attention as Lillie
Tabor, who was born in July, 1884. Her christening outfit cost
$15,000. Her mother, who was fond of keeping scrapbooks, entered many
clippings about her beautiful baby. The right-hand page contains three
clippings from January, 1887, describing the visit of the artist,
Thomas Nast, to Denver and his sketching the baby for Harper’s Bazaar.
When Lillie was eighteen, she ran away to McCourt relatives in
Chicago. Later she married her cousin, John Last, and settled in
Milwaukee. Her daughters, Caroline and Jane, resided there for some
years after Lillie’s death in 1946, concealing their Tabor descent._]
[Illustration: Scrapbook.]
[Illustration: SILVER DOLLAR
_Baby Doe lost her second baby, a boy; and her third child, born in
1889, was another little girl. She only enjoyed four years of the
rich, petted life that her sister had had. Christened a long string of
names, she used Silver and Silver Dollar the most. Although Lillie
resembled Baby Doe in looks, Silver, who had the nickname of
“Honey-maid,” was closer to her mother. Silver spent most of her
adolescence and young womanhood in Leadville, living with her mother
at assorted cheap locations. She was fond of horses, gay parties,
dancing and excitement._
* * *
_Baby Doe’s favorite daughter tried to be a newspaper woman, a movie
actress, and a novelist with one printed book, “Star of Blood.” But
she failed in all her ventures. Silver Dollar’s end was tragic and
sordid in the extreme. She was scalded to death under very suspicious
circumstances in a rooming house in Chicago’s cheapest district. Not
yet thirty-six years old, she was a perpetual drunk, was addicted to
dope and had lived with many men under several aliases. Her funeral
expenses were paid by Peter McCourt._
* * *]
[Illustration: MEETING “T. R.”
_Baby Doe’s happiest moment about Silver was this one, recorded on
August 29, 1910, when the ex-president Roosevelt was visiting in
Denver and received a song about his former visit with lyrics signed
by Silver Echo Tabor, age 20, a pretty brunette._]
[Illustration: THE PROPHETIC CURTAIN AND ITS FATAL WORDS
_The Tabors lived opulently and showily right up to the moment of the
Silver Panic in 1893 when their fortune came tumbling down. In the
same year, 1895, that Augusta died a wealthy woman in California, they
were bankrupt. Tabor became a day laborer and Baby Doe did the hardest
sort of manual work. Finally Tabor was appointed postmaster of Denver.
The Tabors and their two little girls moved into two rooms at the
Windsor and here they lived until Tabor’s death in 1899. His dying
words to Baby Doe were, “Hang on to the Matchless. It will make
millions again.” But the people of Denver, attending performances in
the Tabor Theatre, looked at the curtain and quoted Kingsley’s sad
couplet:_
“So fleet the works of men, back to the earth again,
Ancient and holy things fade like a dream.”]
[Illustration: THE MATCHLESS MINE BECAME BABY DOE’S HOME
_For nearly thirty-six years after Tabor’s death, Baby Doe followed
her husband’s injunction. Between leases, and sometimes during leases,
she lived in a small tool cabin beside the shaft and the hoist house.
At the time of the author’s visit, in 1927, the mine looked as above.
This shot is taken looking west, in the direction of Leadville, and a
spur of Fryer Hill is blocking a view of the continental divide. Baby
Doe furnished the cabin (at the left) with plain furniture and
subsisted on cheap edibles. But the cabin was always extremely neat
and her coal and wood in tidy piles. Below is one of the last pictures
taken of her, October 6, 1933, and shows her characteristic clothing.
In winter, she wrapped her feet in burlap._]
[Illustration: Baby Doe at the Matchless Mine.]
[Illustration: FORTUNE HUNTERS
_After Baby Doe’s body was found frozen, March 7, 1935, vandals
entered her cabin, ransacked her belongings, ripping up the mattress
and overturning everything, while they tried to find a fortune they
imagined she had hidden. But all the effects, that had been preserved
from her glorious days, were with the nuns or in Denver warehouses.
Baby Doe, herself, was neat and tidy._]
[Illustration: JACOB SANDS’ HOUSE IN ASPEN
_Baby Doe’s friend bought a cottage at Hunter and Hopkins in 1889 and
later he rented this house on Main Street. Both his residences still
stand and are the delight of the tourists. In 1898, he and his wife
and their children moved to Leadville, then Arizona, and are now lost
to history._]
[Illustration: THE ETERNAL SNOWS VIEWED FROM FRYER HILL
_When Baby Doe walked to town by the road that led into Leadville’s
Eighth Street, this was the view that faced her across the Arkansas
Valley. The mountains are miles away but seem close in the rarified
atmosphere. They are Elbert (Colorado’s highest) to the left and
Massive to the right. Below is the Matchless Mine after its partial
restoration in 1953._]
[Illustration: The Matchless Mine.]
Now, in the shadow of the Continental Divide, this man, this Croesus,
had become my lover. I just knew those gorgeous mountains would answer
my prayer that first morning I saw them!
Meanwhile, Mrs. Tabor and Horace were entertaining society in their fine
house in Denver and I only saw him on his visits to Leadville. But these
visits were frequent, because that was the year of the fires in the
Chrysolite mine and the strike that finally turned out all the miners of
the district. Leadville was bedlam in June. Knots of men were loitering
around everywhere, or preventing other miners from entering town, and
the whole temper of the streets very ugly. Strikers and mine-owners both
grew increasingly obstinate.
The strikers were most virulently angry against Tabor. Everyone went
armed and the tenseness of the situation seemed about to destroy my
new-found happiness. The miners said Tabor had been one of them just a
short time ago, and it was their vote that had put him in political
power. Now he had forgotten.
“Dirty B——, to turn on us,” I overheard many of the men in the street
muttering.
Something had to be done. Tabor was one of the property owners to
organize a Committee of Safety. They met with dramatic secrecy in
Tabor’s private rooms in the Opera House, and after drawing up an
agreement similar to that of the Vigilance Committee of early San
Francisco, elected C. C. Davis, the editor of the _Chronicle_, their
leader. Mr. Davis first sounded out Governor Pitkin on declaring martial
law, but he said to call on him only as a last resort.
Feeling climbed to a higher pitch. Seven committees of local militia
were organized and tempers were now reaching the boiling point. One day
on Harrison Avenue for a distance of eight blocks, eight thousand
striking miners menacingly swaggered back and forth and a like number of
citizens of opposite sympathies paraded with determination as grim as
theirs. The street was jammed. As I looked down, worried and fearful,
from the window of my suite, it seemed as if at any moment, a local war
would break out and the whole camp be destroyed by flames and bloodshed.
The leading men of the town took this moment to read a proclamation to
the miners. Tabor, Davis and a number of others stepped out on the
balcony of the Tabor Opera House. I hurried into the street to watch the
proceedings, my heart beating wildly with fear. The seething mass of
humanity below these men were all armed and they were mostly good shots.
Tabor standing up so tall and dark and fierce on the balcony would make
an excellent target.
“Oh, dear God,” I prayed. “Don’t let anything happen!”
I hardly realized I was praying at the time. But Davis demanded
menacingly that the strike be called off. He told the miners to return
to work, then said that if they would not accede, the citizens would
protect the owners. He said they would bring in other workers to take
their jobs. My fear was so great that I could actually hear my lips
mumbling incoherent, beseeching words.
A shot rang out!
The sharp noise seemed to rend my heart in two. I hardly dared take my
eyes from the balcony to glance around for fear of missing a falling
figure among that intrepid group. But Tabor and his friends were
straight and unconcerned. Their belief in law and order made them brave.
The cut-throat mob must have sensed that. No figure fell from their
midst. Whatever the shot was, it had not been fired at them. I sighed
with relief.
Colonel Bohn of the Committee of Safety was trying to urge a horse he
was mounted on through the mob, and was brandishing a drawn sword to
emphasize his right. It was a very foolish thing to do at a time like
that.
“Somebody must be trying to shoot the old fool,” the teamster next to me
in the crowd remarked.
“Maybe a signal for the miners to start firing,” the man with him
offered as a counter-suggestion.
I was terrified—not for myself—but because of Tabor’s exposed position.
My hands flew to my throat.
“Oh, don’t say that!” I almost screamed.
The teamster turned around and stared at me.
“You’re all right—they won’t shoot you. It’s them damned slave-driving
millionaires they’re after.”
And Tabor was the one they were after most! But nothing happened. A
policeman pulled Colonel Bohn off his horse and rushed him to the jail
“for disturbing the peace,” although it was more likely for
safe-keeping. Finally, both sides of the fray began to split up in
little groups, then to disperse and go home. The immediate danger was
over. But I knew now what it was like to be in love with a prominent man
in an important political office. It meant helpless fear of an
assassin’s bullet. And fear was a new emotion to me—that’s where love
had brought me. I shuddered and turned inward to the Clarendon.
Martial law was declared some hours later and slowly the miners went
back to work, having lost their cause. There was covert grumbling in the
saloons and on the streets for some time, but at last, life got back to
normal, and the regular hum of the pumps at all the mines around filled
the night again.
That July, ex-President Grant came to Leadville for a ten-day visit in
and about the mining country. He came as Tabor’s guest and Tabor, as
lieutenant-governor, headed a committee sent down to meet the general’s
private car. It was coming on the D.&R.G. tracks from Manitou where the
great man and his wife had been taking the waters. The committee
accompanied the presidential party into camp over a road lighted the
last miles with enormous bonfires. I was very thrilled at the idea of
the President actually being in my hotel. After he had toured the mines
and smelters and addressed discharged soldiers from the Civil War, a
banquet was given him at the Clarendon on the last of his three days in
the town proper.
The luxuriousness of the scene was impressive. The _Leadville Chronicle_
was printed on white satin to give to the President at the banquet as a
souvenir of his visit. The gift made such a tremendous impression on him
that when he died, he willed it to the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington where it may still be seen.
Tabor, rather bewildered and shame-faced, came to me afterward in our
suite and said:
“Darling, I know the President wanted to meet you more than anyone else
in Leadville. I saw him look at you several times—you are always the
most beautiful woman in any gathering. But you know this mining camp and
how it talks. We must be discreet.”
“Yes, I understand perfectly,”—and I leaned over and kissed his
forehead. He had thrown himself down rather disconsolately in a big
overstuffed chair, and now he gathered me into his lap. We were locked
in each other’s embrace for some minutes. We were happy just to be
together.
When our relationship first began, I’m sure I was the most in love. But
all through the summer, Tabor had begun to talk to me more and more
seriously. Though he talked mostly about mining matters and about his
political ambitions, he spoke finally about Augusta and me. It was an
enormous experience, touching me to the soul, to watch the unfolding of
the love and trust of the man I adored.
At first, I had been hardly more than a pretty toy of which he was very
fond. He would lavish all sorts of costly presents on me—jewelry,
clothes, and that rarest and most extravagant tribute in a mining camp
at 10,000 feet altitude, flowers.
I remember one day he sent up a woman who used to peddle hand-made
underwear across the mountains from camp to camp. She carried her
samples and some of her wares in a large bag she packed on her back.
Tabor sent her up to my suite one day. Then when she had everything in
the way of exquisite lace and embroidered chemises laid out over the
chairs and bed, he joined us and bought me over $350 worth of her goods!
But now things were different, I didn’t hear so many stories about his
other women. I could feel his love for me growing with the appreciation
he had for my character.
“You’re always so gay and laughing, Baby,” he would say, “and yet you’re
so brave. Augusta is a damned brave woman, too, but she’s powerful
disagreeable about it.”
He would sit glum and discouraged for a while, and then add:
“And I can’t imagine a woman who doesn’t like pretty things! I’ve tried
to buy her all sorts of clothes and jewelry since we’ve had the money.
But she just throws them back in my face and asks me if I’ve lost my
mind.”
You can hear it said and you can read it in books that I broke up
Governor Tabor’s home, and that he broke up mine. But that is far from
the truth. Both of our marriages had failed before we ever met.
Augusta Tabor had no capacity for anything but strenuous work and very
plain living. When they moved into their palatial new home, she wouldn’t
live upstairs in the master’s bedroom but moved down in the servants’
quarters off the kitchen. She said they were plenty good enough for
her—and how could she cook all that way away from the stove? She also
insisted on keeping a cow tethered on the front lawn and milking it,
herself. Tabor was very humiliated by these actions. As
lieutenant-governor of the state, he was very anxious to live in a style
befitting his station. Also, he hoped to be senator.
But Augusta Tabor laughed at his ideas in a very mean way. Tabor had a
really sweet disposition. He would come to me often to tell me of some
upsetting incident, with a dreadfully hurt look in his eye. Another
trait of Tabor’s that irritated Augusta tremendously was his generosity.
Anybody could touch Tabor for sizable loans with no trouble at all. He
was delighted to help people less fortunate than he.
He had always been like that, and he was to the day he died. When he was
Leadville’s first postmaster, he made up out of his own pocket the
salaries of some five employees just so that Leadville could have more
efficient service. He gave money to every church in Leadville for their
building fund regardless of the denomination. He gave money for the
Tabor Grand Hotel in Leadville (now the Vendome) in 1884, even after he
moved away. He was the same lovable donor when he moved to Denver.
He sold the land at the corner of Sixteenth and Arapahoe Streets to the
city of Denver for a postoffice, at a bargain price, and he followed
this gesture up with a hundred and one donations to private and public
charities.
“Trying to buy your way to popularity,” Augusta would sniff
disparagingly.
Tabor would wince under her barbs. He gave because he liked people. He
was naturally friendly, and the only times he gave money, hoping for
some definite return, were in political channels. All his other gifts
were spontaneous. But Augusta did not understand this generosity and she
didn’t like it. And what Augusta did not like, she could make
exceedingly clear with her sharp tongue! He never was her husband after
July, 1880.
Naturally, in these trying circumstances, Tabor turned more and more to
me. Later, that fall, he suggested that he should re-furnish one of the
suites at the Windsor and that I should move to Denver to be closer to
him. Nothing could have thrilled or delighted me more.
“Oh, darling! I would adore to live at the Windsor,” I cried, throwing
my arms around him.
The Windsor was the last word in elegance, with a sixty-foot mahogany
bar, a ballroom with elaborate crystal chandeliers, and floor of
parquetry, and a lobby furnished in thick red carpet and
diamond-dust-backed mirrors. It was much more impressive than the old
American House, which had thrilled my girlish heart when I had first
come to Colorado. Here was my dream slowly unfolding before me, almost
exactly as I had first visualized it—to be a queen in the cosmopolitan
circles of Denver!
Later we departed for Denver separately. I took the Rio Grande and wore
a heavy veil. He took the stagecoach over to South Park and then went on
the rival narrow gauge in David Moffat’s private car. But our reunion at
the Windsor was all the more delightful because of our enforced
separation. After Augusta’s comments on the Leadville strike, Tabor
never spent an evening up on Broadway, but came to me more and more
often.
“You’re a vulgar boor—I’ve always known that,” she had said, “but at
least I thought you had enough sense not to call a common lynching gang
a Committee of Safety for Law and Order. And getting mixed up with that
silly egotistic rooster, Davis, who used a six-shooter for a gavel! And
forcing Governor Pitkin to declare martial law. Mark you my words,
you’ve lost all the political popularity you’ve been so busy buying by
your recent actions.”
Tabor was very hurt at this, the more so because there seemed to be an
element of truth in her words. The attitude toward him in Leadville had
changed and Tabor really loved that mining camp—it was always “home” to
him, much more than Denver. And in later years, I felt the same way,
although just then I was eager to conquer fresh fields.
“Never mind,” I said. “I’m sure she’s wrong—and besides what do you care
about that ugly old mining camp? You’re a big man going to do the
biggest things for the nation. And what if Governor Pitkin doesn’t like
you? Probably next election, you’ll be governor, yourself!”
Meanwhile, Tabor busied himself with plans for building another opera
house, The Tabor Grand, in Denver. He called in his architects, W. J.
Edbrooke and F. P. Burnham (who had designed the Tabor Block) and
stuffed their pockets with $1,000 notes.
“Go to Europe and study the theatres of London, Paris, Berlin and
Vienna. Pick up any good ideas they’ve got laying around and improve on
them. I want only the best!”
Besides the architects, Tabor sent other agents on various missions. He
detailed one man to go to Brussels for carpets, another to France for
brocades and tapestries, a third to Japan for the best cherry wood to
make the interior woodwork, a fourth to Honduras for mahogany for other
trimming. A dozen contracts were drawn up in New York and Chicago for
furnishings and fripperies. The building would be the most expensive
west of the Mississippi.
About this time, Tabor went back to Leadville on a spree that Bill Bush
was careful to tell me about. Bill had begun to feel jealous of my
influence with Tabor although we were still outwardly very good friends.
He wanted to make me jealous, in turn.
Tabor borrowed Dave Moffat’s private car and went to Leadville for a
ball that the fast women and sports of the town were giving in the
Wigwam. He told me and, undoubtedly, Augusta, that he had to go up to
Leadville on some mining business and would probably be gone several
days.
The ball turned out to be an orgy. Everyone drank too much and Tabor was
supposed to have stumbled about with a girl in a gaudy spangled gown
which, a few days before the ball, had been on display in the window of
the Daniels, Fisher and Smith Dry Goods Emporium on Harrison Avenue,
Leadville, bearing a tag marked $500. Bill Bush tried to insinuate that
Tabor had bought it as a gift to another one of his loves.
“And why shouldn’t he, Bill?” I asked. “I love the man as he is. You
forget I’m not Augusta. If he wants to have a good time among his
friends, I think that’s fine. He knew all of them a long time before he
knew me.”
But Bill wouldn’t believe I was sincere. He replied:
“Well, you’re a good actress!”
Then he added some more juicy details. After the ball, those who could
still walk trooped over to the Odeon Variety Theatre where a new show
started at 3 a.m. Tabor had sat in a box smoking cigars and drinking
champagne. Every time he thought a girl was especially attractive, he
would throw a shower of gold and silver coins over her head. At the
intermission he had invited the actresses into his box and put his arms
about their neat waists.
After the show ended at five o’clock, he went to the Saddle Rock Cafe,
our favorite restaurant, for breakfast. Then he went back to the
Clarendon, finally, to sleep. He slept all the next day. In the evening
he asked three or four successful mining men to accompany him back to
Denver in the private car. Having slept all day, he sat up all night as
the train climbed over Kenosha Pass, playing poker, using twenty-dollar
gold pieces as chips.
“And why shouldn’t he? I like a gambling man—someone who isn’t afraid to
take chances—that was one of the worst faults of Harvey Doe.”
Bill Bush shrugged his shoulders. Presently he laughed off the whole
conversation with:
“You’re a clever girl, Baby—shrewd as they come! But talking about your
late and not too much lamented husband, where is he and what’s the state
of your divorce? The Governor wants me to find out.”
“I don’t know where Harvey is but my divorce is final—I got it a year
ago and I am a completely free agent.”
The year was now 1881. All that spring and summer, Tabor and I were
immersed in the planning and erection of the great building that was to
be a monument to the Tabor name for all time. Tabor had left home
unequivocally in January, but as he was on so many frequent trips to New
York, Chicago or Leadville, where he stayed was really not noticed until
that autumn.
At the festive opening night of the Tabor Grand Opera House, with Emma
Abbott singing Lucia, Box A of the six fashion boxes was conspicuously
empty. That was the box Tabor had reserved for himself and family. It
was wreathed in flowers and a huge pendant of roses hung above it. He
was on the stage or in the wings waiting for the ceremony of dedication.
Augusta, alone of all elaborately gowned Denver society, did not put in
an appearance. I could hear whispers all around.
“Look, Mrs. Tabor isn’t here! Probably she’s found out about that
blonde! Wonder if the little hussy’s had the nerve to come....”