incoherent for me to make head or tail of her story. Fearful that she
would catch pneumonia from exposure, I stirred up the fire in the stove
and got the temperature of the cabin to the perspiring point. I put her
to bed and she was soon sleeping it off.
But when I went to town for the mail, the news was all over town—a
sordid story involving a saloon keeper. In a flash, my mind was made up.
“Write to your Uncle Peter,” I said that evening at supper, “and ask him
for enough money for you to go to Denver and get a job on a newspaper.
There’s no opportunity for your talent in this town and no chance to
meet a man really worthy of you.”
I was much too proud to appeal to Pete, myself, after our quarrel, but
on several occasions I had permitted Silver to do so. In justice to
Pete, I must admit he always responded—and I always felt he was trying
to make up for the way he acted at the time of Tabor’s collapse.
Silver left for Denver shortly after. For a while, she made good as a
reporter on the _Denver Times_, and, later, in Chicago she wrote a
novel, “Star of Blood.” But good fortune did not last. When she was out
of money and a job, she wrote to me in Leadville.
“Mama,” she mused on paper, “I think I will enter a convent. You have
always been very religious and I am turning in that direction more and
more—perhaps that would be a fine solution for my life.”
I had always pictured Silver with a dazzling, high place before the
world. But when I realized how the world was changing her from the
sweet, pretty little girl she had been to a woman, bruised and at the
mercy of men’s lust, I welcomed the thought of the serenity and
spiritual safety of a convent. I was giving up my life to the Matchless.
It was fitting that my daughter should give up her life to her God. They
were both dedications to a love higher than self.
“If you don’t hear from me,” she went on, “you will know that I can’t
write—that I’ve taken vows.”
My breath choked in my throat. I had lost everything—everything in the
world that I prized—my dear husband, money, prominence, all my fineries,
jewelry and the many little luxuries a woman loves, my brother, my
family, my first daughter—and now Silver! It was almost more than one
heart could stand. I cried out in terror.
“Oh, no, Silver! I can’t lose you.”
Little by little, I became reconciled to her suggestion. My darling baby
was going away—but she was not really going away. She would be with me
always.
Shortly after that, she managed to raise enough capital to start and
edit a little paper called the “Silver Dollar Weekly.” But after a few
issues, its financial success was too negligible to carry on. Her
letters said she was giving the project up and going to Chicago. If she
failed there she would enter a convent in the mid-West that Uncle Peter
knew about.
The years passed slowly by. A few letters came and then only silence.
Imagine my horror one September night in 1925! I had come to Denver to
pass the winter and had stopped at the desk of my cheap little hotel
before going to bed. The clerk surveyed me with a kind of contemptuous
awe and asked:
“Is that your daughter I seen in the paper tonight was murdered in some
Chicago scandal?”
“Certainly not,” I flared back. “My daughter is in a convent.”
I could not afford to buy a newspaper so I hurried to the Denver Public
Library in the Civic Center. What could the story be? Perhaps the clerk
meant Lillie—I never mentioned her name nor even admitted she was my
daughter—but something might have happened to her or her husband that
revealed who she really was. As I clumped into the library, dressed, as
usual, in my black dress, veiled motoring cap headgear and heavy boots,
the clock said a few minutes past nine-thirty.
“Oh, dear,” I said to the librarian at the desk. “Am I too late to read
tonight’s paper? I know the newspaper files close at half-past nine—”
She looked up and with some penetration, perhaps recognition, gazed at
me for a brief instant.
“Yes, the newspaper room is closed. But if you will go in and sit down
in the reference room, I think I can manage to bring you an evening
paper.”
I thanked her very pleasantly and did as she bade. While I waited, I
absently traced the grain of the heavy walnut with my finger nail,
trying not to show any distress. Soon she quietly laid the paper down in
front of me and stole away. But with that sixth sense you have in a
crisis, out of the back of my head I could feel the librarians watching
me.
“Silver!” I gasped to myself and wanted to faint.
But I made myself sit extremely straight and read very quietly, knowing
there were alien eyes observing me. The account told of a young woman,
who had posed under various aliases but lastly as Ruth Norman. She had
been scalded to death under very suspicious circumstances in a rooming
house in the cheapest district in Chicago. She was a perpetual drunk,
was addicted to dope and had lived with many men of the lowest order.
But her doctor knew who she really was. She was Rose Mary Echo Silver
Dollar Tabor, who had signed her songs Silver Echo Tabor and her novel,
Rose Tabor.
“My darling little Honeymaid!” I wailed inwardly and thought my heart
must break. My eyes blurred with tears so that I could not read. “What a
ghastly tragic end—poor, poor little girl!”
A strange photograph had been found in her room on which Silver had
written this warning: “In case I am killed, arrest this man.” He was
later identified as a saloon-keeper who had been one of her lovers. But
insufficient evidence was brought out at the coroner’s inquest to attach
definite guilt to him.
To save Silver’s body from the potter’s field, Peter McCourt was wiring
$200 for the burial of his niece.
“Damn him!” was my thought. He seemed always, at every blow my life
sustained, to be in a position to make my humiliation more soul-searing.
Deliberately I read the whole account through a second time. I knew with
profound conviction that every line was true—I could piece together the
whole story step by step. But following that awful downfall, there under
the white-bowled lights of the library, my conscience cried out that I
had failed again-failed, as a mother, more miserably than ever Augusta
could have wished or prophesied. I was bowed down with shame.
“Don’t let anyone know,” my heart immediately rebelled. “The Tabor pride
does not admit defeat.”
Gathering up the paper quietly and folding its pink sheets along their
original creases, I took it to the desk and nonchalantly handed the
death-blow back to the girl who had brought it to me.
“Thank you very much for the paper,” I said. “But that story’s all a
pack of lies. She’s not my daughter—that young woman. I _know_ Silver is
in a convent.”
Turning on my heel, I walked out, erect and dignified, my miner’s boots
clacking with the conviction of my statement.
So passed Silver from my life. I don’t know which was sadder or more
humiliating—Silver’s going or Lillie’s. From the viewpoint of the world,
I suppose it was Lillie’s. But from my own, I was devoted to Silver and
believed in her, and her going was the hardest to bear. I knew she had
told me the lie about the convent to protect me from hurt. But in the
end, the hurt was much greater.
I have never admitted my hurt, even to intimates. Before the world, I
have always preserved the outline of her fabrication. Silver is alive
today. She is in a convent.
The winter dragged miserably in and I was even poorer. My boots wore out
and I hit upon the scheme of wrapping my legs in gunny sack, like
puttees, held with twine; a habit I have always held to. Only dreams and
memories were left to sustain the poverty and dreariness of my life. Now
I was completely down.
But catastrophes never come singly and it was also that winter that the
Matchless was again to be foreclosed. During a quarter of a century, the
leases, the legal battles, the disappointments, the troubles and the
finances of that mine had been one long series of involved
ramifications. Each time the clouds would seems to have a silver lining,
it would prove only a figment of my imagination or a mirage of the Cloud
City (Leadville’s nickname). A silver mine in the Cloud City should
certainly have some lining!
“Why don’t you give up? Let the mine go for the mortgage?” a Denver
banker to whom I appealed for help said to me. “It’s all worked out—and
anyway it’s paid you a small steady income for years.”
“I should say not!” I replied with vehemence. “I shall never let the
Matchless go—not while there is breath in my body to find a way to fight
for it. The mine is a Golconda.”
Doubting eyes greeted my statement and the money was refused. I was used
to that—and in the quiet loneliness of my cabin or during my sombre
meditations in church even I, too, occasionally doubted. Yet never would
I let that be known. My great husband, Tabor, could not have spoken
other than truthfully and prophetically from his deathbed and if I was
to live true to his command, I must always believe.
“I have no reason for living if I do not have faith in the Matchless. No
dear one is left to me. I have only this one legacy of my great love. It
is my mission and my life,” were the thoughts that ran through my head
as I left the banker’s office. But now I had exhausted my last resource.
No future was ahead of me, no work to do and no place to live. The mine
was doomed—and my heart sank to the lowest depths.
During that entire weekend, I wandered about Denver in a daze, telling
my rosary in first one church and then another. About my neck, instead
of beads, I always wore a long black shoelace knotted intermittently to
form beads and holding a large plain wooden cross. Friends gave me other
rosaries but I clung to my improvised string.
In some ways, my plain bedraggled habit, my make-shift rosary, my legs
strapped in gunny sack and twine and my grey shawl over the black dress
seemed only a just penance for the clothing extravagances and sins of my
youth. I did not like to explain my attitude to most people—although I
sometimes mentioned my feeling to friends or Fathers who were truly
devout Catholics—but this thought gave me the courage to forget how I
looked. Those rags were a chosen punishment for former vanity.
“Dear God, help me to save the Matchless,” I prayed on my shoestring
over and over again all day that Sunday. Suddenly as I knelt in St.
Elizabeth’s an inspiration came to me bathed in a white light. Gathering
up my full skirt, I hurried from the church and headed toward the corner
of Ninth and Pennsylvania Sts. and the home of J. K. Mullen. He was a
millionaire miller and a liberal donor to many Catholic charities.
Outside in the night air it had begun to snow but I plodded on
resolutely. By the time I had reached his dignified old mansion, it was
past nine o’clock and I was afraid I should find no one home. But
summoning a show of boldness, I rang the doorbell.
For a long time, there was no answer. I was cold and nervous, apart from
my anxiety about the mine. I shifted my weight from one foot to another
trying to make up my mind to ring again. At last I was sure enough to
press the button. This time, after a short wait, the door slowly opened
and revealed Mr. Mullen, himself.
“Good evening,” I said pleasantly. “I’m Mrs. Tabor and I wondered if I
might see you, although”—and laughed with that same musical laugh that
had charmed so many illustrious men in its day—“it’s a rather odd time
for a call.”
“Why, certainly, Mrs. Tabor, do come in. I’m all alone. And being Sunday
night, the servants are all out—had to answer the door, myself.”
He led me into a gloomy spacious room lit only by one reading lamp and
by the flames from the fireplace.
“It’s a pretty bad night for you to be out,” he remarked.
“Oh, I don’t mind. It’s nothing to the Leadville blizzards I face all
the time up at the mine. I’m used to a hard life.”
“Well, you have a lot of courage.”
“I need it—and it’s taking a lot of courage to come here—but I’m
depending on my cross,”—and I clasped it more tightly in my hand.
“What do you mean?”
Hesitantly I began to unfold my story to him. When I spoke of my
loneliness and having only this one trust to live for, he remarked:
“Yes, I’m going through the same thing. You know, don’t you, that Mrs.
Mullen died last March? My daughters are all married and now I have
nobody who really needs me.”
“Oh, I’m deeply sorry.”
We sat silent for some minutes, watching the fire and lost to our own
thoughts. Finally Mr. Mullen urged me to go on. When I had finished my
plea, he suddenly exclaimed:
“I will redeem that mortgage!”
Striding over to his desk, he sat down and wrote a check for $14,000
with the same impulsive generosity as W. S. Stratton had written his for
$15,000 to Tabor in 1895.
“Oh, Mr. Mullen,” I cried. “You are an angel!”
“Your story appealed to me, Mrs. Tabor, appealed to me very strongly. I
think you deserve to keep the management of the Matchless.”
My life and my mission were saved by a message straight from God!
Following up this action, in 1928, the J. K. Mullen estate created the
Shorego Mining Co. and technically foreclosed the Matchless. But their
action was to prevent other depredations and to preserve me from
unfortunate business dealings. The Matchless has been really mine.
With the coming of the depression, gradually the owners and lessees
abandoned the mines on Fryer Hill and the Matchless among them.
Immediately after the pumps were stopped, the mines began to fill with
water. Since many of the drifts are interlocking, today, in order to
work the Matchless, not only its own shafts and drifts would have to be
pumped dry but almost all of Fryer Hill, too. It has been a discouraging
time, disappointments mounting one upon another.
I have had no income. Yet with my pride, I have never accepted charity.
Where the least aspect of condescension could be imagined, I have
returned gifts and refused offers of aid. But when I have been sure that
people were genuinely friendly or would not speak about their
generosity, I have let them help me, I have also received many donations
through fan mail of late years—bills for $5, or $10 or even larger.
These have come because of renewed interest in the Tabor name brought
about by newspaper stories or by the book and movie, “Silver Dollar.”
I read the book.
“It’s all a pack of lies,” I told anyone who asked me about it. But the
story as a whole was more nearly right than I would care to admit
especially considering its sneering tone. Of course, there are many
inaccuracies like referring to Tabor as “Haw” (which no one ever called
him in real life) and some straight geographical and historical
untruths, such as having the Arkansas flow in Clear Creek Valley and
talking of Central City as a collection of shanties when it is all brick
or stone. The author was most unkind to me and talked about my guarding
the mine with a shotgun, when in actuality I have never owned a shotgun
that worked. It is true that I do not like strangers and I have several
ways of dealing with them. If someone knocks, I peek out the corner of
the window (which was once shaded by coarse lace, then burlap and
finally newspapers), lifting just a tiny flap so as to show only one
eye. If they see me and recognize me, I say I’m taking a bath—and I have
been known to give that same answer all day long to a series of callers!
Sometimes I alter my voice and say, “Mrs. Tabor is downtown—I am the
night watchman,” (as I did when Sue Bonnie was making her first efforts
to meet me) and sometimes I just sit as quiet as a mossy stone,
pretending the cabin is uninhabited.
Nevertheless, the author of “Silver Dollar” did me a real service in
bringing me many unseen friends and correspondents all across the United
States. Carloads of people flock up Little Stray Horse Gulch each
summer, seeking a glimpse of me, so many cars that I have renamed that
road My Boulevard!
But I never speak to them or admit them to my cabin except,
occasionally, when they come properly escorted by a Leadville friend.
And when I go to town, I frequent the alleys as much as possible, my
figure dressed in my long, black skirt and coat, my legs shrouded in
burlap and twine and my face hidden by the perennial auto-cap with its
visor and draping veil. I, who used to vaunt my public appearances in
the streets by the most elegant dresses, matched by gay floating-ruffled
parasols and by my liveried brougham and team, now skulk along beside
the garbage cans and refuse.
When the movie “Silver Dollar” had its premiere in Denver late in 1932,
the management approached me with an offer of cash and my expenses to
Denver to be present. “No, I will not go,” I replied firmly. “I can’t
leave the mine.” (Actually I couldn’t bear to see myself and all that I
hold dear maligned.)
“I don’t suppose you’d let us have some ore, then, from the Matchless?
We want to have an historical exhibition in the foyer of everything we
can get that relates to the Tabor mine.”
“Certainly,” I replied. “I’d be delighted. That’s quite different. Tabor
was a great miner and the Matchless is Colorado’s most famous
mine—naturally people will be interested.”
I, myself, escorted the men out on the dump and helped them pick up a
gunny sack full of the richest bits of ore we could find. When they had
filled their sack, I waved them pleasantly on their way.
“Don’t believe all you see,” I said. “I’m not half as bad as in the
book.”
A couple of years later the motion picture came to Buena Vista and my
friends, Joe Dewar and Lucille Frazier, asked me to motor down with them
to see it. They were to keep our going a secret, I would wear a veil,
dress differently than usual, and sit in the back of the theater so that
no one would recognize me.
“That’s a date, then,” Joe said. “We’ll be up for you Thursday evening.”
But when Thursday arrived, I did not have the courage to go through with
the plan. Here was I, a lonely, poverty-stricken old woman with only a
sacred trust left to me out of all the world, a trust that most people
spoke of as an ‘obsession’ or a ‘fixation.’ Yet now I must go to see
what the world thought of me as a national beauty, a scandalous
home-wrecker and a luxury-loving doll. I could not face it. If I had
sinned, I had paid a sufficiently high price for my sins without
deliberately giving myself further heartache. I sent down a message to
the village that I could not go.
Meanwhile, shortly after the premiere of the movie in Denver, I saw
Father Horgan approaching with two men. When anybody knocked at my
cabin, I always peeked out of the window to see who was there before
admitting them. As I raised the burlap curtain sewed in heavy stitches
of twine and recognized him, I asked:
“Whom have you got with you?”
“Two lawyers from Denver who want to talk to you about signing a paper—a
business matter.”
“Very well,” I said. “Since you brought them—you know I don’t like
strangers. But I’ll see them for your sake.”
They entered and sat down in my humble quarters. I always kept the cabin
very neat with a small shrine fastened to the far wall, my boxes, table
and bed arranged around the room and the stove near the lean-to. It was
December and very cold. They unfastened their coats and broached their
offer by saying:
“How would you like to make $50,000?”
“You want to lease the Matchless?”
“No. We think your character has been damaged in the motion picture
founded on your life and that you should sue for libel.”
“But I haven’t seen the movie—I can’t testify to that—”
“Well, we have. And legally you have a very strong case.”
So legally I had a very strong case? I knew something about
litigation—my whole association with Tabor had been involved in law
suits. Most of them, to be sure, were suits about mining claims but
there was also the secret Durango divorce suit and the legal battle with
Bill Bush. No good had ever come out of all that except fees to the
lawyers—neither of us had gained anything in money or in reputation.
“But I do not need $50,000,” I replied. “The Matchless will soon make
many times that sum. But thank you very much indeed for your kindness
and interest.”
I turned to Father Horgan and introduced a discussion of religious
matters with him. Shortly, however, the lawyers cut in again.
“But you could certainly use $50,000 extra. And all you have to do is
put your name on this line.”
They held out a paper already drawn up with an agreement for them to go
ahead and sue in my name.
“But I’m not interested in the law. I’m interested in mining. To enter
into such a business with you, I would have to learn many new things and
I’m only interested in the price of silver, in high-grade ores and such
like matters.”
“You don’t have to learn anything. Leave it all to us. We’ll tend to
everything.”
“God will look after me. I put my trust in Him—not in men.”
Each time they returned to the issue of obtaining my signature, I
circumvented them in some such manner for I knew what that suit meant.
It meant scandal. It meant the opposing side’s digging back in the past
and finding the name of Jacob Sands. There was not enough money in the
world to pay me for besmirching the Tabor name, rightly or wrongly. But
I did not hint at my real reasons for refusing. I merely turned to
Father Horgan and asked him about another religious topic.
At last they became discouraged and took their departure. When I had
said good-bye and closed the door, I stealthily opened it again, just a
crack curiously wondering if I could hear any of their conversation. I
only caught one comment as they went over the hill. One of the lawyers
was saying to Father Horgan:
“Well, either that woman is the craziest woman in Colorado—or else she’s
the smartest!”
I closed the door and laughed merrily aloud.
“Indeed!” I exclaimed. “Well, I’m neither.”
I was an old woman, living on stale bread that I bought twelve loaves at
a time and plate boil which I bought in dollar lots. Plate boil is a
brisquet part of the beef, like suet, and very, very cheap, at the same
time that it generates heat. Lucille Frazier once asked me how I could
bear to live on such a diet.
“Oh, I find it delectable,” I answered, “really delectable.”
That statement was not entirely true. But my dainty palate that used to
have champagne and oysters whenever it wanted, had changed so much with
the hardships of life that it no longer craved delicacies. My tongue had
lost its taste for many sweetmeats and actually found this meagre
unappetizing fare satisfying—and certainly more satisfying than to
accept charity!
The Zaitz grocery kept me during these depression years in the necessary
groceries at a very cheap rate or on credit. In addition, their delivery
boys would often give me a lift from town to the cabin, sometimes
breaking a trail through the snow for me.
When I was sick, never anything more than a cold, I would doctor myself
with turpentine and lard, my favorite remedy for any ailment. And so I
managed. If I did not have enough coal or wood to heat the cabin, I
would go to bed for warmth. My Leadville friends generally kept an eye
out for me and helped me surreptitiously through the worst crises. In
these last years, there are many more friends than I could name.
So I have lived on—‘existed on’ would be a more correct statement. I
have been lonely, blue, often cold and starving in the winters, and
beset by many torments. But I have been sustained by a great faith and a
great love. I have lived with courage and a cheery smile for my friends.
As I look out over the abandoned shaft-houses and dumps of the fabulous
Fryer Hill ruins, over the partially deserted town of Leadville to the
glorious beauty of Colorado’s highest mountains, I know that I have
surely expiated my last sin and that I have fulfilled the trust my dear
Tabor put in me when he said:
“Hang on to the Matchless.”
_Farewell_
The last day anyone saw Mrs. Tabor alive was February 20, 1935. On that
morning, she broke her way through deep snow around the Robert E. Lee
mine which adjoined the Matchless on Fryer Hill, and walked the mile or
more into the town of Leadville. Her old black dress was horribly torn
and the twine and gunny sack wrappings on her feet were dripping wet
because she had repeatedly fallen through the lowest snow crust into the
melting freshets of running water beneath. The Zaitz delivery truck ran
her home and let her out in Little Stray Horse Gulch beyond the
abandoned railroad trestle (now gone), as close to the Matchless as it
was possible to get. She walked off through the snow, carrying her bag
of groceries and waving good-bye to the delivery boy, Elmer Kutzlub (now
the owner of his own grocery store in Leadville).