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Horace Tabor was Colorado's Silver King. He and his wife, Elizabeth "Baby Doe" McCourt, lived out one of the most famous success stories, and tragedies, of the gold-rush days.
That infamous, "from rags to riches, and back to rags", to often a common denominator of gold and silver millionaires.
He arrived in 1860 with his first wife, Augusta. For nearly 17 years, he prospected and operated a small, mostly unsuccessful store that sold supplies to miners. Augusta made most of the living, cooking for miners, taking in boarders and doing whatever she could in the wild, frontier town of Leadville. She was a devoted wife and courageous woman in a harsh wilderness that made her old before her time.
Suddenly, Tabor struck it rich(1877) when two prospectors he grubstaked discovered a rich silver vein. The "Little Pittsburgh Mine" was one of the biggest strikes in Leadville's history, and overnight Tabor was a millionaire.
He spent lavishly, buying silk nightshirts with diamond buttons, building opera houses in Leadville and Denver, dining nightly at Leadville's elegant Saddle Rock Restaurant.
That was where he met Elizabeth "Baby Doe" McCourt, an attractive blonde many years younger than he. And he decided to divorce Augusta.
It broke her heart. Although Tabor was no real catch, Augusta loved him deeply. She could not stand to remain in Leadville after the divorce, so she took a $300,000 settlement and went to California. It was a very small amount considering what Tabor was worth (probably making a million dollars a year).
Tabor and Baby Doe threw themselves into the good life, buying mansions, peacocks for the lawns, champagne breakfasts and whatever struck their fancy. Their wedding was in Washington, D.C., and attended by President Chester Arthur.
But Tabor was an easy mark for phony investment schemes and lost heavily to flim-flam men. He also had all his eggs in one basket, silver mines.
In 1893, when the government switched from silver to gold as the monetary standard, Tabor lost everything. He ended up on the streets of Denver, old and penniless, and died not long after the crash.
Baby Doe lived until 1935 in poverty at the Matchless Mine in a broken down shack. Telling her rags to riches story to whom ever would listen.
Baby Doe lived on in poverty for many years. The last thing Tabor said to her was, "Hang on to the Matchless," a Leadville mine he owned and believed contained gold.
It was worthless. But Baby Doe lived in a broken-down shack at the mine for the rest of her life. She was found frozen to death there in 1935.
By far the prettiest of six siblings born to Peter McCourt, Sr. and Elizabeth Nellis, "Lizzie" early on displayed a lively and independent spirit that combined a tomboy disposition with the skin and looks of a cherub. This interesting, for the mid-1800s, combination was best exemplified by her winning the Oshkosh Congregational Church figure skating contest, a distinction that was unheard of for a girl, much less a Catholic one, in the winter of 1876/77. That event brought her to the attention of Harvey Doe, Jr., whom she married shortly thereafter, and with whom she moved to Colorado.
Lizzie's Irish verve, and uncommon beauty brought her considerable attention wherever she traveled, but especially so among the rough and tumble elements of an isolated mining community such as Central City, where Harvey's father had a half interest in a mine he hoped Harvey would make profitable. Harvey's inability to make a living, however, forced his new wife to don miner's clothes and personally work a shaft of their Fourth of July Mine, which caused great distress around the, as yet, unliberated town. (Interestingly, feminist rhetoric, in the form of Lucy Stone, founder of the suffragist Woman's Journal came to Central City at about the same time.)
Despite raised eyebrows and clacking tongues, the miners of Central City recognized what a unique thing they had in the combination of Lizzie's gumption and her pulchritude. And just as their hard-edge frontier spirit often found its opposite in the playful, romantic names they gave their mines, the hard-rock denizens of Central City showed their deep appreciation by giving her the nickname that was to follow her down through the ages: "Baby" Doe--the miners' sweetheart.
Somewhere in the fall of 1879 Baby Doe attracted the attention of the newly wealthy Horace Tabor of Leadville, who caused her to leave Central City and her wayward husband behind. Over the next few years Horace grew increasingly estranged from his first wife Augusta, while his liaison with Baby Doe was becoming a matter of public knowledge. In 1882 they were married in a private civil ceremony in St. Louis, and married again in an opulent (and scandalous) public ceremony in Washington, D.C. the following March, at the conclusion of Horace's short term as U.S. Senator from Colorado.
The two lived lavishly, albeit shunned by "polite" society, for about fifteen years. They had two daughters and a stillborn son before Tabor's seemingly inexhaustible fortune evaporated in the "free silver" devaluations of the 1890s. Though Horace was employed as Denver's postmaster when he died in the Spring of 1899, Baby Doe spent the remaining thirty-five years of her life little better than impoverished in a cabin outside the Matchless Mine in Leadville. Still beautiful and relatively young, she could easily have remarried. She chose, instead, to "hold on to the Matchless," continuously seeking funds to "work" it, while scribbling page after page of her increasingly paranoiac and, ultimately delirious thoughts.
In early March of 1935, her frozen body was discovered on the floor of her cabin, her arms peacefully crossed on her chest. After a particularly cold spell, she had apparently run out of wood for her stove. By then, having been deserted by both of her daughters, she had nevertheless become a legend; the subject of a two books and a Hollywood movie. Eventually her story would find its way into two operas, a stage play (in German), a musical, a screenplay, a one-woman show and countless other books and articles.
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