Baby Doe Tabor

1878. Pampered Baby Doe proves tougher than anyone imagines when she finds herself abandoned, pregnant and running a gold mine alone. Her pluck gains the admiration of Silver King Horace Tabor, married, twice her age, and running for U.S. Senator. When scandal and economic ruin threatens Tabor's life, Baby Doe must make a painful choice.

The story of Baby Doe Tabor has seduced America for more than a century. Long before her body was found frozen in a Leadville shack near the Matchless Mine, Elizabeth McCourt “Baby Doe” Tabor was the stuff of legend. The stunning divorcée married Colorado’s wealthiest mining magnate and became the “Silver Queen of the West.” Blessed with two daughters, Horace and Baby Doe mesmerized the world with their wealth and extravagance. But Baby Doe’s life was also a morality play. Almost overnight, the Tabors’ wealth disappeared when depression struck in 1893. Horace died six years later. According to the legend, one daughter left home never to return; the other died horribly. For thirty-five years, Baby Doe, who was considered mad, lived in solitude high in the Colorado Rockies. Baby Doe Tabor left a record of her madness in a set of writings she called her “Dreams and Visions.” These were discovered after her death but never studied in detail—until now. Author Judy Nolte Temple retells Lizzie’s story with greater accuracy than any previous biographer and reveals a story more heartbreaking than the legend, giving voice to the woman behind the myth.

This is a fascinating autobiography of Baby Doe Tabor, the second wife of pioneer Colorado businessman Horace Tabor, whose rags-to-riches and back to rags again story made her a well-known figure in her own day, and at one time hailed as the “best dressed woman in the West.” It was during Baby Doe’s final years of her life living in a shack on the site of the Matchless Mine, enduring great poverty, solitude, and repentance, that fellow Coloradan Caroline Bancroft met Baby Doe, who had known Bancroft’s father for many years, and became fascinated by her “smile, the manner, the voice and the flowery speech [...] despite her diminutive size.” Following Tabor’s death in the Matchless Mine cabin on March 7, 1935, Bancroft was commissioned to write her biography, her greatest source of information provided by Sue Bonnie, who had discovered Tabor’s body. This book, originally published in 1955, is the result: “Baby Doe Tabor tells us of her life in nearly her own words—many she actually used in talking to Sue Bonnie and others I have imagined as consonant with her character and the facts of her story.”

Elizabeth Bonduel McCourt was born in 1854 in Wisconsin. She moved west, married a man named Harvey Doe, and came to be called "Baby" by the miners in Central City, Colorado. After attracting the attention of wealthy Horace Tabor of Leadville, she began a very public affair with Tabor ending with marriage in a private ceremony in 1882. A lavish lifestyle ended after fifteen years with loss of the Tabor fortune in the Silver Crash and Horace's death in 1899. Baby Doe spent the last thirty-five years of her life in a small cabin outside the Matchless Mine in Leadville.

The laws of survival always trump the rules of etiquette. Every age has its iconic blonde bombshell. In the 1880s, it's Baby Doe, America's original gold digger. At a time when genteel ladies could politely starve to death, Baby Doe seeks her fortune the best way she knows how-marrying a rich man. She joins the rush to the Colorado silver bonanza and meets millionaire mine owner Horace Tabor. Baby Doe enjoys the high life as his paramour, but Tabor's wife and his business manager plot to get rid of the new girl. Baby Doe, however, has schemes of her own to upend Horace's old relationships and become the one and only Mrs. Tabor. But fate sweeps in and avalanches Baby Doe's dreams. What price will she pay for becoming The Mrs. Tabor? Based on a true story, The Mrs. Tabor seduces with a scandalous tale of love and fortunes found and lost.

The Silver Baron¿s Wife traces the rags-to-riches-to-rags life of Colorado¿s Baby Doe Tabor (Lizzie). This fascinating heroine worked in the silver mines and had two scandalous marriages, one to a philandering opium addict and one to a Senator and silver baron worth $24 million in the late 19th century. A divorcée shunned by Denver society, Lizzie raised two daughters in a villa where 100 peacocks roamed the lawns, entertained Sarah Bernhardt when the actress performed at Tabor¿s Opera House, and after her second husband¿s death, moved to a one-room shack at the Matchless Mine in Leadville. She lived the last 35 years of her life there, writing down thousands of her dreams and noting visitations of spirits on her calendar. Hers is the tale of a fiercely independent woman who bucked all social expectations by working where 19thcentury women didn¿t work, becoming the key figure in one of the West¿s most scandalous love triangles, and, after a devastating stock market crash destroyed Tabor¿s vast fortune, living in eccentric isolation at the Matchless Mine. An earlier version of this novel won the PEN/New England Discovery Award in Fiction.

Forget everything you thought you knew about Mrs. Elizabeth Bonduel Tabor. For over 80 years, historians and authors alike have filled dozens of books describing her as crazy or mad. They claim that Mrs. Tabor spent 36 years living the life of a hermit, inside an old tool shed, located at a Silver Mine she didn't even own...but nothing could be farther from the truth. Marrying first for money, then engaging in two scandalous affairs, Elizabeth Tabor set social protocol aside to become the Silver queen of Colorado, before her world came crashing down. Following the death of her second husband and with two children to feed, she held her head high and fought the corrupt men who stole her deceased husband's fortune and rebuilt a new life for her daughters. Building her own alliances and becoming a successful business woman and mine owner, she watched in despair as her oldest daughter married a close family member, while her youngest daughter slid into alcoholism and prostitution. Desperate for a distraction, Elizabeth Tabor spent the warm Colorado months dressing in men's overalls and digging silver ore from her mines by hand, until just before her death at the age of 80. From running inside a burning apartment building to save a cat, dressing nude roman statues in lingerie to piss off the neighbors, fighting alongside the Unsinkable Molly Brown for women's rights and chasing away trespassers with a loaded shot gun, Elizabeth Tabor held onto her pride and her Catholic faith with firm fist, until her dying breath.

The passionate, compelling and magnificently authentic story of the first woman in the camps of the Colorado silver mines, and how her strength and courage helped her endure through one of the biggest scandals of the time.