Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,825

This is the grave of Horace and Baby Doe Tabor.

Born in 1830 in Holland, Vermont, Tabor grew up on the family farm up near the Canadian border. At the age of 17, he moved to Boston to be an apprentice to a granite cutter, which his brother had already done. So he did that and became good at it and moved around New England taking jobs in that field, including getting a job supervising the construction of the new insane asylum being built in Augusta, Maine. He eventually married the daughter of that guy, a woman also named Augusta. She was a committed abolitionist and he kind of was too and being in love and wanting to impress her, he went to Kansas to fight for the abolitionist cause when it was previewing the Civil War in the 1850s. He was involved in the defense of Lawrence from pro-slavery terrorists, while working as a stonemason to earn money. He finally married Augusta in 1857.

Like a lot of the Kansas abolitionists, including one John Chivington, he moved west to Colorado when the Gold Rush happened there in 1859. He had decided to make his fortune mining instead of as a stonemason and that led to a lot of years of seeking and living in hard camps, the fate of those whose lives get overtaken by the great rich quick scheme of finding the color. But they did OK because Augusta was pretty good at business and while he was out trying to find gold, she ran a successful inn that housed all these single men. So they built some capital that way and lived OK. They were in Leadville by the mid 1870s and Tabor was elected mayor there in 1877. Augusta ran a general store in town.

Well, one day in 1878, two miners couldn’t pay their bills at the store so they gave Tabor a 1/3 claim to their mine instead. He did this frequently and it drove Augusta crazy since these mines were almost always worth nothing. But this mine–the Little Pittsburg–went gangbusters. It was a huge bonanza and Tabor became one of the richest men in America. He made over a million off that mine alone and invested heavily into other silver mines in the area and then across Colorado. Silver was his specialty and he funded good stakes and was worth more than $6 million by the next year, which is something around $200 million today. He became a big spender and big investor and did everything big. He built up Leadville, including the opera house that still exists today. He bought millions of acres in eastern Colorado for cattle investments. He became a big time early investor in Honduras, mostly in the tropical wood trade, but also bananas. He bought a big parcel of land in Texas to develop for expected copper mining. He partnered with Marshall Field in Chicago for financial investments.

A good Republican, Tabor also moved up in the Colorado political world, now a new state. He became Colorado’s lieutenant governor in 1879 and served a term. In the middle of that, he was selected to complete Henry Teller’s term in the Senate, which was just a couple of months after Teller left to become Secretary of the Interior under Chester Arthur. So he kept the LG job too.

So you’d think Tabor would be the typical Gilded Age capitalist, blah blah. But no. For a man and a political party who talked such a big game about personal moderation and self-control, Tabor couldn’t handle being rich. He wanted to party and party he did. He became an absolute raconteur, gambling and womanizing. This put him in greater conflict with his wife, who was absolutely the brains of the operation. She wanted him to do things such as invest his money and take life seriously. He wanted to have affairs with showgirls.

One of the women Tabor had an affair with was Elizabeth McCourt, also buried here. She was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in 1854, married young, and moved to Colorado with her loser husband. Known to all as Baby Doe, she was able to get a divorce due to his gambling and womanizing. Living in Leadville, she met Tabor and they fell in love. He divorced Augusta and married Baby Doe in 1883. That was the end of the political career. She was 29 and he might have survived marrying a 29 year old despite his own age if that was the only black cloud over his behavior, but it very much was not. Of course Augusta got a big payout and she remained rich for the rest of her life. Tabor did not.

Tabor and Baby Doe were no longer acceptable in high end social circles, but they had tons of money and they spent it like they would have it forever–mansions, furs, big trips. She became famous for her fashion sense. Tabor kept running for office, but he was no longer politically acceptable given who he married. Still, there was the money. But then the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed. That plunged the price of silver into the toilet and helped cause the Panic of 1893. It also destroyed the fortune of the stupid and significantly overextended Horace Tabor. He was back to nothing while his ex-wife was a millionaire investing in Denver real estate. I don’t know her response as all this was happening, but there must have been at least some enjoyment of his comeuppance and suffering.

Tabor never gained any of the money back. It didn’t help that he invested in lots of other stupid things that didn’t pan out and didn’t pay any attention to his money. He and Baby Doe had to go back to hard labor. Tabor returned to actual physical mining. In 1898, he was named Denver’s postmaster to give him something and he lived in a hotel. But he died the next year, at the age of 68. Baby Doe moved to the one piece of property he had held onto–the Matchless Mine in Leadville. She became an almost ghostly figure, living in a tiny cabin completely unequipped for a Leadville winter, which is over 11,000 feet in elevation. She lost her mind, wandered around the town in bare feet, and eventually froze to death in the cabin in 1935. She was 78 years old.

I know a lot of people in the Colorado public history world and they mostly hate this story because it’s the kind of thing that old white people just can’t get enough of, want to ask questions about, and ignore actual important things that have happened in the state to focus on. It’s the Colorado equivalent of the endless obsession about the Oregon Trail pioneers in Oregon or the burning of the Gaspee in Rhode Island (or for that matter, how everyone here with family that goes back more than two generations is a descendant of Roger Williams and really wants to talk about it…)–the sort of historical story that actually doesn’t mean very much but which captures the imagination of a very particular kind of person engaging in a history in a very particular kind of way, and the kind of way that gets you on local historical society boards.

Horace and Baby Doe Tabor are buried in Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery, Wheat Ridge, Colorado.

If you would like this series to visit other people involved in American mining, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Jafet Lindeberg is in Colma, California and James Marshall is in Coloma, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.