Baby Doe's Vigil at the Matchless Mine

Augusta Tabor had managed the grubstake store in Leadville, the commercial operation that funded the prospecting that made Horace Tabor his first fortune. She kept the books. She extended credit to the right people. She built the social infrastructure of a boom town in a high-altitude valley where winter lasts seven months. When Horace divorced her in eighteen eighty-three to marry a younger woman, Augusta received a settlement but not a share proportionate to what she had actually contributed to the Tabor wealth. She went to Denver, managed her own investments with more discipline than Horace ever managed his, and outlived the fortune by years.

The woman Horace married is the one Colorado remembers. Elizabeth McCourt, called Baby Doe by the Denver society that had made her a spectacle, received a grand wedding at the Willard Hotel in Washington with senators in attendance. She wore diamonds. She wore them to the opera. She wore them until there were no more operas she could afford to attend.

After Horace died in eighteen ninety-nine with debts exceeding assets, Baby Doe made a decision that historians have spent a century analyzing. She returned to Leadville. She moved into a one-room shack at the mouth of the Matchless Mine, the claim Horace had loved most. She stayed for thirty-five years. She did not leave. She wore rags wrapped around her feet in winter. Neighbors occasionally brought food. She wrote in journals that became increasingly difficult to follow.

A neighbor noticed she had not been seen. She was found frozen in the shack on March seventh, nineteen thirty-five.

The shack is preserved at the Matchless Mine site east of Leadville. The journals are at the Colorado Historical Society. The opera composed about her life, The Ballad of Baby Doe by Douglas Moore, premiered in nineteen fifty-six and is still performed.