Leadville: The Highest City and the Most Dramatic Crash

In the spring of eighteen seventy-eight, Horace Tabor grubstaked two prospectors about sixty dollars in groceries and supplies. Within months they had struck one of the richest silver veins in the San Juan Mountains, the Little Pittsburg. Tabor's one third interest in that mine made him roughly a million dollars when he sold it in eighteen seventy-nine, money he used to buy the separate Matchless Mine, which by eighteen eighty was said to be clearing eighty thousand dollars a month. He built an opera house in Leadville. He built another in Denver. He bought a townhouse and filled it with European furniture. He was the lieutenant governor of Colorado. He was the most celebrated man in the state.

Leadville in those years held thirty thousand people at ten thousand one hundred fifty-two feet above sea level, the highest incorporated city in the United States. The streets were mud and planks. The saloons ran around the clock. Silver came out of the mountains in quantities that seemed impossible, and the town spent it as fast as it arrived.

Then Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act on November first, eighteen ninety-three. The silver price collapsed overnight and did not recover. Within a year, Leadville's population had fallen by half. Businesses closed before the locks could be changed. Real estate that had sold for fortunes became worthless. The opera house stayed open but barely.

Horace Tabor died in eighteen ninety-nine with almost nothing. He had divorced his first wife Augusta, the woman who had actually built the commercial foundation of his fortune, to marry a younger woman named Elizabeth McCourt, whom Denver society called Baby Doe. By the time Horace died, there was not enough money to keep the estate together.

Baby Doe returned to Leadville and moved into a one-room shack at the Matchless Mine. She had been one of the most watched women in Colorado. She became a recluse. She stayed at the mine for thirty-five years, in increasing poverty and isolation, convinced that Horace had told her to hold on to the Matchless no matter what, convinced it would recover. A neighbor noticed she had not been seen in some time. Her body was found frozen in her shack in March of nineteen thirty-five.

Her story became a nineteen fifty-six opera by Douglas Moore. The mine is still there. The shack is still there. The mountain does not remember any of it.