The Silver King and Baby Doe

Horace Tabor came to Colorado as an ordinary prospector during the gold rush of eighteen fifty-nine and became one of the richest men in the West, the so-called Silver King. His fortune came from Leadville, a silver boomtown high in the mountains. After grubstaking a pair of prospectors, he took a share of the Little Pittsburg mine, and later he owned the Matchless Mine, which poured out roughly a million dollars a year at the height of the boom in the early eighteen eighties.

Tabor spent lavishly, building grand opera houses in Leadville and Denver. He also divorced his first wife, Augusta, who had labored beside him through the lean years, and married a young divorcee named Elizabeth McCourt, known as Baby Doe. Their wealth did not last.

The repeal of federal silver purchasing in eighteen ninety-three collapsed silver prices and ruined the Tabors almost overnight. Horace died nearly penniless in eighteen ninety-nine. Legend holds that his dying wish to Baby Doe was to hold on to the Matchless.

She did. She lived out her final decades in a cabin at the mine in deep poverty, and she was found frozen to death there in nineteen thirty-five. The rise and fall of the Tabors became one of the defining legends of Colorado's silver age.