Review by Sharon Chickering
Leadville novel – November 1995 – Colorado Central Magazine
All for Love: Baby Doe and Silver Dollar
by John Vernon
Published in 1995 by Simon & Schuster
ISBN 0-684-80731-2
A questionable divorce, a May-December marriage, the flouting of social mors, extravagant lifestyles: the story of Baby Doe and Horace Tabor is fascinating and provides a rich psychological study. But not in this book.
Most Colorado readers are familiar with the basics. Horace Tabor and his first wife Augusta were lured, as were many, by dreams of gold, and joined the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush in 1859. Finding more money in storekeeping and cooking, the Tabors spent time in various mining camps including Granite, Buckskin Joe, and Oro City (Leadville’s ancestor).
In 1878 Tabor grubstaked two prospectors who struck it rich, which gave him a one-third share in the productive Little Pittsburg Mine. His fortunes rose. Not long afterward, he met a beautiful divorcee, Elizabeth McCourt “Baby” Doe. He divorced Augusta — a messy affair — and married Baby Doe. Later their fortunes fell.
This has been the basis for an opera and it should make for a good novel. But except for a few flashes of insight, the text of All for Love is filled with overly graphic, disgusting sex/rape scenes and vulgar dialogue — appropriate, perhaps, for a bodice-ripper, but not for a fictionalized account of real people’s lives.
Many scenes were written only for their shock value, as though author John Vernon felt these lurid descriptions were the only way to lure people into the story.
I should have been warned of this emphasis when I read the title of the first section: “Firkytoodling.”
(According to the Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, by Eric Partridge, firkytoodle means “to indulge in physically intimate endearments, especially in those provocative caresses which constitute the normal preliminaries to sexual congress.)
Even that didn’t prepare me for the first page, where fourteen-year-old Baby Doe sits in the privy with her mother outside the door, listening to her perform her bodily functions.
I did not learn what attracted Baby Doe to Horace (other than his money, which ran out, and she stayed on, so there had to be more).
Instead I read that Tabor had “yellow claws [toenails] curled down under his feet,” that “his skin smelled of urine … as though it ran in his veins,” and that “he never trimmed the long claws on his fingers, which sliced [Baby’s] poor shoulders.” Is this the stuff of a love story? Baby Doe might have been an opportunist, but not a masochist.
If one can endure the unnecessarily crude scenes of the first half of the book, the second half gets better. Baby Doe’s poverty, her loss of touch with reality, and Leadville scenes during the Great Depression are all described authentically.
As for their younger daughter, Rosemary Echo Silver Dollar, we see her at age four as the family begins to slide into poverty, but not again until her mid-thirties in 1925, living in Chicago in a sordid world of prostitution, drug abuse, and violence.
How did she get there? We can only guess from this book. Her story is sad, and the book likely comes close to the truth, but why doesn’t it rate more development? She is, after all, one of the title characters.
What is probably most offensive to present-day Leadville residents is the emphasis on lurid sex.
Certainly it happened — the red light district on State Street functioned until World War II (and, some say, clear into the 1970s when State Street was Second Street).
But that’s not the whole story. Those miles of hand-drilled mine tunnels east of town couldn’t have come from men who spent all their time at orgies — the pioneer miners were also tough, hard-working, and God-fearing.
In the author’s note at the end of the book, Vernon writes: “my subject is the inner life… The inner life begins where historical knowledge ends, and utterly transforms that knowledge.”
Well, I looked for a glimpse of that inner life, but I didn’t find it. Vivid descriptions of intercourse were outer life that didn’t illuminate an inner life, and they left me no closer to understanding what it was that Baby Doe and Silver Dollar did “all for love.”
— Sharon K. Chickering.