Review by Ed Quillen
Tabor Legend – December 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
Baby Doe Tabor – The Madwoman in the Cabin
by Judy Nolte Temple
Published in 2007 by the University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN 0806140356
THE SAGA OF Horace Austin Warner Tabor and Elizabeth Bonduel McCourt Doe Tabor started more than a century ago, and so far there’s no sign that the public will lose interest. In a way, it’s a simple story with three main characters: Hod Tabor, the storekeeper who struck it rich in Leadville; Augusta Pierce Tabor, the faithful and hard-working wife he forsook; and Baby Doe, the voluptuous ex-wife of ne’er-do-well miner Harvey Doe.
The story has been told often in articles, pamphlets, movies, and books, and even in a full-bore opera, The Ballad of Baby Doe. Nonetheless, some mysteries remain.
Start with Horace. Folklore often portrays him as boorish and illiterate, but he was something of a respected leader among men long before he struck it rich. He was elected to the Kansas Territorial Legislature in 1856, and in early 1878, the storekeeper and postmaster was elected the first mayor of Leadville, some time before the Little Pittsburgh Mine started producing vast quantities of silver.
Horace was extravagant and boisterous with his new wealth; Augusta preferred a quiet and restrained life. Back in Oshkosh, Wisc., in 1877, Lizzie McCourt and Harvey Doe married and headed west to Central City, Colorado, to strike it rich. Perhaps on account of her big eyes and cherubic face, she became known as “Baby” Doe. Harvey wasn’t much of a miner, the marriage faltered, and Lizzie Doe decided to check out the booming silver camp of Leadville.
She was accompanied on that trip by a fellow named Jake Sandelowsky (generally he used “Sands” as a surname), and her exact relationship with him remains unknown. In Leadville, she hooked up with Horace. They married ostentatiously in 1883 in Washington, D.C., with President Chester Arthur at the ceremony, after Horace’s political donations had put him in the U.S. Senate
Was she a gold-digger who set her sights on the silver baron and lured him into her clutches? Or did Horace espy the buxom divorcée and lure her into his clutches? History has no answer.
THE ROMANCE OF THE SAGA is that Lizzie (she called herself that, never Baby Doe, according to this book) stayed with Horace after the price of silver collapsed in 1893 and left him penniless. After his death in 1899, she was 45 years old, an age where she could have remarried.
But instead, she moved back up to the decaying Matchless Mine on the east side of Leadville, where she was found dead and frozen in March of 1935. She didn’t own the mine, for it had been foreclosed, but she chased off intruders. She wasn’t a total recluse, as author Judy Nolte Temple points out, but few Leadvillites would speak to outsiders about her.
The Madwoman in the Cabin is a new look at Lizzie Tabor. Part of the book examines her role in popular culture, how a complex wife and mother became something of a stereotype, first as a sort of “blonde bombshell” and then as a bizarre hermit. The book also explores some of the continuing fascination — that is, if you want to get people into a museum, be sure to feature a Baby Doe exhibit.
The book can get dense in places: “The mesmerizing figure of Baby Doe is the fulcrum upon which the entire western morality play balances. She is as complex and contradictory as her name: part innocent babe playing with fire, part ex-Mrs. Doe, prowling divorcée. If she is the sinful seductress of a married man, her fall is deserved punishment. However, if her only sin is her irresistible beauty, leading to ill-fated love, then her fall is tragic. Each person who attempts to tell the story — including myself — burdens Baby Doe with their ideologies regarding gender dynamics, the West, sexual power. Her comely silhouette acts like a Rorschach test administered to each generation, revealing which issues about female sexuality vex it. In her role as the younger woman, Baby Doe is Horace’s (and every man’s) dream and every wife’s nightmare. For men, however, the nightmare occurs when a woman crosses the line between being the beautiful object of male desire and the threatening sexual female so vividly portrayed in the film Fatal Attraction. The Baby Doe in [David] Karsner’s 1932 book and the film Silver Dollar is a sexual predator — perhaps the tool of ironic fate — who ruins the fortunes of Horace Tabor. In depression-era America, hungry for the splendor the book and film depicted, it must have been satisfying to see a millionaire plummet into ignominy and his trophy wife become a penniless widow.”
Temple also attempts to let Lizzie portray herself in her own words. The widow left bushels of writings, notes that she called “Dreams and Visions,” and some were in code.
Those which were printed in this book were seldom easy to follow. It’s obvious that Lizzie Tabor was a troubled woman: “Wednesday Aug. 12, 1925. Jesus our Divine Savior gave me a glorious dream this A.M. He sent Tabor & brother Stephen to me both so young strong & well & handsome & so prosperous fine & we were so happy & gay & I think Silver was with us in a lovely home & Tabor Stephen & I had lots of small rough bright things & different colors of Value — & I was in by stars & all happiness & prosperity and peace.”
LIZZIE AND HORACE had two daughters. Lily moved to Wisconsin to join the McCourts and was more or less estranged from her mother. Rose Mary Echo Silver Dollar Tabor died under seedy circumstances in Chicago; her mother told everyone that the dead daughter was living in a convent. This inspired some to think that Lizzie had lost contact with reality, long before anyone read her journals.
If you’re a Baby Doe buff, you’ll want to read this book, for it presents much that I hadn’t read before — though I must confess that I’ve seldom gone out of my way to read about the Tabor saga . I found this book slow-going, but a friend who has always been fascinated by the Tabor story loved it. If you’re a mere local history buff like me, you’ll likely wish it had more about Leadville and less about the gender politics of the 19th-century West. Madwoman has an academic tone, and the analysis is rather revisionist. Although Baby Doe may be a popular subject, this is not just a popular history.
