Review by Lynda La Rocca
Local History – June 1995 – Colorado Central Magazine
My Search for Augusta Pierce Tabor – Leadville’s First Lady
by Evelyn E. Livingston Furman
Quality Press, Denver
ISBN 0-9635005-0-3
AUGUSTA PIERCE TABOR, first wife of Leadville founder and 19th-century silver baron H.A.W. Tabor, is often described as a cold, unattractive shrew who drove her flamboyant, philandering husband away with her prudish outlook and frugal ways. Indeed, one of the best-known portraits of Augusta underscores this view, depicting a severe, matronly woman with thin lips, tightly coiled hair, and pince-nez perched firmly on her sharp nose.
Evelyn E. Livingston Furman, the owner of the Tabor Opera House in Leadville, was convinced that there was another side to this remarkable Colorado pioneer who followed her husband from Maine to Kansas Territory and finally to Colorado, enduring the endless hardships inherent in frontier life.
So Furman set out to find the “real” Augusta. Her search led to the house in Maine where Augusta was born and raised, to Kansas where the Tabors lived in a 12- by 16-foot cabin and eked out a living as farmers, through Colorado, scene of their greatest triumphs and deepest pain, and finally to France, where Augusta’s descendants live today.
In the process, Furman discovered an Augusta whose courage, determination, and perseverance matched those of any pioneer.
The 82-year-old Furman, a self-described “keeper of the Tabor flame,” previously wrote books on the Tabor Opera House and the tragic saga of Rosemary Echo Silver Dollar Tabor, Horace Tabor’s younger child from his second marriage.
My Search for Augusta Pierce Tabor, the third of Furman’s self-published books on the Tabors, follows a pattern similar to her previous undertakings. It is peppered with outstanding historical photographs, including some rare and previously unpublished pictures of Augusta as a somber, big-eyed child and an exceptionally attractive softly smiling young woman. It includes excerpts from Augusta’s own diary, along with accounts of Augusta’s and Horace’s lives taken from various period sources. It chronicles Furman’s encounters with many people who aided her research. It even contains a complete genealogy of the Pierce family.
Here is Augusta recounting her first sight of the cabin in “Bleeding Kansas” that her husband built for her: “Why I felt so badly I could not tell, for I had not been deceived. I knew just the size of the house; I also knew that it stood out upon an open prairie. I could not realize how lonely it could be.” Two decades later, the eagerness of Colorado churches to secure the membership of the now-wealthy Tabors elicited this wry remark: “I suppose Mr. Tabor’s and my souls are of more value than they were a year ago.”
UNFORTUNATELY, Furman is so close to her subject that she tends to forget that readers may not be as familiar with the Tabor saga. She neglects to explain that, although the Tabors originally sought gold in Colorado’s mountains, their wealth came from silver, providing only brief and indirect mention of this crucial fact. She similarly fails to explain the eventual loss of H.A.W. Tabor’s fortune. Throughout the book, the name of the Little Pittsburgh silver mine, a mine pivotal to the entire Tabor story, is misspelled. Yet despite factual errors and omissions, a choppy narrative and a tendency to invent extraneous conversations, Furman’s fascination with her subject, and her dedication to the Tabors, shine through.
My Search for Augusta Pierce Tabor is a valuable addition to the trove of Tabor materials and a loving tribute to Augusta Tabor, Leadville’s “first lady” and a memorable historical figure too often overshadowed by Baby Doe.
— Lynda La Rocca