by Francisco A. Rios
(Editor’s note: Dr. Rios, a retired professor from the University of Colorado at Denver, spent 805 volunteer hours over a span of one year and seven months cataloging hundreds of letters from the Tabor Collection at the Colorado Historical Society (CHS) onto a computer database. Over the next several months we will be reproducing some of these letters as a series with the generous permission of the CHS.)
Why would you, the readers of Colorado Central, want a reintroduction to the Tabors? Can’t many of you recite the Tabor tale of rags-to-riches-to rags by memory, citing chapter and verse? Haven’t scores of you been up to Fryer Hill and seen Horace’s Matchless Mine and Baby Doe’s cabin? Is there more to say about the Tabors?
Yes, there is more. This series will introduce the Tabors in a different light, as seen through their letters to each other and to friends, strangers and business associates, and through newspaper articles.
As a part-time volunteer at the Colorado History Museum, I expended 805 hours over a span of one year and seven months reading the thousands of documents in the Horace Tabor collection and typing into a computer file a one- or two-sentence summary, previously written, of each document.
Based on those hours of reading, the series will reintroduce the Tabors—Horace, Baby Doe, daughters Lily and Silver Dollar, and the first Mrs. Tabor, Augusta. But the series begins not at the beginning of the Tabor saga, but at the end, with the death of the main protagonist, Baby Doe. The series takes this backward approach because the first order of business is to dispel the popular notion of Baby Doe’s lonely tragedy up on Fryer Hill.
True, Baby Doe wore rags for shoes and she may have frozen to death in her cabin, but she deliberately chose her way of life at the Matchless and she would abhor our pity today just as she refused charity throughout her life.
Lee Taylor Casey, a fine columnist for the Rocky Mountain News, wrote the following tribute to Baby Doe at the time of her death in March, 1935. (It was pasted into one of the scrapbooks that Clara Layton Ellis presented to the Colorado State Historical Society in 1954.)
Baby Doe Tabor did not actually die alone in that shanty on bleak Fryer Hill in Leadville. With her, an epoch died. She exemplified the indominitable spirit which was once the West. With her passing, that spirit is finally extinguished.
It is a grievous mistake to feel sorry for Mrs. Tabor because her last years were packed with hardship. She was no weeping Apple Mary. She was able to look good or evil fortune full in the face, and to meet either with independence and determination. She was not to be pitied. She was greatly to be envied.
People said Mrs. Tabor did not have to live in that crude board shack; did not have to cut her firewood from the mountain pines; did not, at 81, have to trudge far for water and haul it painfully up the jagged slopes of Fryer Hill.
People said there were many who would have helped her—many whom she and her husband had helped in prosperous days and who were eager to return those benefactions.
But these people were wrong. Baby Doe did have to live just where she lived, and exactly as she lived.
This compunction did not come alone from respect for her husband’s memory or from devotion to his Matchless Mine. Still less did it come from a sentimental throwback to earlier, better times. There was little sentiment, and no sentimentality, in the whole drama. She was living her life in her own way, asking or permitting help from no one, because her very nature compelled her do to so.
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The Material Era
To us, her final tragic years seem to represent a strange sort of self-sacrifice. But the people of her time would have known exactly what she was doing and why she was doing it. She wanted and enjoyed that which was hers, and hers only. Not for her the crumbs from the tables of Dives.
There probably was never a happier woman than Mrs. Tabor when she rode along Pennsylvania Ave. behind that famous pair of bays, herself bejeweled, her husband a multi-millionaire senator. These things were hers, and she had a right to them. She relished, with exceeding zest, what only money can buy—fine foods, wines, expensive gowns, display. A true pioneer, she took small account of spiritual values. She flourished in an era of acquisition—acquisition of material possessions. She was a symbol of her time.
* * *
Keeping the Rules
And she was consistent. If she was proud when her husband’s fortune was piling up at the rate of thousands a day and presidents and cabinet members were eager to do her honor, she was equally proud when rough denim had replaced her silks and laces, clapboards and gunny-sacks appeared instead of tapestry upon her walls, and in place of a lackey bringing her a goblet of wine she went, pick in hand, to chop ice from a pool that she might drink. Such pride—unyielding to the end—was the key to her character.
The men and women of the lavish productive days of her youth were not over-troubled by questions of ethics. They looked straight to what they wanted. So did she. Like the others, she wanted wealth and position. She won in the game, and enjoyed her winnings.
But, either as winner or loser, she was able and ready to abide by the rules. The rules prohibited whimpering and whining. She would not and did not take what she had neither earned nor won. She played the game out; that was what her spirit impelled her to do.
* * *
The Only Change
A year or so ago, the premier of a million-dollar movie was held in Denver. Mrs. Tabor was the central figure of the play, which bore the name of her dead daughter. Mrs. Tabor, in stark privation, was offered $1,000 to attend the opening performance. She would have been useful as part of the exploitation.
She stayed in character, and rejected the offer, to the utter astonishment and amazement of Hollywood, which is the symbol of today as she was the symbol of yesterday.
Starving in a hut, while $1,000 was hers for the taking! Refusing relief from friendly neighbors—or the federal government! No wonder people said she was eccentric; no wonder they feared her mind had gone.
But she was not eccentric; her mind was still strong and hard. She had not changed. Her outlooks, her beliefs, her rules of the game, her standards were the same.
Only the world about her changed.
Next Month – The Changing Fortunes of the Tabor Family
Dr. Francisco A. Rios is a Colorado native who taught Spanish literature, culture, civilization and language for 30 years at the University of Colorado at Denver. He was also Chairman of the Dept. of Modern Languages for ten of those years. He is now a volunteer for the Colorado History Museum and for the Denver Police Department.