Title: Augusta Tabor: Her Side of the Scandal
Author: Caroline Bancroft
Release date: January 15, 2016 [eBook #50934]
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson, Dave Morgan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
By Caroline Bancroft Price 75c
Copyright 1955 by Caroline Bancroft. Fifth edition, 1968
All rights in this book are reserved. It may not be used for dramatic, radio, television, motion or talking picture purposes without written authorization.
Johnson Publishing Co., Boulder, Colorado
Caroline Bancroft is a third generation Coloradan who began writing her first history for The Denver Post in 1928.
Her long-standing interest in western history was inherited. Her pioneer grandfather, Dr. F. J. Bancroft, was a founder of the Colorado Historical Society and its first president.
His granddaughter has carried on the family tradition. She is the author of the interesting series of Bancroft Booklets, Silver Queen: The Fabulous Story of Baby Doe Tabor, Famous Aspen, Denver’s Lively Past, Historic Central City, The Brown Palace in Denver, Tabor’s Matchless Mine and Lusty Leadville, Glenwood’s Early Glamor, Augusta Tabor: Her Side of the Scandal, The Unsinkable Mrs. Brown, Unique Ghost Towns, Colorado’s Lost Gold Mines and Buried Treasure, and the basic, over-all history, Colorful Colorado.
A Bachelor of Arts from Smith College, she later obtained a Master of Arts degree from the University of Denver, writing her thesis on Central City, Colorado. Her full-sized Gulch of Gold is the attractive, definitive history of that well-known area.
She is shown standing beside the headgate at Lake Caroline on Mt. Bancroft, a Continental Divide peak named for her grandfather. The photo was taken by Charles Eaton in the summer of 1956.
STEPHEN L. R. McNICHOLS Governor of Colorado 1957-63
“She is a blonde, I understand, and paints. But I have never seen her.”
Augusta Tabor made this remark about Baby Doe in the course of a long interview that she gave to a reporter for the Denver Republican. The account appeared on October 31, 1883, and carried several heads. One of these read, “Mrs. Tabor No. 1 makes some spicy revelations.”
Augusta received her caller in the elegantly furnished sitting-room of her twenty-room mansion. The house stood at the corner of Seventeenth Avenue and Lincoln Street but faced Broadway. Its address was 97 Broadway, and was entered along a spruce-lined circular driveway. The house and its surrounding block of land had been part of her divorce settlement from the millionaire Silver King, Horace A. W. Tabor.
That divorce in the January preceding had been a national scandal, only to be topped by the even greater scandal of her former husband’s remarriage. The wedding was performed on March 1 in Washington where Tabor had gone to serve a thirty-day term as senator. It was attended by a number of political big-wigs, including President Chester Arthur; but they came without their wives. The women drew a sharp line against recognizing “that blonde,” the former Mrs. Elizabeth McCourt Doe.
The best people continued to draw that line. When the Tabors returned to Denver after their honeymoon, no one called on the second Mrs. Tabor. But shortly afterward Augusta came home from California where she had taken her broken heart. Two hundred and fifty people organized a surprise reception for her at her palatial residence.
But in the following months Augusta brooded.
“I do not consider myself divorced from Mr. Tabor,” she told the reporter. “The whole proceedings were irregular. If it were not for my son, 2 Maxcy, I would commence suit tomorrow to have the divorce annulled. I repeat, it was illegal.”
“Do you think Mr. Tabor would live with you if you were to have the divorce set aside?” the reporter asked.
“No, I couldn’t hope for that. But it would be a great deal of satisfaction to know that that woman was no more to him than she was before he gave her his name and mine.”
Augusta glanced over to the center table where she had laid down her sewing, a piece of silk patchwork. The reporter thought she looked lonely and sad-faced. Then she sighed.
“Well, there has been scandal enough, God knows. It would make a big volume if put in book form. It has aged me.”
A new chapter of the scandal was being enacted that week. Horace Tabor was suing his old friend and business manager, William H. Bush, for $25,000 because of sundry debts, including a $2,000 embezzlement as former manager of the Tabor Grand Opera House of Denver. Bush had retaliated with a counter-suit against Tabor, asking payment for all sorts of flagrant services performed for the Silver King. The juicy trial was the sensation of the week.
Augusta had been called to testify for Bush. Her testimony had been very titillating; and she had startled the court even further by crossing over and sitting down beside Tabor while she tried to engage him in conversation.
“Mr. Tabor has changed a great deal,” she commented to the reporter. “He used to detest women of that kind. He would never allow me to whitewash my face however much I desired to do so. She wants his money and will hang to him as long as he has got a nickel. She don’t want an old man.”
The reporter ventured the suggestion that the fifty-two-year old Tabor was not such an old man.
“Oh, yes he is! He dyes his hair and moustache. I noticed him in the court room the other day. He was afraid to draw his handkerchief across his mouth for fear of staining it. I also noticed that the hair on his temples, which is gray, was colored nicely to give him a rejuvenated appearance.”
Augusta and the reporter conversed for two solid columns of small, tightly-packed print while she revealed a number of intimate matters. The details of the secret, illegal, first divorce which Tabor had procured from her in March, 1882, were set forth. Augusta claimed the charges had been a lie from beginning to end and gave conclusive data in refutation.
“Mr. Tabor used to be a truthful man. He is changed now,” she remarked indignantly. After a pause, she continued with:
“I understand that she has her family quartered at his home. I mean all in this country. I understand that a fresh invoice is coming over from Ireland.”
The reporter smiled at her sally and encouraged her to talk on. She showed him three scrapbooks that she was making of clippings about Tabor. (These scrapbooks are now in the Western History Collection of the Denver Public Library, and contain this particular interview along with many others.) Augusta explained that at first she had only saved newspaper 3 articles that spoke well of him. But now she was saving everything, and the later clippings were all derogatory.
SILVER DOLLARS ATOP TABOR BUILDINGS
The two buildings on the left at the corner of Harrison, looking down Chestnut, were Tabor’s bank and store; in 1879’s booming Leadville.
“Is there really seventeen in that McCourt family? Well, there is one thing that Mr. Tabor cannot say, and that is that any of my relatives ever lived off him. Not one of them ever received a cent from him. That woman will break him up.”
Augusta liked to talk to newspaper people. She, herself, had contributed to Eastern newspapers and been a member of the Colorado State Press Association. In July, 1879, she attended a meeting of the Association at Manitou in company with Flora Stevens, a correspondent for the Kansas City Times. Miss Stevens later wrote Augusta up under the heading, “A Rich Man’s Wife,” in which she said that Augusta kept an extensive journal during the trip to Manitou. Unfortunately this particular example of Augusta’s authorship has not been preserved.
Augusta also liked to visit newspaper offices. In May, 1879, she brought a visitor, “her dainty niece,” Suzie Marston, to see the various departments of the Rocky Mountain News. This girl was from Augusta, Maine, the family home-town, after which Augusta had been named. Augusta took her niece on trips around Colorado and in 1889 chaperoned her on a diversified tour of Europe while they traveled with the George Tritches of Denver.
The first Mrs. Tabor’s habit of calling on writers has preserved for us a very fine autobiography. In September of 1883 Mrs. Alice Polk Hill of Denver, who had lived in Colorado for a decade or so, decided to compile a book by collecting reminiscences and informal bits of history. She spent 4 several months traveling about the state to obtain material. Sometime prior to the publication of her book in 1884, she arrived in Leadville and stayed at the Clarendon Hotel. Augusta, who was visiting her sister, Mrs. Melvina L. Clarke, in Leadville at the time, came to call.
Mrs. Hill was delighted and later described Augusta as a “frail, delicate-looking woman with pleasing manners.”
More importantly, Mrs. Tabor No. 1 wrote out a detailed account of her early marriage, much of which Mrs. Hill used in her first book, “Tales of the Colorado Pioneers,” but which has survived intact in the Denver Republican.
Her romance with Tabor, a Vermont stone-cutter, began in Maine in August, 1853, when Augusta L. Pierce was twenty years old and Horace Austin Warner Tabor was twenty-two. He came to work for her father, a contractor. After a couple of years’ employment he fell in love with the boss’s daughter. A two-year engagement followed while Tabor homesteaded a 160-acre farm in Riley County, Kansas.
“On January 31, 1857, we were married in the room where we first met,” Augusta recalled.
Farming in Kansas proved bleak, arduous and lonely for the twenty-four-year old bride, and unprofitable for her husband. When the news of gold in Colorado broke, the Tabors joined the rush. On April 5, 1859, they set out in an ox-drawn covered wagon with two men friends and their sixteen-month-old baby son, Maxcy, who was teething. They also took along several cows to provide milk. The journey to Denver took them until June 20. They camped there for two weeks because the cattle were footsore, and then moved to a site near Golden.
Here, the men decided to push on to Gregory Diggings, now Central City, and they went afoot since there was no adequate road for a wagon.
“Leaving me and my sick child in the 7 by 9 tent, that my hands had made, the men took a supply of provisions on their backs, a few blankets, and bidding me be good to myself, left on the morning of the glorious Fourth. My babe was suffering from fever and I was weak and worn. My weight was only ninety pounds. How sadly I felt, none but God, in whom I then firmly trusted, knew. Twelve miles from a human soul save my babe. The only sound I heard was the lowing of the cattle, and they, poor things, seemed to feel the loneliness of the situation and kept unusually quiet. Every morning and evening I had a ‘round-up’ all to myself,” Augusta wrote.
After three “long, weary weeks” the men returned. On the 26th of July they again “loded” the wagon and started into the mountains. Traveling by way of Russell Gulch, it took them three weeks to reach Payne’s Bar, now Idaho Springs. She remarked:
“Ours was the first wagon through and I was the first white woman there, if white I could be called, after camping out three months.”
The men cut logs, laid them up four feet and put the 7 by 9 tent on top for a roof. Horace went prospecting and Augusta opened a business. She baked bread and pies, gave meals and sold milk from their cows.
AUGUSTA SAT WITH A PRESIDENT IN A BOX
The Tabor Opera House in Leadville was the home of legitimate drama and provided many cultural evenings for early-day bonanza barons.
Horace found no gold, but Augusta was very successful. She made enough money to buy their unpaid-for farm in Kansas and to keep them through the winter in Denver. In February Horace returned to his prospect but found his claim had been jumped. He decided to go prospecting farther afield, on the Arkansas, and returned to Denver to make plans.
They traveled by way of Ute Pass and were a month on the road before they reached South Park. Now she waxed lyrical.
“I shall never forget my first vision of the park. The sun was just setting. I can only describe it by saying it was one of Colorado’s sunsets. Those who have seen them know how glorious they are. Those who have not cannot imagine how gorgeously beautiful they are. The park looked like a cultivated field with rivulets coursing through, and herds of antelope in the distance.”
After two hazardous crossings of the ice-caked and tumultuous Arkansas, and after several weeks of unsuccessful placering when they could not separate heavy black particles from the gold, they arrived in California Gulch. It was May 8, 1860.
“The first thing after camping was to have the faithful old oxen butchered that had brought us all the way from Kansas—yes, from the Missouri River three years before. We divided the meat with the miners in the gulch, for they were without provisions or ammunition.”
Once again Augusta was the first woman in the camp, and once again the men built her a primitive log cabin. This one had a sod roof, no window, and a dirt floor. She promptly went into business and Horace went 6 prospecting. As the Tabors were the only people in the upper end of the gulch who owned a gold-scales, Augusta added weighing dust to her duties of taking boarders and doing laundry. In a few weeks ten thousand men were crowded in the gulch, and a mail and express office was needed. Augusta was appointed postmistress of Oro City.
THE PASSAGE-WAY OVER ST. LOUIS AVENUE
The Tabor Opera House was connected with the Clarendon Hotel for the ease of Tabor and Bush who had private suites in the former.
“I was very happy that summer,” she added.
By September 20th Horace had accumulated $5,000 in gold dust from his claim. He gave $1,000 worth of this dust to Augusta, and she prepared to leave the mountains to spend the winter with her father and mother.
“I put my wardrobe, what there was of it, in a carpet bag, and took passage with a mule train that was going to the Missouri River. I was five weeks in crossing and cooked for my board.”
(Horace and Maxcy also went to Maine that winter but Augusta did not mention this.)
“With that $1,000, I purchased 160 acres of land in Kansas, adjoining the tract we already owned. My folks dressed me up, and in the spring I bought a pair of mules and a wagon in St. Joe to return with, which took about all my money.”
Horace spent the $4,000 that was left of the gold dust for flour in Iowa on the way back. In the spring they opened a store in Augusta’s cabin. While he mined the claim, Augusta waited on customers and raised her son. She even transported gold to Denver on horseback for the express office. In order to fool highway robbers, Tabor carried a small amount of gold, while large amounts were hidden under her skirts enjoying the protection of chivalry to ladies! That summer of 1861 the store was more profitable than mining because the easy placer gold was nearly played out.
MARRIED
In 1878 Tabor and his first wife were respectable citizens and suitably wed. He kept a general store in the booming mining town of Leadville and she, the mayor’s wife, had boarders to increase the family earnings and budget.
In those days the Tabor residence stood on Harrison Avenue; and can be seen toward the rear of this sketch, occupying the space between the Clarendon Hotel and some new stores. Augusta’s boarders would have looked exactly like these men. Although most of her boarders in 1878 were Tabor’s clerks, they spent every hour of their free time searching the hills for silver like everyone else. This was a typical prospecting outfit.
DIVORCED
Tabor hardly looks like the sort of Lothario who would have been the idol of two remarkable women. But such he was. Both wives were courageous, articulate and full of initiative, besides adoring. The first liked to work; the second to play. The first was downright; the second, flattering. The first hated to show off; the second loved the limelight. The first was economical and the second, extravagant. But both were unusual women who made history. A detailed treatment of the second Mrs. Tabor’s life will be found in the illustrated booklet, “Silver Queen: The Fabulous Story of Baby Doe Tabor.” It is a rags-to-riches and riches-to-rags tale, full of pathos.
The photographs of Horace Tabor and Baby Doe, below, have never been published before; also the photograph of Baby Doe on the next page. The following sketch of Augusta, as a young woman with curls, was printed with a write-up of the scandal in the national Police Gazette.
BITTER FOES
The first Mrs. Tabor, or the second, would tell her coachman to pass the other’s carriage if they saw each other out driving. Their enmity never relented the least bit during Augusta’s life.
The camp fell off rapidly and by autumn was practically deserted. The Tabors decided to try the other side of the Mosquito Range and the booming camp of Buckskin Joe. Again they opened a store and again it was selected as the post office. Horace had no better luck with mining in South Park than in Oro and so resigned himself to their small business venture.
But he still dreamt of bonanzas and hopefully grubstaked penniless prospectors. The agreement was that in return for supplies, which he gave them, they would share any rich finds. Augusta viewed the practice with disfavor.
When the Printer Boy mine was expanded in 1868 in California Gulch, the Tabors moved back to Oro City. This time they erected a four-room log cabin about a mile above the present site of Leadville and settled down to their usual routine of running a general store. For ten more years, bringing the total to eighteen, Augusta kept at her labors and Horace cherished his dreams.
As the years passed, Augusta’s natural New England frankness grew more tart. She found Horace’s easy-going ways irritating. His off-hand generosities made no sense to a woman who knew the value of a hard-earned dollar. Or, perhaps, some psychic intuition warned Augusta that that very same trait would bring her eventual heart-break, and she was trying subconsciously to ward off the blow.
The blow came disguised as good fortune. In 1877 the news leaked out that those heavy particles of black sand, which had been so difficult for the placer miners to separate from gold, were really bits of lead-silver carbonates. A second rush to California Gulch began. The newcomers were silver-seekers and chose the lower part of the gulch in which to settle. The Tabors decided to move their Oro City store a mile farther down, and selected a site on the south side of Chestnut Street, a door below the Harrison Avenue 10 corner. They built a story-and-a-half log and frame building with sleeping quarters upstairs, and dining and kitchen arrangements to the rear.
AUGUSTA’S HOUSE
This little clapboard dwelling originally stood on Harrison Avenue, Leadville, where the Opera House is now. It was moved to its present place on Fifth Street in 1879. In 1955 it was opened as a small shop-museum. It now stands alone on the block, but for many years it was huddled against a clapboard false-front assay office on one side and small residences on the other.
Business boomed. Tabor had to hire two clerks to take care of the post office alone. Soon he was forced to open a banking department since he owned an ordinary iron safe which sat outside the counter. Everyone wanted to deposit their cash in his safe. The cashier divided his time between the dry goods and grocery divisions, and the receipt of deposits and writing of exchange. Tabor hired still more clerks and expanded jovially in the balmy atmosphere of his new importance.
In January, 1878, the settlement comprised some seventy tents, shanties and log cabins. The inhabitants decided to call a meeting, effect an organization and choose a name. “Leadville” was selected, although a few people thought “Cloud City” was more poetic. A short while afterward they voted Tabor to the mayorship, and officially confirmed his year-long office with a city election in April. Tabor was now worth between $25,000 and $30,000.
As sleeping and eating facilities were at a premium, the Tabors decided to build a residence for themselves, where Augusta could serve meals, and to allow the clerks to sleep above the store. They chose a site at 310 Harrison Avenue, way off from the settlement, and began to build in the spring. Meanwhile Tabor was handing out grubstakes and still dreaming.
Then the momentous day of his Castles-in-Spain arrived. On Sunday, April 21, 1878, two German prospectors, August Rische and George Theodore Hook, asked him for a stake while Tabor was sorting mail. Postmaster Tabor told them to pick out what they needed, and the men chose about $17 worth of supplies, mostly groceries. They drew up an agreement that Tabor was entitled to a third of what they found.
A few days later they came back and asked for a second hand-out. They had staked a claim and they needed shovels, a hand-switch, drills and blasting powder to sink a shaft. This brought the total outlay to some $60.
FAST FRIENDS
Although Bush quarreled violently with both Maxcy’s father and mother, no friction ever marred their affection. They were business partners and friends for twenty years despite sixteen years’ difference in their age and outlook.
Early in May, Augusta was coming downstairs one morning when August Rische burst into the store. As she told the story to Flora Stevens, his hands were full of specimens. He rushed toward her and shouted:
“We’ve struck it! We’ve struck it!”
Augusta said she was rather frigid to him.
“Rische, when you bring me money instead of rocks, then I’ll believe you.”
But it was true. Their mine, the Little Pittsburgh, netted Tabor $500,000 in the following fifteen months. He bought the Chrysolite which proved to be another bonanza. Augusta continued to keep boarders during the summer and Tabor, to supervise the store’s activities. But then Tabor began to splurge, and in the autumn they sold out. The fall election had made Tabor lieutenant-governor of Colorado, so they planned to move to Denver.
In January, 1879, Tabor rented, and the next month purchased, the Henry C. Brown house at 17th and Broadway, paying $40,000. According to Augusta, when her husband took her to see it, she was very mindful of the quick rises and equally rapid descents of Colorado fortunes. Augusta took one look at her husband’s idea of a new home and said:
“I will never go up these steps, Tabor, if you think I will ever have to go down them.”
Thirty-five curious callers appeared the first day she was at home. She remarked sarcastically:
“I would scarcely know how to return the call of the woman next door who arrived in a carriage.”
Tabor provided the means for returning the call. It was a $2,000 carriage, an exact replica of the one driven by the White House coachman around Washington.
“La,” she told Flora Stevens, “If we had only had the money that is in that carriage when we began life.”
Delegations from the various churches also came to call, each seeking the Tabors’ membership. Augusta remarked:
TABOR PROPERTY DOMINATED DENVER IN 1881
The Tabor Grand rose like a cathedral beyond the spired church. At far right is Augusta’s house. The light building behind the present Navarre Restaurant is the Windsor Hotel. The tall business building in the middle was the Tabor block. The Brown was a triangular cow pasture. In front of it was Augusta’s coach house that faced Seventeenth Avenue.
“I suppose Mr. Tabor’s and my souls are of more value than they were a year ago.”
Poor Augusta! Time was running out. Tabor’s answer to her tartness was to spend his evenings in the variety halls and bordellos. As his interests and investments widened, he took the most seductive inmates traveling with him. The newspapers reported that Tabor had given clothes, jewelry, furs and furbelows to three or four women (one paper said five) so that they could appear as “Mrs. Tabor.” One that he singled out was Alice Morgan, an Indian club swinger at the Grand Central variety hall in Leadville. Next he was charmed by Willie Deville in Lizzie Allen’s parlor house in Chicago, and he brought Willie west with him. Augusta discovered the affair and the miscreants promised to part.
But this was a ruse. Tabor kept on seeing her secretly and took Willie on a trip to New York. There, she was so indiscreet about their relations that a woman in the hotel tried to blackmail the Silver King. Tabor told Willie she talked too much and made her a gift of $5,000 to soften the blow of saying “good-bye.” (Augusta preserved an interview, with many more details than these, that Willie gave to a St. Louis reporter a couple of years after the affair. Apparently, Willie was still talking too much.)
In September, 1879, Tabor sold out his interest in the Little Pittsburgh for a cool million dollars. He bought the Matchless for $117,000 (which later proved the greatest bonanza of all) and over 800 shares of stock of the First National Bank in Denver. Then he and Augusta went East for six weeks while he made further investments, notably land in South Chicago.
TWENTY ROOMS
Henry C. Brown, the builder of the Brown Palace Hotel and donor of the State Capitol ground, sold this house to Horace Tabor in 1879. Augusta’s first act, when she obtained it as part of her divorce settlement, was to have the grounds landscaped. Each summer thereafter she entertained at a lawn party to aid charities of the Unity Church.
On November 5 the Tabors returned to Denver and Horace left for Leadville to see to the completion and opening of the Tabor Opera House. Augusta remained in Denver. Tabor did not return even for Christmas. His bachelor suite on the second floor of the Opera House (with its handy passageway across to Bill Bush’s Clarendon Hotel) proved too delightful for a man whose eyes wandered.
Augusta and he began to quarrel more violently. During 1880 they appeared together at balls of the Tabor Hose Co. in Denver and of the Tabor Light Cavalry in Leadville, and when Tabor entertained ex-President and Mrs. Grant in the “Cloud City.” The two couples sat together in the left-hand box for the second act of “Ours,” and then left to attend a ball in the general’s honor. This was July 23, 1880, a momentous date for forty-seven-year old Augusta—not because she had met a president, but because just about that time Horace ceased to be her husband.
In the autumn, back in Denver, Horace gave her $100,000, following his usual practice of making a parting gift. In January, 1881, Tabor left the Broadway mansion irrevocably and established residence in a suite at the Windsor Hotel of which he was part-owner.
What had happened was that, some time during the spring or summer on one of his frequent trips to Leadville, Tabor had met “Baby” Doe. She was twenty-five and he was forty-nine. They were introduced by Bill Bush who had known the Dresden-doll beauty as Mrs. Harvey Doe during her two-and-a-half year residence in Central City. Bill Bush had been proprietor of the Teller House and had also known her husband and in-laws. She had obtained a divorce from Harvey Doe in March, 1880, for adultery and non-support, and shortly after arrived in Leadville.
Baby Doe said that it was “love at first sight” on her part. With Tabor, the feeling grew on him. She became his mistress almost immediately, but it was not until January, 1881, that he began to think of divorce and re-marriage. Augusta put her foot down. She refused successive overtures of a handsome settlement in return for a divorce.
Augusta knew what was going on. In December, 1880, she bought a third interest in the Windsor Hotel from Charles L. Hall of Leadville. The other third was owned by Bill Bush, who also managed the hotel, assisted by her son, Maxcy. In the next months Augusta used her ownership to 14 check up regularly on activities at the hotel. When Tabor brought Baby Doe down from Leadville and installed her at the Windsor, the two women must have passed in the lobby frequently.
AUGUSTA’S CORNER WITH TREES—THEN AND NOW
When Augusta disposed of her last remaining lot at Seventeenth and Broadway, her trees were sold and transplanted to Wolhurst, Littleton.
Augusta realized a fine monthly profit from her Windsor investment, and in April, 1881, she treated herself to a trip abroad for several months. Both Tabor and Bush wanted to buy out her share. Tabor did not like her making “such a damned nuisance of herself” going in and out of the rooms, and Bush wanted to obtain a controlling interest in the hotel. Augusta kept on saying, “No.” No divorce and no hotel sale.
When Augusta returned from Europe, she found her husband had risen to new heights. He was being considered for a senatorship and he had finished building the Tabor Grand Opera House in Denver. The citizens were tendering a ceremony and watch fob to him on the opening night.
Augusta wrote him a letter apologizing for what she “had said in the heat of passion.” She also asked to be allowed to come to the opening night of the Tabor Grand and to go with him to Washington as a senator’s wife. This letter turned up among Baby Doe’s papers at her death. No one knows how, or if, it was answered. But the Tabor box was empty on September 5, 1881, the gala occasion Augusta wanted to attend.
In April, 1882, Augusta instituted a suit for payment of $50,000 a year alimony despite the fact that she was not divorced. She listed Tabor’s holdings and their specific worth, an impressive tabulation, which brought the total to $9,410,000. The suit caused a lot of scandal, damaged Tabor politically, but accomplished nothing for Augusta since it was thrown out of court as illegal.
Augusta gave in on the hotel-sale petition first. She sold her interest in the Windsor to Bush for close to $40,000 in May, 1882. Finally, on January 2, 1883, she gave Tabor a divorce in exchange for property worth about $300,000. She caused a sensation at the divorce trial by reiterating:
“Not willingly, Oh God, not willingly!”
It was this public statement of hers to the judge which made her feel that the divorce was not valid.
Amos Steck, Augusta’s lawyer, summed up the whole five years of public quarreling and scandal when he talked about her to a reporter:
“Oh, she knows all about his practises with lewd women. I never saw such a woman. She is crazy about Tabor. She loves him and that settles it.”
For years Augusta hoped that Baby Doe would tire of Horace and, crestfallen, he would come back to his first wife. She thought that when the money was gone, the young hussy would flit. She told reporters she was building up her own fortune and hanging on to her large house in order that she might take care of Tabor in his old age.
But Augusta was wrong. She had underestimated her rival. When the Silver Panic of 1893 reduced the former millionaire to poverty, his pretty blonde wife stuck like glue.
Belatedly Augusta realized the true character of Baby Doe. In 1892 the first Mrs. Tabor sold her house on Broadway and moved across the street to the newly-opened Brown Palace Hotel. Although Maxcy and Bill Bush were the managers and lived there also, Augusta did not enjoy hotel life. Her health was starting to fail and she went to California for the winter, seeking a milder climate. There in Pasadena, on February 1, 1895, at the age of sixty-two she died, her social position still secure, if not showy, and her fortune built to a million and a half dollars.
She said in her own words when Tabor was at his richest:
“I feel that in those early years of self-sacrifice, hard labor, and economy, I laid the foundation for Mr. Tabor’s immense wealth. Had I not stayed with him and worked by his side, he would have been discouraged, returned to the stone-cutting trade and so lost his big opportunity.”
All Colorado agreed with her at the time—and then the mills of the Gods ground slowly and exceedingly fine. Tabor’s immense wealth evaporated.
But its going did not bring Horace back to her; he clung to Baby Doe until the end, four years after Augusta’s death. Never once was there the slightest rumor of any infidelity of his to her after 1881 and none of Baby Doe to him after their first meeting. It must have been galling to Augusta.
Maxcy Tabor inherited the money his mother had husbanded with such business acumen. He brought her body back from California and she was buried in Riverside cemetery. With the passage of the years Maxcy was laid to rest in Fairmount beside his wife; and Horace Tabor, in Mt. Olivet beside Baby Doe. Augusta lies alone in an old-fashioned cemetery, as alone as she lived her last fifteen years, terribly alone.
For many years of her middle life Augusta was called “Leadville’s First Lady.” The nickname was spoken in affection and in admiration, and she was interviewed for the Leadville papers under that heading. Yes, she was a first lady in many ways, courageous and industrious and civic. The tragedy of her life lay in the fact that, although she was beloved of many, she lost the key to the only heart she wanted.
Gulch of Gold: Her affection for and pride in Gregory Gulch shows in every line of this book.... The old photographs and maps are entrancing.... Marshall Sprague in the New York Times.
Colorful Colorado: Its Dramatic History: “... a remarkable feat of condensation ... ought to be a copy in your car’s glove locker.” Robert Perkin in the Rocky Mountain News.
Unique Ghost Towns: “This new Bancroft Booklet is the best yet.” Stanton Peckham in The Denver Post.
The Unsinkable Mrs. Brown: “Caroline Bancroft’s booklets are brighter, better-illustrated and cheaper than formal histories of Colorado.... The Unsinkable Mrs. Brown was a delightful person, and I wish I had known her.” John J. Lipsey in the Colorado Springs Free Press.
The Brown Palace in Denver: “Miss Bancroft has a sure touch and this new title adds another wide-selling item to her list.” Don Bloch in Roundup.
Denver’s Lively Past: “With zest and frankness the author emphasizes the dramatic, lusty, bizarre and spicy happenings.” Agnes Wright Spring in The Denver Post.
Historic Central City: “We could do with more such stories of Colorado’s fabled past.” Marian Castle in The Denver Post.
Famous Aspen: “It’s all here.... Aspenites should be grateful.” Luke Short in The Aspen Times.
Silver Queen: The Fabulous Story of Baby Doe Tabor: “Attractive, sprightly, well-printed book ... which is more informative and genuinely human than preceding works giving the Tabor story.” Fred A. Rosenstock in The Brand Book.
Tabor’s Matchless Mine and Lusty Leadville: “Seventh in her series of Bancroft Booklets retelling segments of Colorado’s history. They are popularly written, color-packed little pamphlets, and it’s a pleasure to commend them to native and tourist alike.” Robert Perkin in the Rocky Mountain News.
Six Racy Madams of Colorado: “This delightful booklet is written both with good humor and good taste.” Rocky Mountain News.
Colorado’s Lost Gold Mines and Buried Treasure: “The casual reader ... will find his own treasure buried in this little booklet.” Claude Powe in The Central City Tommy-Knawker.
(See back cover for prices)
A fictionized history, reading like a novel but of the soundest research, picturing the stories of colorful characters who started the state, with over 100 photos and maps. Hard cover book. $6.25
The whole magnificent sweep of the state’s history in a sprightly condensation, with 111 photos (31 in color). Paper, $2.00.
Forty-two of Colorado’s romance-packed high-country towns have their stories, told with old and new photos, history and maps. $2.00.
The rollicking story of an ignorant Leadville waitress who reached the top of Newport society as a Titanic heroine. Illustrated. $1.25.
Her love affair caused a sensational triangle and a national scandal in the ’Eighties. Illustrated. $1.50.
Colorado’s most publicized mine was just one facet of the extraordinary history of the lusty camp where it operated. Illustrated. 75c.
Today the silver-studded slopes of an early day bonanza town have turned into a scenic summer and ski resort. Illustrated. $1.50.
Colorado’s first big gold camp lived to become a Summer Opera and Play Festival town. Illustrated. 85c.
A wild frontier town, built on a jumped claim and promoting a red-light district, became a popular tourist spot. Illustrated. $1.00.
No hotel had more turn-of-the-century glamor, nor has seen such plush love-affairs, murders and bizarre doings. Illustrated. 75c.
Thirty fabulous tales, which will inspire the reader to go searching with a spade, enliven the state’s past. Illustrated. $1.25.
Biographies of six “ladies of pleasure” (whose parlor houses were scarlet ornaments to the state) make amusing reading. Illust. $1.50.
(Add 20 cents for mailing one copy; 30 cents for more than one)
JOHNSON PUBLISHING COMPANY
839 Pearl, Boulder, Colorado 80302