End of Baby Doe

On the evening of March 1, 1883, President Chester A. Arthur left the White House, stepped into his carriage, rolled around to Washington's Willard Hotel. There that New York dandy witnessed the wedding of Colorado's U. S. Senator Horace Austin Warner ("Silver Dollar") Tabor and Elizabeth Bonduel McCourt ("Baby") Doe. Diplomats and Congressmen were present. The beauteous young bride wore a pearl necklace for which the groom had that morning paid a fortune; it had, the guests were told, been part of the jewelry pawned by Queen Isabella to finance Christopher Columbus. The air was loud with the popping of champagne corks, heavy with the scent of thousands of flowers--"a massive wedding bell of white roses, surmounted by a Cupid's bow, with arrow on the string, tipped with a heart of violets. ... At either end of the table ... a colossal four-leaf clover in red and white roses and carnations."

Next day the Catholic priest who officiated, discovering that both bride and groom had been divorced, refused to sign the marriage license. President Arthur and the rest of Washington learned that the happy pair had been secretly married in Missouri some months before. The agents whom Tabor had sent abroad to find Queen Isabella's jewels, it developed, had never left the U. S. And on March 4 Tabor's 30-day term as Senator ended and he returned with "Baby Doe" to Denver.

At the time "Silver Dollar" Tabor counted his fortune at $100,000,000, was reputed the largest landowner in the world. Ten years later came demonetization of silver and panic. Tabor, in the belief that his silver mines would produce unending wealth, had squandered or gambled away some $12,000,000 in 14 years. Now he was ruined. Followed five years of humiliating poverty--"Baby Doe" stripped of her gorgeous gowns and jewels, "Silver Dollar" working occasionally with pick & shovel. In 1898 he was appointed Denver's postmaster, held the job a year. died. But only last week came an end to the story of the fabulous Tabors.*

A Vermont stonecutter, Tabor went West in 1855, opened a general store, made $1,300,000 out of a $64 grubstake to two German prospectors who struck silver. He bought the Matchless silver mine in Leadville, Colo, for $117,000, made $10,000,000 out of it. Coarse and lusty, he spent his money with equal pleasure on a million-dollar opera house in Denver, a $1,000 silk & lace nightshirt with gold buttons. Dazzled by his wealth was the belle of the mining camps. "Baby Doe," daughter of an Oshkosh, Wis. tailor. When the great Tabor began eyeing her blonde loveliness, she quickly cast off her impecunious young husband. Tabor married her, 30 years his junior, as soon as he could get rid of the aging Vermont wife who had struggled up to the rim of riches with him.

On his deathbed in 1899 Tabor whispered to "Baby Doe": "Hold on to the Matchless. It will make you rich again." Their daughter Elizabeth left her in prim disdain, still lives respectably in Wisconsin. Their daughter Rose Mary Echo Silver Dollar Tabor became a Chicago reveler. was scalded to death in 1925. "Baby Doe" stayed by the Matchless. Taking up lonely residence in a shack at the abandoned mine's entrance, high in the Rockies, she kept machinery, hoists and pumps ready to begin work any day. But most of her time for more than 30 years she spent crouching in her shack with a shotgun, waiting for interlopers. In 1927 a mortgage on the mine was finally foreclosed, but "Baby Doe" could not be driven off.

Last week her nearest neighbor, having failed to see her about for some time, broke into her shack. He found a rickety iron bed covered with old clothes, a rusty stove, a three-legged table propped up with a packing box. On the floor in rags lay the 73-year-old body of "Baby Doe." A coroner determined that she had frozen to death about two weeks before. She still had two dollar bills and a little silver.

*From David Karsner's highly-colored biography Silver Dollar was drawn the Edward G. Robinson cinema (TIME, Jan. 2, 1933). Last week The Press of the Pioneers published a more sober account, The Tabors: A Footnote of Western History by Lewis Cass Candy.

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