On Top of Old Matchless

By M.D.

THE LEGEND OF BABY DOE

by JOHN BURKE 273 pages. Putnam. $7.95.

The ruination of the Old West was the advent of good women, who shuttered the bordellos, sent the highrollers packing, and imported pianos and preachers in a wistful attempt to transform mining camps into mini-Philadelphias. Baby Doe was not one of them. A pocket Venus from Oshkosh and no better than she should be, blonde, blue-eyed Elizabeth McCourt Doe had shed a feckless husband and arrived in Leadville -- Colorado's Magic Mountain -- almost at the moment in 1880 when the played-out gold fields turned out to be mere icing on the world's richest slice of silver. She became "the Silver Queen" heroine of ballad and bawdy tale, an opera and dozens of books.

King of the mountain was Horace ("Hod") Tabor, a shambling boor and former storekeeper who had grubstaked two starving prospectors to $64.75 worth of provisions. Only ten months later, Hod wound up with the Matchless and other prodigious silver mines that were to earn him as much as $4 million a year -- in taxless 1880 dollars. After his first meeting with Baby, who had judiciously selected him as her private grubstake, Hardrock Horace bought off her current protector and made Baby Doe his mistress. No matter that he was 53 and she 23, or that he was married. It was conglomeration at first sight. After divorcing his wife, Hod married the designing Doe (her decollete bridal gown cost $7,500), and they set out to live lavishly ever after. In Denver, Hod built the lady a splendiferous mansion surrounded by a hundred peacocks, nude statuary (it later had to be clothed in deference to some Denver bluenoses), and carriages of every hue to suit her costume. He bestowed on her jewels that supposedly once belonged to Queen Isabella of Spain; in fact, they had been gathered by agents from New York hock shops. He built what was possibly the country's grandest opera house and imported for Denver's delectation almost every current luminary, from Sarah Bernhardt to Oscar Wilde (who bombed).

As this meticulously researched biography shows, Tabor also bought forests in Honduras, minelands in Mexico, and more and more real estate. In their ten years of marriage, Hod and Baby squandered some $12 million. He even figured that he could buy his way into the White House but got no closer to it than the U.S. Senate, where he served a blessedly brief term as an interim appointee. Then, in 1893, the U.S. went back on the gold standard; the price of silver, which had been supported by the Government, plummeted. In the depression that ensued, Tabor went broke even faster than he had made it rich. Five years later he died, penniless, but adjuring his wife: "Never sell the Matchless, Baby. When silver comes back, it will make millions."

Still an extraordinarily attractive woman at 33, Baby Doe refused to remarry--or rather, she remained faithful to the Matchless. For the next 30 years, she wooed lenders and lawyers, fought off creditors and dug relentlessly into her mine. To no avail. Finally, on March 7, 1935, she was found frozen to death in a mountain shack beside the shaft.

Spurned and mocked by the purse-lipped ladies of Denver, Baby Doe in death became as much a part of Western mythology as Annie Oakley or Buffalo Bill. Her shanty, sanitized and shined, has become a major tourist attraction, returning to Old Matchless in the form of visitors' coins some of the silver that once poured from its fabled veins.

M.D.

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