Baby Doe Tabor and the Matchless Mine.

When my husband and I visited Leadville, Colorado--click here to read that post--we decided to visit the legendary Matchless Mine site. In 1879, silver tycoon, Horace Tabor, had purchased the richest silver mine of the time, an investment that brought in $2 billion by today’s standards.  Prospectors had first come to the Leadville area looking for placer gold in the 1860s but it was soon depleted. Siver Carbonate was discovered in 1878 and by the 1880s Leadville was the world's premier silver producer and a thriving metropolis.

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We were also intrigued by the true saga of Baby Doe Tabor whose rags to riches to rags story was the subject of an opera "The Ballad of Baby Doe" that we saw a few years earlier in Central City, Colorado.  Baby Doe was born Elizabeth Bonduel McCourt in 1854, one of fourteen children to a family of moderate means in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.  She was known for her exceptional beauty of golden locks, large striking blue eyes, and petite figure.  She was also ambitious and wanted to marry out of poverty.  Elizabeth met and married Harvey Doe in 1877.  Harvey was an heir to a mining dynasty, as his father William Harvey Doe, Sr. owned a substantial number of mining claims in Colorado.  They moved to Central City, Colorado where her husband began mining for gold. The other miners found Elizabeth so beautiful that they started calling her “Baby Doe,” and the nickname stuck. After three years, her husband fell into debt and began drinking and soon afterward Baby Doe sued him for a divorce. She moved to Leadville, where she met the "Silver King," Horace Tabor, who was twice her age. They fell in love, but Tabor was married at the time and he divorced his wife of twenty-five years, Augusta, so that he and Baby Doe could be married in 1883.  Baby Doe's extravagant silk $7,000 wedding dress is part of the History Colorado Center's collection, and you can see it and read the interesting story about it on this link.

The couple became known as “The Silver King and Queen,” for living an elaborate life together in a Capitol Hill mansion in Denver. They had two daughters, Elizabeth, known as “Lily” and Rose Mary, known as “Silver Dollar.” Many of Denver’s elite disapproved of the Tabors and they especially shunned Baby Doe. Tabor's divorce and remarriage to the young and beautiful Baby Doe was the biggest scandal of the 1880s in Colorado. 
Tabor was one of the wealthiest men in Colorado, supporting his wife in an extravagant and lavish style, showering her with jewels and expensive clothes. Unfortunately, he eventually lost his fortune when the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act caused the Panic of 1893 depression, which resulted in widespread bankruptcies in silver-producing regions such as Colorado. He was destitute when he died in 1899, and Baby Doe returned to Leadville with her two daughters, living out the rest of her life there.

Legend has it that on his deathbed, Horace told Baby Doe to "...hold on the Matchless mine … it will make millions again when silver comes back." Baby Doe, loyal to her husband and hoping to regain her wealth, moved to Leadville to oversee the mine and got permission from the eventual new owners to live in the supply cabin at the Matchless Mine. Baby Doe spent the rest of her life in the small one-room cabin as seen in the photo above.

Inside the cabin

For nearly thirty-six years following Tabor's death, Elizabeth struggled to profit from the Matchless Mine. She was able to lease the property for various iron, zinc, manganese, and silver ore mining operations, though it never produced what it had during Leadville's great silver boom days. In her later years, Elizabeth became somewhat of a recluse and was seen wandering in Leadville, wearing rags on her feet.  After a snowstorm in March 1935, she was found frozen in her cabin, aged about 81 years.

Sadly, after her death, vandals broke into Baby Doe's cabin and stole everything. Many were looking for her legendary jewels, but most likely they had all been sold long before her death.

The "Best Dressed Woman in the West" and the last known photo of Baby Doe in 1933

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Meanwhile, as fate would have it, Tabor's first wife, Augusta, went on to become a millionaire after their divorce by investing in the Singer Manufacturing Company which made sewing machines.

It's easy to see how the story of Horace Tabor and Elizabeth "Baby Doe" Tabor's lives of riches, scandal, great love, debauchery, poverty, devotion, and tragic endings could be made into an opera and the inspiration for a movie and many books.     

 The Matchless Mine itself is surprisingly small in size.

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During its profitable years, it produced 1.9 million dollars worth of silver--worth billions in today's economy.

Please click on this photo to enlarge it to read the placard

In 2006 a rig drilled a new core hole to investigate deposits of the Matchless Mine and it was determined that almost all the valuable high-grade silver had been removed by Horace Tabor's miners in the 1880s, leaving the area worthless as a mine, but rich in history.

We enjoyed visiting and learning more about the tragic life of Baby Doe and learning more about the Matchless Mine. Colorado is full of history in so many unique places.

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