In March 1935, Sue Bonnie pushed through three feet of snow to her friend's cabin on Fryer Hill outside Leadville, Colorado. She and Tom French broke a window and found 80-year-old Baby Doe Tabor dead on the cabin floor, partially clothed, arms flung out, her body frozen stiff into a cross.
Fifty years earlier, Baby Doe had been one of the richest women in America. Her husband, Horace Tabor, the silver mining king, burned through $10,000 a day for his entire 30-day Senate term in 1883. Her wedding gown cost $7,000. Her diamond necklace cost $75,000, sold to her as authentic stones from Queen Isabella's hoard — the ones she'd supposedly pawned for Columbus.
The 1893 silver panic wiped them out. Tabor died in 1899 as Denver's postmaster, telling his wife, "Hang on to the Matchless [mine]. It will make millions again." She did — for 36 years. She wrapped her feet in gunny sack cloth and twine, and lived on stale bread and cheap brisket.
Caroline Bancroft's Silver Queen, free on Project Gutenberg, tells the story in Baby Doe's imagined voice. Bancroft met her once in 1927, when her father, a mining engineer, drove out to the Matchless hoping to back her. The cabin was dirt and rust. Bancroft, then 27 and bored, ignored her. Eight years later, she wrote the biography.
The book is gossipy and partisan, full of the details that later fed John Latouche's opera The Ballad of Baby Doe. Her daughter Silver Dollar died scalded in a Chicago rooming house under an alias, addicted to dope.
