Horace A. W. Tabor, originally from New England, moved to Denver with his wife Augusta and their baby son in 1859 during the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush.
While Tabor prospected, the couple survived by operating a general store and taking in boarders (among other things).
Almost twenty years later, in mid-1878, silver lodes were found in a Leadville mine that Horace had invested in. The discovery kicked off the Colorado Silver Boom.
Tabor used his profits to invest in other silver mines, and, by 1879, he’d become one of the wealthiest men in Colorado.
Soon after, the “Silver King” began an affair with Elizabeth Doe (known as “Baby Doe”). After the scandal was made public, Tabor divorced Augusta and married Baby Doe.
The wealthy couple, while living lavishly in Denver, welcomed two daughters: Elizabeth (called “Lily”) in 1884 and Rose Mary Echo Silver Dollar (called “Silver”) in 1889.
On the back of the photo above, a friend of Silver’s wrote this about Silver’s full name:
‘Rosemary’ given by her mother after the saint and ‘Echo’ given by her mother because she loved the echoes in the mts around Leadville. ‘Silver Dollar’ given by her father because it was the Silver ore that made him his millions. This picture was given to me in Leadville, Colo. 1903 by Silver.
Other sources say the “Silver Dollar” part was suggested by none other than politician William Jennings Bryan, a family friend (and free silver advocate).
Unfortunately, the Tabors lost their fortune when the value of silver plummeted following the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in mid-1893.
Horace died in 1899. Baby Doe spent the remaining years of her life futilely hanging on to the derelict Matchless Mine in Leadville, where she passed away during the winter of 1935. She’d outlived her daughter Silver — who’d died under suspicious circumstances in Chicago in 1925 — by a nearly decade.
The family’s rages-to-riches-to-rags story was made into a film called Silver Dollar in 1932 and an opera called The Ballad of Baby Doe in 1956.
Sources:
- Horace Tabor – Wikipedia
- Mauck, Sydney. “The Silver Queen of Cloud City.” History Colorado 1 Apr 2021.
- Bancroft, Caroline. Silver Queen: The Fabulous Story of Baby Doe Tabor. Boulder, CO: Johnson Publishing Company, 1962.
- Find a Grave
Images: Adapted from photographs of Silver Dollar Tabor (1890), Rose Mary Echo Silver Dollar Tabor (1903), and Baby Doe Tabor (1880s) (via Denver Public Library Digital Collections)
[Latest update: Jan. 2025]
