A high-spirited biography of a feisty lady - the legendary Silver
Queen of Colorado and her sensational rise and more sensational
fall from the gaudy, bejeweled ranks of Colorado's mining
magnificos. Burke admires her unreservedly: as the bewitching
teenager who married one Harvey Doe to escape from the middle dass
respectability of Oshkosh; as the young adventuress "Baby Doe" who
set out to become the mistress of Horace Tabor, the vulgarian
bonanza king of the silver mines; as Tabor's dazzling and devoted
wife, the woman who helped him squander his greenback millions in a
style which rivaled Lorenzo the Magnificent. Most of all Burke
admires her in adversity as the tough old woman in miner's boots
and old pants single-handedly working the played-out rock heap
which had once made her the most glamorous woman in the Old West.
Was Baby Doe just a frivolous, good-time hussy? Most emphatically,
no, says her champion. What propelled her was a splendid dream,
sheer love of conquest and her delight in mocking conventions. Rich
or poor, with head held high all her life she outraged the proper
matrons of her day from the mining camps where she worked with pick
and shovel to the grand halls of Washington, D.C. where President
Chester Arthur danced at her wedding. Aside from Baby's inimitable
never-say-die personality (Burke has patched a lot of his story
from her own always indiscreet scrapbooks and diaries), Burke
captures fully the gilded frenzy of the mining towns in an age when
plutocrats reigned, anything - well, almost anything - was for sale
and only a fool was content to remain poor and obscure. That .Baby
persisted for almost forty years in loneliness and want working her
claims on!y adds to her stature. Surely Burke's injected new life
into the old girl. (Kirkus Reviews)
In her pulchritudinous prime Baby Doe was called the Silver Queen
of Colorado by journalists and "that shameless hussy" by the proper
wives of the men who eyed her. Flirtatious, adventurous, ambitious,
Elizabeth McCourt Doe gave everyone a lot to talk about when she
met Horace Tabor, the Silver King of Leadville, in 1880. Three
years later they were free to legalize their passion. Although
thirty years separated them, they were well matched in romantic
recklessness. If "The Legend of Baby Doe" is the lowdown on the
high jinks of two public lives, it is also the story of a love that
survived spectacularly good times and bad.
Before bad times came, Baby and Horace went on a spending spree.
They built an opulent opera house in Denver and bought an
Italian-ate villa. Baby Doe went out bejeweled and ermined, and sat
at home alone, snubbed by the social dragons. John Burke has
written about the giddy rise of a bonanza king who dreamed of
entering the White House with Baby Doe on his arm and about the
disastrous fall they took together. Wiped out by unwise investments
and the Panic of 1893, Tabor soon died, leaving Baby Doe and their
two daughters penniless. Reportedly, his deathbed order was to
"hang on to the Matchless," a played-out mine filled with water.
She managed to do that for almost four decades, struggling
heroically against loneliness, poverty, and heartbreak, and
becoming one of the great legends of the American West.
General
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