Colorado Vanguards: Historic Trailblazers and Their Local Legacies by Perry Phyllis J

Author:Perry, Phyllis J. [Perry, Phyllis J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2015-11-16T05:00:00+00:00

The Labors

Horace Tabor 1830–1899 • Augusta Tabor 1833–1895 • Elizabeth McCourt (Baby Doe) Tabor 1854–1935 • Leadville and Denver

All eyes were on the radiant, beautiful, blond bride. She wore around her neck a rope of pearls rumored to have been the very ones used by Queen Isabella of Spain to finance the first voyage of Columbus to the New World. The site of the wedding ceremony and reception held on March 1, 1878, and presided over by a Catholic priest was the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. Among the distinguished guests was the president of the United States, Chester Alan Arthur. The proud, mustachioed bridegroom, a member of the U.S. Senate, was known to all as the Silver King.

The fairy tale elements of the lavish Washington wedding masked some strange truths. Horace Tabor, the bridegroom, served as a senator for only thirty days. And in spite of the Catholic ceremony, not only had the bride and groom both been married before, they had also secretly married each other several months before. It did not take long after the wedding for these facts to come out in endless gossip and newspaper articles, marking another bizarre episode in the lives of the Tabors: Horace, Augusta and Baby Doe.

In 1830, Horace Austin Warner Tabor was born in Holland, Vermont, a small farming village about three miles from the Quebec border. In his teens, Horace became apprenticed to a stonecutter. He followed this trade for eight years, working in quarries in Vermont, Massachusetts and Maine. In Maine, Tabor worked for a man named William Pierce. Pierce had always made a good living as a stonemason, hired a number of men and kept his family in comparative comfort. His daughter, Augusta, grew up in the Universalist-Unitarian Church, with the rather modern notion that women were the equals of men. Tabor met and fell in love with the boss’s daughter, and he and Augusta became engaged.

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