“What do you mean by saying I could have my friends over and then causing a scene like this. Do you want to disgrace me?”
“Disgrace you! Everything you have in the world is due to Tabor and me. If you had any gratitude, you’d have your friends invite me to their parties—not use me to further your own ends!”
This led to a violent argument and we did not speak for several days. Eventually, Pete and I talked this all out and we made up our differences. We were very close, as he was just two years younger than I. But the day was to come, when we were to part forever. I never forgave him for not helping Tabor in his hour of need. Of that, more later.
I didn’t always lose my temper, however, over these slights. Sometimes I maintained a real sense of humor. One day one of the coachmen came to me and said:
“If you please, ma’am, the maid next door says that one of the reasons the ladies don’t call is because of all those naked figures on the lawn. They think they’re indecent.”
I thanked him with a twinkle in my eye.
“How absolutely silly!” I thought.
The figures that stood on our lawn were the very finest masterpieces cast by the same Parisian bronze foundry that cast the sculpture of Rodin. They had been especially ordered and shipped from Europe. There were two sweet little deer that stood by the carriage entrance in front, and in the corners by the shrubs were Psyche, Nimrod, and Diana, of Grecian gracefulness. Perhaps these figures were somewhat advanced for a town that had been a frontier only a few years before, but they certainly weren’t indecent.
I sent the coachman down to fetch the costumer and when he arrived, I commanded:
“Now make me clothes exactly to fit these figures. I want Nimrod with red hunting hoots and a derby hat. I want Diana in flowing chiffon and panties underneath, and I want Psyche in stiff satin.”
He surveyed me as if I were crazy.
“The maid next door says her mistress can’t stand these naked figures—they shock her,” I explained. “These clothes are for the neighbor’s benefit, not mine.”
The costumer did as he was bid and in a couple of weeks, my statues were all fitted out to the Queen’s taste—Queen Victoria’s. But underneath the banter of my attitude and the humor of my little stunt, there was a heart that was sore. My husband couldn’t rise as he should and my children were excluded from the normal place they should hold, because I and my former actions were frowned on. Any wife and mother must know how deeply worried I was behind my pertness and bravery.
Yet suddenly all this didn’t matter. Real tragedy fell on us. The year 1893 arrived and with it the silver panic. Almost overnight, we who had been the richest people in Colorado were the poorest. It seems incredible that it should have all happened so quickly, but with one stroke of President Cleveland’s pen, establishing the demonetization of silver, all of our mines, and particularly the Matchless, were worthless.
Tabor’s other holdings which had sounded so spectacular and so promising on paper, turned out, many of them, to be literally paper. He had been duped or cheated by associates and friends for years without either of us realizing it. Some of his real estate was already mortgaged, and, when the blow first fell, he mortgaged the rest. Afterward we learned what a mistake that was. We should have learned to economize immediately.
But none of the mining men believed the hard times would last. Ten Denver banks failed in three days during July and our cash went when they crashed. Gradually, with no money coming in, we could not meet payments on the mortgages. The banks wouldn’t loan us any more money and our property began to fall on the foreclosure block.
“Take my jewels and sell them, Tabor,” I volunteered.
“No, the day will come when you’ll wear them again. I’ll make another fortune. That gold mine I bought near Ward and never developed will help us out. The world wants gold now—not silver.”
Before the house was taken from us, the Tabor Block in Denver and all the Leadville properties fell. What wasn’t taken for mortgages, began to go for unpaid taxes. When I had married Tabor, he had spent $10,000 a day during his thirty-day stay in Washington because at that time his income from the Matchless alone had been $80,000 a month. Yet just ten years after, we were actually worried about our grocery bill.
I knew Tabor’s dearest possession, next to the Matchless mine, was the Tabor Grand Opera House. When the mortgage owners gave notice of foreclosure on that, I went personally to plead with young Horace Bennett for an extension of time and leniency.
“We millionaires must all stick together,” I said.
He regarded me with cold blue eyes and replied:
“I am not a millionaire, Mrs. Tabor, and this is a business transaction. I appreciate how you and Mr. Tabor have sentimental feelings about the Opera House. But in that case, you shouldn’t have mortgaged it.”
I could not make him share my belief that Tabor would recoup everything. In my innermost heart, I knew he would. But here was a new kind of man in Colorado who did not look at life the way the first-comers did. Those men were plungers, gay and generous. When they had money, they spent it and when they didn’t, they had the bravery to start out on new ventures and make other fortunes. When a friend was down, they loaned him more than he needed and forgot the loan. That was Tabor. But not these newcomers who were settling and growing prosperous in Colorado.
And even my own brother! I went to Pete to save the Opera House for Tabor.
“I haven’t the money, and even if I had, you’d only mortgage it over again for some silly extravagance,” he said.
I was furious. From that day until he died in 1929 I never forgave him. When his will was read, he had left a quarter of a million dollars but he only left me, who had made all his affluence possible, some worthless carriage stock. He was the most bitter disappointment of my life.
There was one man who was an exception. He was W. S. Stratton ofColorado Springs who made many millions in the Independence mine in Cripple Creek. When he heard of Tabor’s plight, he wrote him a check for $15,000 to use in developing his Eclipse mine in Boulder County.
“There’s a true friend,” Tabor remarked with touching humility. It wrung me to the quick to see him act like this, pathetic and almost beaten. When he had had money, and even in the days before I knew him and before he became rich, his generosity and honesty had been proverbial. In return, the world gave him only deceit and niggardliness—and a cold shoulder. Many a night I wept with secret rage at the world as much as sorrow for Tabor.
Once again I openly lost my temper. Workmen came to our house to turn off the lights and water because of unpaid bills. Tabor protested against this humiliation but without success. Finally he turned back into the house saying:
“Well, tell your bosses how I feel about it.”
Gathering up my skirts, I flew into the yard like a wildcat.
“The idea of your doing this to Tabor! The man who gave Denver its beautiful Opera House! The man who has done much more for this town than ever it deserved. He’s invested large sums in your very own business and helped most of your own officers to political positions. Why, this is an outrage!”
“Orders is orders,” they replied belligerently, and went on with their work.
“Well, just wait until Congress changes that ridiculous law about silver and the Matchless is running again! Then you’ll be sorry you acted like this.”
I had lived all my grown-up life with miners. I could not believe, even if the rich vein of our fortune had thinned, that the pay ore would not widen again a little further on. I had implicit faith in my husband and his judgment. I have always had implicit faith in the Matchless. But sometimes it has been hard to make others understand.
When I had no visible effect on these men, I turned to Tabor and said: “Well, lets make a game of it.”
So we giggled while we carried lighted candles from room to room of the great house, and toted our drinking water from a barrel—water hauled to the house from the Old Courthouse pump. Somehow I kept our spirits up. Whenever Tabor was around, it was a game—I insisted on it for his benefit. But soon the illusion was gone. No game was possible when the Eclipse mine proved worthless.
The house was foreclosed. We lived in cheap little rooms in West Denver. I did all the cooking, washing, ironing and sewing. I worked early in the morning and late at night to make Tabor presentable to appear downtown with his business associates, and to have Lillie look nice when she went to school. During those bleak years of the mid ’90s, our affairs went consistently from bad to worse. My jewels, except a few choice pieces, were pawned or sold for necessities. Some times we didn’t have enough to eat. But I carried my head high, knowing that Tabor luck was sure and that our fortunes were bound to change.
Tabor was past sixty-five and suddenly he was an old man. He worked as an ordinary laborer in Leadville, wheeling slag at the smelter. But he was not up to the strenuous physical effort. And the pay was only $3.00 a day. At the other end of town, the Matchless was shut down and her shafts and drifts were fast filling with water after the stopping of the pumps.
Desperation haunted our every move. I could not believe that what I had laughingly spent for one of the children’s trinkets just a few years ago would now keep the whole family in groceries for a month. During this gloomy period, which lasted for five years, my greatest consolation was Silver. She was four years old when the catastrophes first began to fall and had no realization of what was happening. But her disposition was always sweet and hopeful. She was a laughing, affectionate child, and adored both her father and me.
“Darling, darling Silver,” I would murmur, tucking her into bed beside her sister. “What would I ever do without you?”
When it seemed that none of us could survive the strain any longer and that really all hope was lost, Senator Ed Wolcott whom I had met in Central City and who had been both a former friend and a political enemy of Tabor’s in Leadville and in Denver, came to the rescue. Through his intercession, he succeeded in getting President McKinley to appoint Tabor postmaster of Denver.
“Our luck is back!” I cried, clapping my hands in glee. “It was when you were postmaster of Leadville that you struck it rich. I’m sure this is a sign. Pretty soon, you’ll have it all back!”
We moved into a simple two-room suite, No. 302, in the Windsor Hotel. It was on the corner above the alley, but with an uplifting view of the mountains. Tabor went to work for the government. He was very grateful and pleased with his position, although I thought much more should have been done for him. Still, he enjoyed the work, and the regular routine of his job. He settled down into being a quiet wage-earner and family man. He practiced petty economies to live on $3,500 a year, a sum he had lost many times on one hand of poker. Now his luncheon was a sandwich at his desk. But he loved me and the children and he seemed to be really content, despite the modesty of our circumstances.
“But you will be the great Tabor again,” I insisted from time to time. I felt very deeply that his present simple occupation was too mean for the great builder and benefactor that Tabor had been, a deplorable way to end his days! It simply could not be.
He would pat my hand and say:
“My dear, brave little Baby. So trusting, so constant, so hard-working—and always so cheerful! Your love has been the most beautiful thing in my life.”
I cherished this tribute tenderly and have often thought of it in the years since. The snobbish society women of Denver had been sure I would leave Tabor the moment his fortune collapsed. I suppose if I had ever really been what they thought me, I would have—but they had never given me credit for the sincerity of my love. When the crash came, I was thirty-eight years old. My beauty had hardly diminished at all. Several men sought me out to make clandestine overtures when I was alone in the cheap rooms in West Denver. But I sealed the knowledge of their visits and who these men were—one of them had been, some years before, a supposedly good friend of Tabor’s. My pride was incensed by their offers.
“What sort of a wife do you think I am?” I demanded indignantly, and sent them unceremoniously on their way.
But now the year was 1899. Tabor had held his job only a year and threemonths in April, when he was taken violently ill with appendicitis. I called in three doctors for advice. They mentioned an operation but were doubtful of the outcome because of Tabor’s advanced age. Tabor had always had a marvelous constitution and I felt sure he would pull through without an operation. Besides, I was afraid of surgery.
For seven days and nights, I nursed him. I was by his bedside constantly, never letting myself sleep except in cat-naps during this long vigil. Often he was in too great pain to speak. Occasionally, the suffering would let up, and we would talk a little.
“Never let the Matchless go, if I die, Baby,” he said once. “It will make millions again when silver comes back.”
The week dragged endlessly by while worry and strain bore me down with fatigue. Had I made the right decision? Would Tabor recover?
On the morning of April 10, the doctors who had come to examine Tabor, led me gently aside and told me the end was near. Nervous and weak from loss of sleep and doubt about the decision I had made regarding the operation, I collapsed. It was not until the afternoon that I knew anything, because drugs had been administered to me, and I had been taken into another bedroom. When I came to, the nurse said:
“Your husband has gone.”
“Tabor, dead! Never!” I cried.
I tried all afternoon not to believe what they said, but finally I could deny the truth no longer. Desperate grief weighed me down oppressively. I was forty-four years old and my great love affair was over. Never would I have any further life. What was I to do?
And almost as if the angels above had heard my harassed question, I heard Tabor’s words ringing in my ears:
“Hang on to the Matchless. It will make millions again.”
Fortunately for my state of mind, Tabor’s death was received with the prestige due a great man. I think that if his passing had been snubbed as he himself had been in his last years, I could not have borne my sorrow. But his going was solemnized as it should have been.
“Deepest condolences to the widow of Senator Tabor,” arrived from the governor of Colorado, the mayor of Denver, the legislature, the city council and every civic and fraternal order in the state. Flowers filled our hotel suite to overflowing. Telegrams arrived in bundles from all over the country. It was a magnificent tribute.
“Oh, Silver! Oh, Lillie!” I cried between my tears and smiles, “Papa would be so happy if he could but know!”
Flags were ordered at half mast on federal, state and city buildings. Thebody was taken to the Capitol and viewed by thousands. At night the doors were closed and four soldiers of the state militia stood guard over the catafalque in the governor’s room. Floral pieces of many designs were sent by the hundreds to the Capitol as well as to us. A list of these donors filled more than a column in the newspapers. Leadville sent a floral piece of roses six feet high and four feet wide, designed like a cornucopia to symbolize the Tabor Plenty.
“He would be most pleased with that gift,” I explained to the girls. “Papa really loved Leadville.”
At the funeral, services were first held in the Capitol. Then there was a parade of federal and state soldiers, police and firemen. Four bands marched in the procession. The cortege filed slowly along Broadway and turned down Seventeenth St., finally making its way to Sacred Heart Church at Twenty-eighth and Larimer Sts. Four priests officiated at the church rites, Father Berry making the principal address.
Ten thousand people gathered along the line of march and as I peered out from under my heavy black veil, I wanted to throw a kiss to each and every one of them.
“Papa was a truly great man—they have come because they know that,” I whispered to the girls who were riding in the same carriage with me. And from somewhere, there began to run through my head the line: “In death a hero, as in life a friend.”
I had been weeping off and on for days and this thought brought on a fresh gust of racking sobs. It seemed as if I just could never regain control of myself! I was spent with grief.
The parade re-formed after the church service and made its final march to Calvary cemetery, a Catholic plot, beyond present Cheeseman Park. Brief services followed at the grave side where we had gathered in a knot about the coffin.
“Oh, Mama, Mama, Mama, don’t let them put Papa down there!” Silver suddenly shrieked when she saw the body being lowered into the ground. Silver and Lillie, both became hysterical and had to be led away to a carriage by the members of my family who were with me. But the girls’ hysteria was contagious. In a burst of sobs, I rushed to the casket and threw myself on its floral covering, possessed by some mad notion of being buried with Tabor.
“There, there, Mrs. Tabor, you’re overwrought,” the priest soothed while several people lifted me off. I was calmer as the men began to shovel in the dirt and finally when the gathering began to disperse and move off toward the carriages, I mustered enough voice to say:
“Please leave me alone here. Tell my coachman to wait at the gateway. I will come a little later.”
Actually I sat and knelt there for hours. Evening came and the cold April stars commenced to twinkle in the sky. I prayed and prayed, mostly incoherent desires, but frequently that Tabor and I should be re-united in heaven not too long away and I should have strength to carry on alone. I prayed a little for Tabor, too, but not much. I knew that so good and generous a man as hereally was, despite some of his minor transgressions, must surely find a safe, restful haven in the Lord’s eyes. He would be happier than we.
My premonition was all too true. Happiness was his reward but not ours.
For about two years, we struggled on in Denver, trying to eke out a living. Every hour I could take from housework, I spent in an endeavour to secure capital for re-possessing and improving the Matchless and made many calls on bankers and business men up and down 17th St. During the twenty-five years since my arrival as the bride of Harvey Doe, Denver had grown into the metropolis of the Rocky Mountains region. By 1901, the town was known as the “Queen City of the Plains” and had a population of 150,000, a phenomenal growth from the 30,000 of the pioneer community I had first seen. In this more urban atmosphere, investors were not drawn to mining the way they had been formerly—they were turning to reclamation projects, sugar beet factories and tourist attractions.
Lillie was a grown girl by now and Silver was just entering adolescence. They were both lovely looking but Silver was much more the child of Tabor’s and my great love. Lillie was silent and distant and each year that she grew older, more contemptuous of my ideas.
“It’s all rot there being any millions in that hole in the ground,” Lillie frequently remarked. “Why, that mine was completely worked out years ago.”
Such disdain was treason to Silver and me. Our adored Tabor had said it would bring us millions again as soon as silver came back and we believed him implicitly. I kept on with my efforts, and persistence finally told. Claudia McCourt, the one sister who had remained loyal to me, bought back the Matchless at a sheriff’s sale in July, 1901. Oh, what a wonderful lucky day that seemed! I knew that Tabor would be proved right and I hurried home to tell the girls.
“We’ll move up to Leadville and be right there on the ground to see that they don’t cheat us or steal any ore. Tabor always said to beware of ‘high-graders.’ You girls will love spending the summer in the mountains.”
Silver was thrilled at the prospect and entered into my plans with ardent enthusiasm. Lillie was very dubious about the whole project, both opening the mine and living in Leadville. But when the day came for us to move, she boarded the train with no further comment. We took rooms at 303 Harrison Avenue (the very building where Jake Sands had first lived—but all that seemed to me now as if it had never been!) and settled down to become residents of Leadville.
Silver soon made many friends and entered into the youngsters’ life in Leadville with a vim. She had a natural sweetness and warmth like her father’s that attracted people to her immediately. But Lillie spent most of her time writing letters to her friends in Denver, shut up in a room away from us.
“Come,” I said to them one day when we had driven out on Fryer Hill close to the mine. “You must put on overalls and go down the shaft into the Matchless the way I do so that when you inherit this bonanza, you’ll know all about it.”
Silver was elated at the idea and rushed into the hoist house to look for miner’s work clothes. But Lillie was rebellious.
“Then I’m going to run away!”
Later she secretly arranged for money from her uncle, Peter McCourt in Denver, for train fare back to Chicago, Illinois, to live with the McCourt relatives there. After Tabor had settled a substantial sum on Mama and Papa, at the time of my marriage, I thought my older sisters should have stayed loyal to me. But when Pete and I broke, they sided with Pete, although Mama tried to gloss matters over. Soon after, Mama died and the break was open.
For my own daughter to desert and go with those traitors to me—it was unthinkable! I was crushed.
Yet so it was that Lillie passed from my life.
After that ugly, unfortunate day, I seldom mentioned her name to anyone and she rarely communicated with me. It was almost as if I had never borne her as my baby nor exhibited her with such pride. Those many matinees when I had carried her in my arms through the foyer of the Tabor or taken her riding beside me in our handsome carriage on the streets of Denver so that all should see my darling first-born, had vanished completely.
My beautiful fair-haired baby with her exquisite clothes was no more, those days were like a dream that had passed. The first nine years of her adoring mother’s lavish attention and the later ten years of grueling, slaving work to keep her clothed and fed, had alike fallen away and were as if they had never been. My last sight of her was as she piled her belongings in the back of a hired buggy and drove off to the railroad station.
“Oh, how cruel, how cruel life has been to me!” I moaned as the buggy pulled away. Closing the door, I started on foot up town, hardly conscious that I wanted to be able to pray alone in the Church of the Annunciation on Seventh Street. Lillie’s buggy was disappearing and now I needed the strength of prayer and the reassurance of the Virgin’s beatific smile.
As I knelt alone in the white interior praying ardently, I gazed heavenward at the imitation frescoes, replicas of classics pasted to the wall. Slowly courage returned to me. I must still carry on—for Tabor’s name and for Silver’s future. That thought came to me stronger and stronger, bathed in the white light of a real revelation. Gradually the almost trance-like state, that I must have been in for a long time, subsided and I came back to the sharp realities of life.
“I wonder who all those saints are?” I mused to myself, again glancing at the ceiling as I rose to go. I knew very little about spiritual matters except for occasional readings in the Bible and I determined I should know more. So before trudging the mile and a half home, I headed for the library.
“This will be what you want, I think,” the very nice girl said in answer to my query, and handed me “The Lives of the Saints.” From that day on, it was my favorite book. I read and re-read it throughout the years, supplementing its message with daily chapters from the Bible.
Meanwhile Silver was my pride and joy. When I got back to our house,I told her about Lillie’s abrupt departure, trying to remain calm and self-controlled as I narrated the episode.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish!” Silver answered impudently and threw her arms around my neck. “Don’t let her hurt your feelings, Mama. She’ll he sorry. When I’m a great authoress and you’re a rich society woman in Denver, she’ll come running back. Then she’ll think differently about the Tabor name.”
For some time Silver had had an ambition to write and was already contributing extra poems to her English work in eighth grade. Now I hugged her gratefully for her sympathy about Lillie and her encouragement for the future. She had her father’s coloring and much of his character. How proud he would have been of her if he could have seen her at that moment!
“Yes, yes, I’m sure you’re right, Silver. Lillie will be sorry and come back—and with your talent, you will make the Tabor name once again a thing of lustre!”
Slow and silent, in some ways, and quickly and noisily in others, the years slipped away. I had mortgaged the Matchless again, for development work, with the expectation that when the shaft was sunk to a slightly lower level, we would strike high-grade ore. But I was never able to lease the mine to the right group of men to carry out my idea.
“Nobody knows anything about mining any more!” I would cry with exasperation. “All the real miners like Tabor are dead.”
Through their ignorance and bad management, the mine ate up capital. Although the leases paid occasionally in rent and royalties, those sums were only large enough to keep Silver and me supplied with adequate clothing and food. For a while, we rented a small house in town, once on Seventh St. and at another period, on Tenth St. But the Matchless never paid profits sufficient enough to dispel the mortgage. Once more, foreclosure hung over our heads.
“Silver,” I said as we sat down to dinner. “We must go down to Denver and open my safety box. Papa wouldn’t let me sell the very last of my jewels—but now, we must. I’m sure he would understand. The Matchless must be saved. Those were his last words.”
“Oh, Mama! Your beautiful jewelry!”
“Oh, well, I don’t have any use for it now. And when the Matchless pays again, I can buy more.”
Silver and I frequently journeyed to Denver on pleasure trips or jauntily to pass some of the long cold winters when the mine had to be shut down. But this trip was a sad occasion. It was no easy matter to part with those treasures, given to me by my dearly loved husband. But I was determined they should go. I must keep a stiff upper lip. At the bank, Silver cried:
“Oh, not your engagement ring—and not Papa’s watch-fob!”
My engagement ring was a single pure diamond, an enormous stone, surrounded by sapphires and set in gold which Tabor had panned himself in his early days at California Gulch. His watch-fob was a massive piece of gold artwork presented to him by the citizens of Denver on the opening night of the Tabor Grand Opera House. Three engraved pictures in ornament, The Tabor Grand Opera House, the Tabor Block in Denver and the Tabor Store in Oro inCalifornia Gulch, were suspended in links from a triangle of gold held by a closed fist. On either side of the richly carved medallions ran mine ladders of gold down to a lacy array of miner’s tools below the medallions. These, in turn, held a bucket of golden quartz, filled with gold and silver nuggets. On the reverse side, were monograms in fine enamel and the legend “Presented by the citizens of Denver to H. A. W. Tabor,” and “Labor Omnia Vincet.”
“That must be our talisman, Mama,” Silver suggested. “We must never part with that.”
I felt in my bones Silver was right and I ordered those two pieces put back into the safety deposit box. But the rest of the jewelry went to pay debts just as the diamonds of Queen Isabella of Spain had previously. My wedding present! What a sad memory! I never could bear to go back to that vault—I was afraid I should burst into tears. But Silver returned in 1911 and brought the two pieces to me at about the time we decided to make our permanent home in Leadville, living at the Matchless cabin to save rent.
“I met Mr. Edgar McMechen coming out and I showed him Papa’s fob,” she told me. “He thought it was gorgeous and said to be careful of that—that it was of great historical interest. I told him I wanted you to see it again—that you needed cheering up—and just to see it, would help you from getting discouraged and blue.”
“You are a sweet, thoughtful daughter,” I answered, kissing her. “I will look at them for inspiration. Then I will give them to the sisters at St. Vincent’s hospital in Leadville. They are always so kind to us and will store anything I ask.”
But it was the year before that, in 1910, that Silver had given me my greatest happiness about her. In 1908, President Roosevelt had visited Leadville and Silver had ridden into town to see him. That evening when she came back to the cabin, she wrote a lyric entitled “Our President Roosevelt’s Colorado Hunt.” A. S. Lohmann of Denver later set it to music and we had it published. TheDenver Postwrote up her accomplishment and printed a picture of Silver two columns wide. I was so pleased!
Two years later President Roosevelt, although no longer in office, returned to Colorado and made an address in Denver. Silver was there, close to the platform, and when the speech was ended, was presented to him as the author of the Roosevelt song. The ex-president willingly posed with my daughter and the next day, the Denver newspapers printed photographs of Silver and President Roosevelt shaking hands.
“My darling, brilliant daughter!” I exclaimed in natural maternal pride when I saw the account. “Again a Tabor associates with a president of the United States—the Tabor luck is coming back!”
But I was wrong—that was the last day I was to experience great joy. My dearest treasure, Silver, with her piquant profile and sweet demure ways, was marked already with the shadow of tragedy. She had grown up very fond of horses and riding. I could not afford anything for her to ride but a burro that I used for hauling out ore from the mine. She used to hang around the livery stable hoping for better things.
One of the partners was a big man who always wore an enormous white ten-gallon hat and looked like a Western sheriff. He was a picturesque figure in a common way. Generously, he fell into the habit of loaning Silver riding horses, especially a spirited seventeen-hand cream gelding which would carry her thundering up Harrison Avenue with a speed to delight her romantic fancy. It was natural that she should be grateful and linger after the ride, talking horseflesh in a friendly way.
Nothing untoward about this arrangement occurred to me since the man was old enough to be a responsible citizen. He had known her from the time she was a little girl trudging up and down Little Stray Horse Gulch with a gunny sack over her shoulder, hauling mail and supplies. All the old-timers made it a point to be kind to her—like Big Jim McDonald who was running the Monarch mine up above us and frequently gave her a lift in his buggy, or like Henry Butler, editor of theHerald-Democrat, who loaned her a typewriter and helped her with her writing. I was not even suspicious until it was too late.
When the village gossip reached my ears, I fell into a soft moaning but then quickly denied the idea to my informant as impossible. But when I was by myself, I moaned aloud.
For years, my fond hopes had built such castles-in-Spain for Silver—with her dark prettiness and her unusual talent, no future could be too roseate for her—and now I was beside myself with worry. The Matchless had been mortgaged again, this time for $9,000 with an interest rate of 8%, and I was having more trouble with the lessees. There was no money with which to send Silver away.
“What course should I take?” I asked myself in desperation.
Before I could come to any decision, matters gathered to a drastic head. A few nights later, Silver set off for an Easter Monday hall in a lovely silk dress I had made her and a fur-trimmed coat (since at 10,000 feet altitude the spring nights are like icy winter). The party was to be given for the nice young people of the town. She went with two boys who were sons of substantial Leadville families.
But when Silver came in, it was eight-o-clock in the morning and she was drunk. Her dress was disheveled and she had no coat. The lovely blue silk dress was torn and dirty. And she was alone!
“Silver, what on earth has happened?” I cried. But she was too incoherent for me to make head or tail of her story. Fearful that she would catch pneumonia from exposure, I stirred up the fire in the stove and got the temperature of the cabin to the perspiring point. I put her to bed and she was soon sleeping it off.
But when I went to town for the mail, the news was all over town—a sordid story involving a saloon keeper. In a flash, my mind was made up.
“Write to your Uncle Peter,” I said that evening at supper, “and ask him for enough money for you to go to Denver and get a job on a newspaper. There’s no opportunity for your talent in this town and no chance to meet a man really worthy of you.”
I was much too proud to appeal to Pete, myself, after our quarrel, but on several occasions I had permitted Silver to do so. In justice to Pete, I mustadmit he always responded—and I always felt he was trying to make up for the way he acted at the time of Tabor’s collapse.
Silver left for Denver shortly after. For a while, she made good as a reporter on theDenver Times, and, later, in Chicago she wrote a novel, “Star of Blood.” But good fortune did not last. When she was out of money and a job, she wrote to me in Leadville.
“Mama,” she mused on paper, “I think I will enter a convent. You have always been very religious and I am turning in that direction more and more—perhaps that would be a fine solution for my life.”
I had always pictured Silver with a dazzling, high place before the world. But when I realized how the world was changing her from the sweet, pretty little girl she had been to a woman, bruised and at the mercy of men’s lust, I welcomed the thought of the serenity and spiritual safety of a convent. I was giving up my life to the Matchless. It was fitting that my daughter should give up her life to her God. They were both dedications to a love higher than self.
“If you don’t hear from me,” she went on, “you will know that I can’t write—that I’ve taken vows.”
My breath choked in my throat. I had lost everything—everything in the world that I prized—my dear husband, money, prominence, all my fineries, jewelry and the many little luxuries a woman loves, my brother, my family, my first daughter—and now Silver! It was almost more than one heart could stand. I cried out in terror.
“Oh, no, Silver! I can’t lose you.”
Little by little, I became reconciled to her suggestion. My darling baby was going away—but she was not really going away. She would be with me always.
Shortly after that, she managed to raise enough capital to start and edit a little paper called the “Silver Dollar Weekly.” But after a few issues, its financial success was too negligible to carry on. Her letters said she was giving the project up and going to Chicago. If she failed there she would enter a convent in the mid-West that Uncle Peter knew about.
The years passed slowly by. A few letters came and then only silence. Imagine my horror one September night in 1925! I had come to Denver to pass the winter and had stopped at the desk of my cheap little hotel before going to bed. The clerk surveyed me with a kind of contemptuous awe and asked:
“Is that your daughter I seen in the paper tonight was murdered in some Chicago scandal?”
“Certainly not,” I flared back. “My daughter is in a convent.”
I could not afford to buy a newspaper so I hurried to the Denver Public Library in the Civic Center. What could the story be? Perhaps the clerk meant Lillie—I never mentioned her name nor even admitted she was my daughter—but something might have happened to her or her husband that revealed who she really was. As I clumped into the library, dressed, as usual, in my black dress, veiled motoring cap headgear and heavy boots, the clock said a few minutes past nine-thirty.
“Oh, dear,” I said to the librarian at the desk. “Am I too late to read tonight’s paper? I know the newspaper files close at half-past nine—”
She looked up and with some penetration, perhaps recognition, gazed at me for a brief instant.
“Yes, the newspaper room is closed. But if you will go in and sit down in the reference room, I think I can manage to bring you an evening paper.”
I thanked her very pleasantly and did as she bade. While I waited, I absently traced the grain of the heavy walnut with my finger nail, trying not to show any distress. Soon she quietly laid the paper down in front of me and stole away. But with that sixth sense you have in a crisis, out of the back of my head I could feel the librarians watching me.
“Silver!” I gasped to myself and wanted to faint.
But I made myself sit extremely straight and read very quietly, knowing there were alien eyes observing me. The account told of a young woman, who had posed under various aliases but lastly as Ruth Norman. She had been scalded to death under very suspicious circumstances in a rooming house in the cheapest district in Chicago. She was a perpetual drunk, was addicted to dope and had lived with many men of the lowest order. But her doctor knew who she really was. She was Rose Mary Echo Silver Dollar Tabor, who had signed her songs Silver Echo Tabor and her novel, Rose Tabor.
“My darling little Honeymaid!” I wailed inwardly and thought my heart must break. My eyes blurred with tears so that I could not read. “What a ghastly tragic end—poor, poor little girl!”
A strange photograph had been found in her room on which Silver had written this warning: “In case I am killed, arrest this man.” He was later identified as a saloon-keeper who had been one of her lovers. But insufficient evidence was brought out at the coroner’s inquest to attach definite guilt to him.
To save Silver’s body from the potter’s field, Peter McCourt was wiring $200 for the burial of his niece.
“Damn him!” was my thought. He seemed always, at every blow my life sustained, to be in a position to make my humiliation more soul-searing.
Deliberately I read the whole account through a second time. I knew with profound conviction that every line was true—I could piece together the whole story step by step. But following that awful downfall, there under the white-bowled lights of the library, my conscience cried out that I had failed again-failed, as a mother, more miserably than ever Augusta could have wished or prophesied. I was bowed down with shame.
“Don’t let anyone know,” my heart immediately rebelled. “The Tabor pride does not admit defeat.”
Gathering up the paper quietly and folding its pink sheets along their original creases, I took it to the desk and nonchalantly handed the death-blow back to the girl who had brought it to me.
“Thank you very much for the paper,” I said. “But that story’s all a pack of lies. She’s not my daughter—that young woman. IknowSilver is in a convent.”
Turning on my heel, I walked out, erect and dignified, my miner’s boots clacking with the conviction of my statement.
So passed Silver from my life. I don’t know which was sadder or more humiliating—Silver’s going or Lillie’s. From the viewpoint of the world, I suppose it was Lillie’s. But from my own, I was devoted to Silver and believed in her, and her going was the hardest to bear. I knew she had told me the lie about the convent to protect me from hurt. But in the end, the hurt was much greater.
I have never admitted my hurt, even to intimates. Before the world, I have always preserved the outline of her fabrication. Silver is alive today. She is in a convent.
The winter dragged miserably in and I was even poorer. My boots wore out and I hit upon the scheme of wrapping my legs in gunny sack, like puttees, held with twine; a habit I have always held to. Only dreams and memories were left to sustain the poverty and dreariness of my life. Now I was completely down.
But catastrophes never come singly and it was also that winter that the Matchless was again to be foreclosed. During a quarter of a century, the leases, the legal battles, the disappointments, the troubles and the finances of that mine had been one long series of involved ramifications. Each time the clouds would seems to have a silver lining, it would prove only a figment of my imagination or a mirage of the Cloud City (Leadville’s nickname). A silver mine in the Cloud City should certainly have some lining!
“Why don’t you give up? Let the mine go for the mortgage?” a Denver banker to whom I appealed for help said to me. “It’s all worked out—and anyway it’s paid you a small steady income for years.”
“I should say not!” I replied with vehemence. “I shall never let the Matchless go—not while there is breath in my body to find a way to fight for it. The mine is a Golconda.”
Doubting eyes greeted my statement and the money was refused. I was used to that—and in the quiet loneliness of my cabin or during my sombre meditations in church even I, too, occasionally doubted. Yet never would I let that be known. My great husband, Tabor, could not have spoken other than truthfully and prophetically from his deathbed and if I was to live true to his command, I must always believe.
“I have no reason for living if I do not have faith in the Matchless. No dear one is left to me. I have only this one legacy of my great love. It is my mission and my life,” were the thoughts that ran through my head as I left the banker’s office. But now I had exhausted my last resource. No future was ahead of me, no work to do and no place to live. The mine was doomed—and my heart sank to the lowest depths.