“We’ve struck it! We’ve struck it!”
Augusta said she was rather frigid to him.
“Rische, when you bring me money instead of rocks, then I’ll believe you.”
But it was true. Their mine, the Little Pittsburgh, netted Tabor $500,000 in the following fifteen months. He bought the Chrysolite which proved to be another bonanza. Augusta continued to keep boarders during the summer and Tabor, to supervise the store’s activities. But then Tabor began to splurge, and in the autumn they sold out. The fall election had made Tabor lieutenant-governor of Colorado, so they planned to move to Denver.
In January, 1879, Tabor rented, and the next month purchased, the Henry C. Brown house at 17th and Broadway, paying $40,000. According to Augusta, when her husband took her to see it, she was very mindful of the quick rises and equally rapid descents of Colorado fortunes. Augusta took one look at her husband’s idea of a new home and said:
“I will never go up these steps, Tabor, if you think I will ever have to go down them.”
Thirty-five curious callers appeared the first day she was at home. She remarked sarcastically:
“I would scarcely know how to return the call of the woman next door who arrived in a carriage.”
Tabor provided the means for returning the call. It was a $2,000 carriage, an exact replica of the one driven by the White House coachman around Washington.
“La,” she told Flora Stevens, “If we had only had the money that is in that carriage when we began life.”