Delegations from the various churches also came to call, each seeking the Tabors’ membership. Augusta remarked:
TABOR PROPERTY DOMINATED DENVER IN 1881
The Tabor Grand rose like a cathedral beyond the spired church. At far right is Augusta’s house. The light building behind the present Navarre Restaurant is the Windsor Hotel. The tall business building in the middle was the Tabor block. The Brown was a triangular cow pasture. In front of it was Augusta’s coach house that faced Seventeenth Avenue.
“I suppose Mr. Tabor’s and my souls are of more value than they were a year ago.”
Poor Augusta! Time was running out. Tabor’s answer to her tartness was to spend his evenings in the variety halls and bordellos. As his interests and investments widened, he took the most seductive inmates traveling with him. The newspapers reported that Tabor had given clothes, jewelry, furs and furbelows to three or four women (one paper said five) so that they could appear as “Mrs. Tabor.” One that he singled out was Alice Morgan, an Indian club swinger at the Grand Central variety hall in Leadville. Next he was charmed by Willie Deville in Lizzie Allen’s parlor house in Chicago, and he brought Willie west with him. Augusta discovered the affair and the miscreants promised to part.
But this was a ruse. Tabor kept on seeing her secretly and took Willie on a trip to New York. There, she was so indiscreet about their relations that a woman in the hotel tried to blackmail the Silver King. Tabor told Willie she talked too much and made her a gift of $5,000 to soften the blow of saying “good-bye.” (Augusta preserved an interview, with many more details than these, that Willie gave to a St. Louis reporter a couple of years after the affair. Apparently, Willie was still talking too much.)
In September, 1879, Tabor sold out his interest in the Little Pittsburgh for a cool million dollars. He bought the Matchless for $117,000 (which later proved the greatest bonanza of all) and over 800 shares of stock of the First National Bank in Denver. Then he and Augusta went East for six weeks while he made further investments, notably land in South Chicago.
TWENTY ROOMS