A Bachelor of Arts from Smith College, she later obtained a Master of Arts degree from the University of Denver, writing her thesis on Central City, Colorado. Her full-sized Gulch of Gold is the attractive, definitive history of that well-known area.
She is shown standing beside the headgate at Lake Caroline on Mt. Bancroft, a Continental Divide peak named for her grandfather. The photo was taken by Charles Eaton in the summer of 1956.
STEPHEN L. R. McNICHOLS Governor of Colorado 1957-63
Augusta Tabor:
Her Side of the Scandal
“She is a blonde, I understand, and paints. But I have never seen her.”
Augusta Tabor made this remark about Baby Doe in the course of a long interview that she gave to a reporter for the Denver Republican. The account appeared on October 31, 1883, and carried several heads. One of these read, “Mrs. Tabor No. 1 makes some spicy revelations.”
Augusta received her caller in the elegantly furnished sitting-room of her twenty-room mansion. The house stood at the corner of Seventeenth Avenue and Lincoln Street but faced Broadway. Its address was 97 Broadway, and was entered along a spruce-lined circular driveway. The house and its surrounding block of land had been part of her divorce settlement from the millionaire Silver King, Horace A. W. Tabor.
That divorce in the January preceding had been a national scandal, only to be topped by the even greater scandal of her former husband’s remarriage. The wedding was performed on March 1 in Washington where Tabor had gone to serve a thirty-day term as senator. It was attended by a number of political big-wigs, including President Chester Arthur; but they came without their wives. The women drew a sharp line against recognizing “that blonde,” the former Mrs. Elizabeth McCourt Doe.
The best people continued to draw that line. When the Tabors returned to Denver after their honeymoon, no one called on the second Mrs. Tabor. But shortly afterward Augusta came home from California where she had taken her broken heart. Two hundred and fifty people organized a surprise reception for her at her palatial residence.