Augusta also liked to visit newspaper offices. In May, 1879, she brought a visitor, “her dainty niece,” Suzie Marston, to see the various departments of the Rocky Mountain News. This girl was from Augusta, Maine, the family home-town, after which Augusta had been named. Augusta took her niece on trips around Colorado and in 1889 chaperoned her on a diversified tour of Europe while they traveled with the George Tritches of Denver.
The first Mrs. Tabor’s habit of calling on writers has preserved for us a very fine autobiography. In September of 1883 Mrs. Alice Polk Hill of Denver, who had lived in Colorado for a decade or so, decided to compile a book by collecting reminiscences and informal bits of history. She spent several months traveling about the state to obtain material. Sometime prior to the publication of her book in 1884, she arrived in Leadville and stayed at the Clarendon Hotel. Augusta, who was visiting her sister, Mrs. Melvina L. Clarke, in Leadville at the time, came to call.
Mrs. Hill was delighted and later described Augusta as a “frail, delicate-looking woman with pleasing manners.”
More importantly, Mrs. Tabor No. 1 wrote out a detailed account of her early marriage, much of which Mrs. Hill used in her first book, “Tales of the Colorado Pioneers,” but which has survived intact in the Denver Republican.
Her romance with Tabor, a Vermont stone-cutter, began in Maine in August, 1853, when Augusta L. Pierce was twenty years old and Horace Austin Warner Tabor was twenty-two. He came to work for her father, a contractor. After a couple of years’ employment he fell in love with the boss’s daughter. A two-year engagement followed while Tabor homesteaded a 160-acre farm in Riley County, Kansas.
“On January 31, 1857, we were married in the room where we first met,” Augusta recalled.
Farming in Kansas proved bleak, arduous and lonely for the twenty-four-year old bride, and unprofitable for her husband. When the news of gold in Colorado broke, the Tabors joined the rush. On April 5, 1859, they set out in an ox-drawn covered wagon with two men friends and their sixteen-month-old baby son, Maxcy, who was teething. They also took along several cows to provide milk. The journey to Denver took them until June 20. They camped there for two weeks because the cattle were footsore, and then moved to a site near Golden.
Here, the men decided to push on to Gregory Diggings, now Central City, and they went afoot since there was no adequate road for a wagon.
“Leaving me and my sick child in the 7 by 9 tent, that my hands had made, the men took a supply of provisions on their backs, a few blankets, and bidding me be good to myself, left on the morning of the glorious Fourth. My babe was suffering from fever and I was weak and worn. My weight was only ninety pounds. How sadly I felt, none but God, in whom I then firmly trusted, knew. Twelve miles from a human soul save my babe. The only sound I heard was the lowing of the cattle, and they, poor things, seemed to feel the loneliness of the situation and kept unusually quiet. Every morning and evening I had a ‘round-up’ all to myself,” Augusta wrote.
After three “long, weary weeks” the men returned. On the 26th of July they again “loded” the wagon and started into the mountains. Traveling by way of Russell Gulch, it took them three weeks to reach Payne’s Bar, now Idaho Springs. She remarked: