I thought it was Harvey who had disgraced the Doe name by deserting me when I was pregnant; but for everyone’s sake, that autumn of 1879, Harvey and I patched up our quarrel and tried to make a go of it again. A few months later, I thought I saw him go into a bagnio and I immediately ran across the street to demand: “Who’s disgracing the Doe name now?” He said he was just collecting a bill ... that he would never be unfaithful.... But I wasn’t sure....
The elder Does decided to move to Idaho Springs, inasmuch as Central was declining and there seemed to be no way of straightening out Harvey. For the next five years until he died in 1884, Father Doe was one of the pillars of the town. In 1880, he was elected to the legislature and in 1881, he was chosen Speaker of the House. He was president of the Idaho Springs bank and owned two houses, one for revenue. The large bargeboard trimmed frame house in which they lived was the scene of many a social function written up in the Clear Creek Miner. But after 1880, Father Doe refused to support Harvey or pay his debts.
Harvey and I moved to Denver where he ineffectively looked for work. I sold the last of my furniture and clothes to keep us alive. After we were divorced, he drifted off. Evan Morgan said he saw him in Gunnison in 1881 and at the time of Father Doe’s death, he was in Antonito, Colorado, with Flora, one of his sisters. After the estate was settled, Mrs. Doe moved back to Oshkosh and Harvey went with her. There, and in Milwaukee, he lived out his life, running a cigar store and acting as a hotel detective, and fulfilling the epithet used about him at the Shoo-Fly, “Mama’s Boy.”
I could not forget nor forgive the painful, galling humiliation of having to have our baby alone in a mining camp. Save for Jake Sandelowsky I had been without friends, without money, and was disgraced, since my husband’s absence was talked about everywhere. Harvey’s failure to attend to these primary needs for his own wife and child I could not forgive—my heart was emptied of his image for years.
“I think maybe you’re right,” I told Jake before the second break with Harvey. “I’ve been here in Central City for over two years, and very unhappy ones. I think a change would do me good.”
Jake sent me over to Leadville on a visit to see what it was like in December, 1879. At the time, although he had moved to Leadville already, he was back in Blackhawk to talk business with Sam Pelton. I traveled by the Colorado Central narrow gauge from Blackhawk to the Forks and then up to Georgetown. From there I went by stagecoach, over lofty Argentine Pass, through Ten Mile Canyon and into the “Cloud City.” The stage coach ride was fifty-six miles and the fare, ten dollars. In Leadville I stayed at the then fashionable Clarendon Hotel, built by W. H. Bush, formerly manager of the Teller House in Central City. It was on Harrison Avenue, right next door to the newly opened Tabor Opera House.
Everyone was talking about Tabor and his gifts to Leadville when they weren’t exclaiming about the silver discoveries on Fryer and Breece Hills. The air was full of the wildest conversation and buzzing excitement everywhere you turned, and the camp itself made Central look like a one-horse town.
“Oh, I’m sure something marvelous will happen to me here!” I exclaimed as I surveyed busy Harrison Avenue down its four-block length to the juncture with Chestnut Street.
Concord stages, belated because of the recent heavy snows, were rolling into camp hauled by six-horse teams. Huge freight vans, lumbering prairie schooners and all sorts of buggies and wheeled vehicles were toiling up and down the street, separated from the boardwalk by parallel mounds of snow piled in the gutter three and four feet deep. Everywhere was noisy activity, even lot jumping and cabin-jumping, since the population that year had grown from 1,200 to 16,000!
The boardwalks on each side of the street were filled with a seething mass of humanity that had sprung from every quarter of the globe and from every walk of life. Stalwart teamsters jostled bankers from Chicago. Heavy-hooted grimy miners, fresh from underground workings, shared a walk with debonair salesmen from Boston. The gambler and bunco-steerer strolled arm in arm with their freshest victim picked up in a hotel lobby.