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Baby Doe’s favorite daughter tried to be a newspaper woman, a movie actress, and a novelist with one printed book, “Star of Blood.” But she failed in all her ventures. Silver Dollar’s end was tragic and sordid in the extreme. She was scalded to death under very suspicious circumstances in a rooming house in Chicago’s cheapest district. Not yet thirty-six years old, she was a perpetual drunk, was addicted to dope and had lived with many men under several aliases. Her funeral expenses were paid by Peter McCourt.
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MEETING “T. R.”
Baby Doe’s happiest moment about Silver was this one, recorded on August 29, 1910, when the ex-president Roosevelt was visiting in Denver and received a song about his former visit with lyrics signed by Silver Echo Tabor, age 20, a pretty brunette.
THE PROPHETIC CURTAIN AND ITS FATAL WORDS
The Tabors lived opulently and showily right up to the moment of the Silver Panic in 1893 when their fortune came tumbling down. In the same year, 1895, that Augusta died a wealthy woman in California, they were bankrupt. Tabor became a day laborer and Baby Doe did the hardest sort of manual work. Finally Tabor was appointed postmaster of Denver. The Tabors and their two little girls moved into two rooms at the Windsor and here they lived until Tabor’s death in 1899. His dying words to Baby Doe were, “Hang on to the Matchless. It will make millions again.” But the people of Denver, attending performances in the Tabor Theatre, looked at the curtain and quoted Kingsley’s sad couplet:
“So fleet the works of men, back to the earth again,