Baby Doe’s friend bought a cottage at Hunter and Hopkins in 1889 and later he rented this house on Main Street. Both his residences still stand and are the delight of the tourists. In 1898, he and his wife and their children moved to Leadville, then Arizona, and are now lost to history.
THE ETERNAL SNOWS VIEWED FROM FRYER HILL
When Baby Doe walked to town by the road that led into Leadville’s Eighth Street, this was the view that faced her across the Arkansas Valley. The mountains are miles away but seem close in the rarified atmosphere. They are Elbert (Colorado’s highest) to the left and Massive to the right. Below is the Matchless Mine after its partial restoration in 1953.
Now, in the shadow of the Continental Divide, this man, this Croesus, had become my lover. I just knew those gorgeous mountains would answer my prayer that first morning I saw them!
Meanwhile, Mrs. Tabor and Horace were entertaining society in their fine house in Denver and I only saw him on his visits to Leadville. But these visits were frequent, because that was the year of the fires in the Chrysolite mine and the strike that finally turned out all the miners of the district. Leadville was bedlam in June. Knots of men were loitering around everywhere, or preventing other miners from entering town, and the whole temper of the streets very ugly. Strikers and mine-owners both grew increasingly obstinate.
The strikers were most virulently angry against Tabor. Everyone went armed and the tenseness of the situation seemed about to destroy my new-found happiness. The miners said Tabor had been one of them just a short time ago, and it was their vote that had put him in political power. Now he had forgotten.
“Dirty B——, to turn on us,” I overheard many of the men in the street muttering.
Something had to be done. Tabor was one of the property owners to organize a Committee of Safety. They met with dramatic secrecy in Tabor’s private rooms in the Opera House, and after drawing up an agreement similar to that of the Vigilance Committee of early San Francisco, elected C. C. Davis, the editor of the Chronicle, their leader. Mr. Davis first sounded out Governor Pitkin on declaring martial law, but he said to call on him only as a last resort.