A single room lined with books—that was the library! A placard prominently placed on the wall cautioned “Silence.” The only person in the room besides herself was the librarian, sitting at her desk and looking rather forbidding in her horn-rimmed eyeglasses.
Judy searched the shelves. Still under the spell of the old mining days, she selected Aspen and the Silver Kings. It was a large, heavy book, its text liberally interwoven with pictures. She sat down at a table to examine it more leisurely. Mule teams with heavy wagons carrying the silver ore over Independence Pass, a road thirteen thousand feet high. A trip over this scenic wonder was, even to the passengers in Kit Carson’s stage coach, a fearsome thing. A hut near one of the mine shafts. Five men playing cards. A snow slide and the five were buried under twenty-five feet of snow.
She turned the pages. The coming of the first railroad, a queer-looking train pulled by two engines, smoke belching from its odd-looking funnels; people rushed down to the depot with flags, yelling themselves hoarse. It was a great day. Ore could now be moved by train!
Judy cheerfully skipped the pages. She still hoped for something more personal, maybe romantic. It was the human element she anxiously sought.
She read on. Under the intriguing title, “Horace Tabor, the man who preferred love and Baby Doe to his silver empire,” Judy recognized romance. This was the sort of pioneer life that appealed to her!
She looked at Tabor’s picture, a tall, well-built man with fine features and a long silky mustache. While not exactly a Don Juan, he was devotedly loved by two women, both of them interesting characters.
Augusta, his wife, came with Horace Tabor from Maine. In Leadville they opened a general store and in a short time Horace became postmaster and then mayor of the seventy shanties that comprised Leadville at that time. Augusta, even as the mayor’s wife, took in boarders to help with the family budget. Tabor generously staked the miners to food, picks, shovels, dynamite, anything they needed to get on with their prospecting. Augusta objected to his easy-going ways. Money was hard to make and they often quarreled.
But Tabor in staking the miners got a share in whatever they found. The mines began to pay off and Tabor became rich. From “Little Pittsburgh” alone he made five hundred thousand dollars in fifteen months. He bought other mines. He was civic-minded, gave Leadville the Opera House and a Grand Opera House to Denver, was spoken of as the future United States Senator. But the Tabors were unhappy and their quarrels increased.
At the age of forty-seven he met the beautiful blonde, Mrs. Harvey Doe, known as Baby Doe. It was love at first sight! Tabor begged Augusta to give him a divorce. She refused. He offered her mines, properties. “Never,” she repeated. After five years of wrangling in court, she gave him the divorce and accepted the mines. “Some day,” she told the newspapers, “Tabor will return to me when that blonde hussy grows tired of him.”
Judy wondered what became of Baby Doe. No doubt, somewhere among the pages of the book something more would be told.