E-text prepared by Stephen Hutcheson, Dave Morgan,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
()
SILVER QUEEN
The Fabulous Story of Baby Doe Tabor
Copyright 1950, 1955 by Caroline Bancroft
All rights in this book are reserved. It may not be used for dramatic, radio, television, motion or talking picture purposes without written authorization.
Johnson Publishing Co., Boulder, Colorado
The Denver Post
The Author
Caroline Bancroft is a third generation Coloradan who began her literarycareer by joining the staff of The Denver Post in 1928. For five years sheedited a book page and wrote historical features for the Sunday edition. On atravel assignment for the New York Evening Post, she interviewed a long listof celebrated authors in New York, London, Paris, Holland and India. Her articleshave appeared in many nationally known magazines.
Her long-standing interest in western history wasinherited. Her pioneer grandfather, Dr. F. J. Bancroft (after whom the three-crested,Continental Divide peak just south of James is named) was a founderof the Colorado Historical Society and its first president for seventeen years.Her father, George J. Bancroft, a mining engineer, wrote many mining andreclamation contributions to the growing body of Colorado lore.
Caroline Bancroft has carried on the family tradition. A Bachelor of Artsfrom Smith College, she later obtained a Master of Arts degree from theUniversity of Denver, writing her thesis on Central City, Colorado. She hastaught Colorado history at Randell School in Denver and is the author of theintensely interesting series of Bancroft Booklets about Colorado, includingHistoric Central City, Denver’s Lively Past, Augusta Tabor, Tabor’s MatchlessMine and Lusty Leadville, Famous Aspen, Glenwood’s Early Glamour, TheBrown Palace, The Unsinkable Mrs. Brown and the extremely popular ColorfulColorado.
Edwin C. Johnson,Governor of Colorado1931-37, 1955-57
SILVER QUEEN
the fabulous story
of
BABY DOE TABOR
by
CAROLINE BANCROFT
Johnson Publishing Company
Boulder, Colorado
1962
My Interest in Baby Doe
The formerly beautiful and glamorous Baby Doe Tabor, her millionslost many years before, was found dead on her cabin floor at the MatchlessMine in Leadville, Colorado, on March 7, 1935. Her body, only partiallyclothed, was frozen with ten days’ stiffness into the shape of a cross. Shehad lain down on her back on the floor of her stove-heated one room home,her arms outstretched, apparently in sure foreboding that she was to die.
Newspapers and wires flashed the story to the world, telling the tragicend of the eighty-year-old recluse who had, during the decade of the 1880s,been one of the richest persons in