The Matchless Mine and Baby Doe

The silver queen who never left her mine

The Matchless Mine sits on Fryer Hill, the richest ground in the Leadville district, at more than 10,000 feet in Colorado. Horace Tabor bought it on 17 July 1880 for $77,850. He was already Colorado's Lieutenant Governor and already a millionaire from the neighbouring Little Pittsburg and Chrysolite mines, a fortune that began with a $60 grubstake in 1878, and people called the new purchase Tabor's Folly until rich ore turned up that September. Between 1880 and 1886 it earned him about $1.2 million.

Leadville in those years had more than 100 saloons and gambling halls and 36 brothels. In 1880 Tabor met Elizabeth McCourt Doe, a divorcee from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, better known as Baby Doe, in a Leadville restaurant, and gave her $5,000 on the spot. He left Augusta, his wife of 25 years, and after a dubious Durango divorce, a secret wedding in St. Louis and a proper divorce at last, he married Baby Doe publicly at the Willard Hotel in Washington in March 1883, during a 30-day stint as a United States senator. She wore a $7,000 satin dress and a $90,000 necklace. Polite society shut them out.

The Matchless played out first. By 1887 its ore was depleted and Tabor began borrowing heavily, and when the Panic of 1893 wiped out silver he lost everything. At 65 he went back to work as a common miner; friends got him the Denver postmastership in 1898, and he died 15 months later, in 1899. On his deathbed, the story goes, he told her to hold on to the Matchless, because it would make millions again when silver came back. The story may not be true, since by then the mine was probably mortgaged or lost.

She held on anyway. Baby Doe paid off the creditors with a loan and spent 28 years leasing and promoting the Matchless, covering each loan with another, until Shorego Mining foreclosed in 1928. The owner, J. K. Mullen, let her stay in the cabin beside the hoisthouse. She wound burlap sacks around her legs in winter, guarded the mine with a shotgun, and filled about 2,000 scraps of paper with diaries and writings she called "Dreams and Visions." She died there of a heart attack on 20 February 1935, about 81 years old, and was not found until 7 March, after a snowstorm, when neighbours noticed no smoke from the chimney. Despite local legend, she had food, money and coal.

The National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum now runs the Matchless Mine Historic Site, with the superintendent's cabin, the hoist house and the headframe, open from about Memorial Day to Labor Day.