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Overview
But Baby Doe’s life was also a morality play. Almost overnight, the Tabors’ wealth disappeared when depression struck in 1893. Horace died six years later. According to the legend, one daughter left home never to return; the other died horribly. For thirty-five years, Baby Doe, who was considered mad, lived in solitude high in the Colorado Rockies.
Baby Doe Tabor left a record of her madness in a set of writings she called her “Dreams and Visions.” These were discovered after her death but never studied in detail—until now. Author Judy Nolte Temple retells Lizzie’s story with greater accuracy than any previous biographer and reveals a story more heartbreaking than the legend, giving voice to the woman behind the myth.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806183879 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 11/28/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Judy Nolte Temple, Associate Professor of Women's Studies and English at the University of Arizona, is the author (under the name Judy Nolte Lensink) of “A Secret to be Buried”. The Diary and Life of Emily Hawley Gillespie, 1858-1888.
Read an Excerpt
Baby Doe Tabor
The Madwoman in the Cabin
By Judy Nolte Temple
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2007 University of Oklahoma PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-8387-9
CHAPTER 1
The Legend of Baby Doe
Matchless Mine Cabin
Our Own Beloved Mr and Mrs. Wallace:
I have longed to write you of all the trials Persecutions our Divine Saviour has permitted me to endure.... I am now as for a long time alone. I am breaking my heart over that Book and that Picture Show.
The legend of Baby Doe Tabor, like a lode of silver ore, comes from many veins with elusive sources. It is part historically verifiable biography and part myth, a story that confirms desires and taboos through the deeds and misdeeds of heroic figures. This legend, set in the American mining frontier, embodies beliefs about masculinity, female power, money, and sin. Western culture reifies the successful man, yet recurring sagas tell of a smart, beautiful, ambitious, and sexually irresistible woman who brings about his down-fall—and ultimately her own demise. The stories of Adam and Eve, Samson and Delilah, Caesar and Cleopatra, even President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, all contain versions of the femme fatale, of the rule-breaking lovers who trespass moral borders. We devour the lurid details of their glorious if ephemeral freedom from restraint and then follow with satisfaction the tale of their inevitable fall from ill-gotten pleasure. Such legendary lovers form a convoluted link between immorality and immortality. Lizzie had a drawing of Anthony and Cleopatra pasted in her scrapbook, perhaps seeing a parallel between the tragic Egyptian queen who loved unto death and her own short controversial reign as Colorado's Silver Queen.
By the time Mrs. Tabor died in 1935, she had become a legend: the infamous Baby Doe. In obituaries she was called "the Wallis Simpson in the American Empire," an allusion to the gorgeous divorcée who so enchanted the king of England, Edward VIII, and caused an uproar when Edward abdicated the throne in the name of love. The legend of Baby Doe Tabor began during Lizzie's lifetime, nourished by gossips and occasional newspaper articles. Two unauthorized biographies appeared when Mrs. Tabor was seventy-eight and provoked her to protest "that Book and that Picture Show." Popular historian David Karsner wrote the first, titled Silver Dollar, in 1932. It was reprinted in at least eleven editions and remained in print until 1970.
Karsner, who had written books about Andrew Jackson and Eugene Debs, made Horace Tabor his main subject; Baby Doe did not enter the story until page 138. The closing chapter on their daughter Silver Dollar, "Death in the Red Lights," must have particularly hurt Lizzie Tabor, who had denied to reporters in 1925 that the young woman found dead in a Chicago flophouse was her errant child. In writing Silver Dollar, Karsner drew on newspaper articles, general histories of the mining West, and on his relationships with journalists, an academic, a curator at the Colorado Historical Society, and the heirs of Tabor's first wife, Augusta. But Karsner did not interview Mrs. Tabor. Only after completing his manuscript did he venture up into the mountains to actually meet the elderly widow. In a short "afterword" he described encountering the "strange woman" wielding a shotgun, but on the second day Karsner gained an invitation into Mrs. Tabor's cabin. He wrote, "I attempt no interview with Baby Doe. It would have been folly to do so. The story had been told to me many times by numerous people, probably with more clarity and authenticity than she could remember it and piece it together after passing nearly thirty years in the terrible silence of a solitary shack beside a skeleton mine on the summit of the Rockies." Karsner chose to promote the standard legend of Baby Doe rather than listen to the aged recluse tell her side of her story. Did Karsner even ask Mrs. Tabor about the piles of paper covered with her writing that filled the room? Few realized that Lizzie was doggedly recording her "Dreams and Visions" and writing heartfelt letters from her shack, which was neither solitary nor silent. A second affront to Mrs. Tabor occurred when a film based on Karsner's book and also called Silver Dollar premiered on December 2, 1932, in Denver and attracted a huge crowd that hoped to glimpse the legendary Baby Doe herself. Mrs. Tabor had been invited by the producers to attend the premiere, with expenses paid, but she refused this mortification.
Perhaps in response to these hurtful stories, Lizzie Tabor was secretly storing away family documents, including her "Dreams and Visions," in trunks sent to a Denver warehouse and a Leadville Catholic hospital. Her motive, like that of other "compensatory diarists," as Robert Fothergill terms them, may have been to hide away her own version of her life story for safe keeping in hopes that later generations might be more empathetic to her situation as a grieving widow and mother. For this devout elderly woman, the tell-all memoir or rebuttal interview characteristic of our era would have been unthinkable. Despite her careful planning, Lizzie's writings so carefully stowed away would not be available to readers until thirty-two years after her death. Thus Baby Doe was not only sentenced to three decades of "solitary confinement" in life; she was posthumously silenced for three more decades before her words could confront the hurtful legend. In those decades the legend thrived, fed by voyeuristic public hunger for evermore salacious details about Baby Doe, and unchallenged by her own voice that would testify to the injustices she bore. One version of the Tabor story purportedly told in Baby Doe's own words was Caroline Bancroft's Silver Queen, published in 1950 and still in print today. But this voice, like most of the legend it helped perpetuate, was inauthentic.
I use the term "legend" for a story that is based, however loosely, on the lives and adventures of past people. Within legends, archetypal figures and events appeal to us on deep mythic levels: the sexually uncontrollable woman, the morally weak man, the social eruptions evoked by immoral coupling, the child marked by the sins of the parents. These mythic elements provide what Richard Slotkin calls an "intelligible mask" that hints at the earthly and metaphysical issues that torment us. Can men become powerful enough to escape moral parameters? How do we deal with sexually powerful women? What pathways exist in traditional society for ambitious women? What happens to those who love not wisely but too well? Should justice be tempered by mercy? In the legend, such questions feed the mythic figure of Baby Doe, one that speaks to deeply held cultural notions about sex, power, and wealth. These notions embedded in the legend, I suggest, fuel the mythic engine that keeps alive the sad legend of Baby Doe (see chapter 3).
The legend that follows consolidates a wide range of nonfictional books on the Tabors, some of which form a tawdry genealogy of misinformation, each building upon its predecessors to make Baby Doe's sin and her punishment evermore dramatic. I have included characteristic passages from the so-called biographers to give a flavor of their own voices, voices that can sound like those of hyperbolic gossipers. My analysis of each writer's biases appears later (see chapter 3), so that the momentum of the legend is uninhibited. However, at certain important junctures in the legend, each writer's view of female power and sexuality influences a turning point in their narrative. For example, they differ over who seduced whom, whether Baby Doe was a spirited pioneer, a sexual predator, a guileless exhibitionist who took "a leaf from Eve's notebook," or simply a woman lucky or unlucky enough to be in the right western boom town at the right time. I signal these telling divergences within the legend by noting that precisely what happened is unclear. Lizzie Tabor's correspondence could have answered many of these mysteries immediately after her death, but her papers were sealed away—and people seemed to like the legend the way it was. I have interspersed, within the virtually voiceless legend, Lizzie Tabor's own words taken from selected "Dreams and Visions" to complement, contradict, and complicate the story. For even though what follows is primarily a fable, it has roots in real-life events that permeated Lizzie's Dreamworld.
THE BELLE OF OSHKOSH BECOMES BABY DOE
Sunday morn May 23–1927 I dreamed Pa and Ma were sitting in a seat of a wagon & I was behind them others were standing around & all over was dark looking & dusky & Ma had on a big dark rich coat of heavy dark fur she looked very large Pa looked so young & bright & gay & had a smart brimed hat on O so young looking & handsome & he talked gaily to me turning around to me all the time I said to Ma why don't the cook make us some pies & cakes & doughnuts I am so hungry. I then woke up May 23–1927
A beautiful blonde baby girl was christened Elizabeth Bonduel McCourt on October 7, 1854, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. She was the child of Peter and Elizabeth McCourt, devout Irish Catholic immigrants. The McCourt family by 1870 numbered eight children and financially was moderately comfortable from their real estate investments and a clothing store that thrived in the booming Wisconsin lumber region dominated by capitalists such as Frederick Weyerhauser. However, fires that swept through the town and the depletion of the lumber supply kept the McCourt finances in a precarious position: Peter McCourt's worth fluctuated from $75,000 to zero in 1875, the year of a major conflagration. A nationwide economic depression forced the family to move to a modest cottage. "Elizabeth, however, wasn't greatly depressed by her father's business worries. Certainly her own capital assets were not depreciating as she entered adolescence. In her mid-teens she was already called ... the 'belle of Oshkosh.'"
Elizabeth, called "Lizzie" by her family, was approximately five foot three inches tall. "Her figure was already a challenge to the local forces of morality, plump in the places a nineteenth-century female wanted to be plump and pretended to be if she wasn't." Noted for her striking blue eyes and friendly manner, Lizzie began to attract the admiring comments of men and the disapproving envy of women. One McCourt daughter had already been married off to a prosperous man, but the presence of the unmarried twenty-two-year-old Lizzie, regardless of her beauty, was conspicuous. "Elizabeth had made up her mind to this much: when she fell in love, the man must be something, or at least have excellent promise." The social prospects of gentlemanly Harvey Doe, the son of Oshkosh's former mayor, represented promise on a modest scale to the McCourts. Despite the fact that the Does were a respectable Protestant family and the McCourts were Irish Catholic, Harvey knew of Lizzie as the prettiest girl in town. It is unclear if it was the audacious Miss McCourt or the admiring young Mr. Doe who initiated a more personal acquaintance. In spite of his mother's objections to immigrant papists, Harvey Doe married Elizabeth McCourt in a modest Catholic ceremony on June 27, 1877. The newlyweds immediately headed west toward Central City, Colorado, where Harvey's father owned a gold mine called the Fourth of July that his son could work. The West operated for the Does, as it did for many other families, as a safety valve to release tensions: the mother's dismay over her son's marriage to a rumored fast girl, the son's desire to escape his domineering mother. The McCourt family was also supportive of this venture, for the West represented opportunity to those who had the courage, stamina, and luck to pursue mining. For the beaming Lizzie Doe, the West symbolized escape from gossiping women to a freer masculine place where she would be appreciated. She would meet her destiny in the Rocky Mountains.
June 9–1904 I dreamed I went to the Episcopal alter & knelt down with Harvey Doe & was married to him by their minister & I said that Pa would be so happy & told Ma that I was now fixed up in our church ... & Tabor was there all seemed happiness how funny to marry Harvey again
The honeymooning Does spent two weeks at a nice hotel in the thriving city of Denver, population nearly thirty thousand. The bustle and energy must have been stimulating for a girl from Oshkosh. Harvey and Lizzie were headed for even wilder territory beyond Denver, where Harvey's father had preceded them to finalize plans for working the family gold mine. Like most mining towns, Central City lacked women, so someone as striking as Mrs. Doe was immediately noticed by the miners. She was a married woman, but her flashy figure and friendly openness were contradictory to notions of ladylike behavior. Soon Mrs. Doe was given the nickname "Baby" by the miners who called her Baby Doe. It is unclear whether this name was based on her diminutive figure and doelike eyes or was a variation of the salacious term "babe" with its sexual innuendo. It is also unclear whether Mrs. Doe resented this familiarity or relished the rough tribute to her beauty and gameness. Perhaps this suggestive term expressed the miners' relief that here was a woman with spunk who could do physical work—and would have to—for it was soon apparent that Harvey Doe's upbringing as a gentleman's son who could sing and play the piano beautifully had not prepared him for mining labor. Harvey Doe, Jr., believed he had inherited a gold mine but soon discovered he would first have to dig the shaft. The elder Doe had promised that any profits his son made as a result of working the Fourth of July would become partly Harvey's, and if the mine proved prosperous within two years it would be deeded to the young couple.
This seemingly wonderful opportunity was undercut by the fact that Lizzie and Harvey Doe had arrived in the Rockies twenty years too late: the easily accessible placer gold of the 1858–1859 Pikes Peak boom years was long gone and the day of the lone prospector was past. Most of the successful mines were now owned by large corporations that could supply the capital needed to hire Cornish workers. The Does' mine would require a two-hundred-foot-long tunnel to reach the lower-grade ore typical of the end of a boom, and to make matters worse, gold was being challenged by a rival ore, silver, that was making people in upstart towns such as Leadville very rich.
While Harvey hired miners, Lizzie moved their possessions from a costly hotel room into a more modest Central City cottage. She was either worried, ambitious, or bored enough to don men's clothing and help supervise the workers. This gender anomaly was noted in the local Town Talk newspaper: "The young lady manages one half of the property while her liege lord manages the other.... This is the first instance where a lady, and such she is, has managed a mining property." The ore the Does had assayed, however, was poor-grade quality and the funds that Harvey's father had provided to hire workers were soon depleted. To Lizzie's dismay, Harvey became a day laborer, a bottom-tier mucker, at a mine in the nearby town of Black Hawk. The Does' next move to a single rented room above a store there must have reminded Lizzie of the descent made by her own parents as their fortunes waned. Baby Doe again was not accepted among the few genteel women of Black Hawk, so she and Harvey became a threesome with a prosperous drygoods merchant named Jake Sandelowsky. It is unclear whether Baby Doe gradually pursued a warmer acquaintance with Jake Sands, as the Polish Jew called himself, or he pursued her. The scrapbooks that Lizzie began to accumulate during this period show that their friendship contained elements of at least a fantasy romance. She developed a code in an attempt to obscure his name and near a photograph of Jake were clippings from poems titled "The First Meeting" and "Possession.
Harvey Doe went back to Wisconsin, just as Lizzie discovered she was pregnant in late 1878. His motives are unclear. Did Harvey leave in response to his mother's requests that he come home, or because of a quarrel in which the child's paternity was an issue? Or had Harvey already deserted his wife for so long that the paternity of the baby was unquestionable—and therefore grounds for permanent desertion?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Baby Doe Tabor by Judy Nolte Temple. Copyright © 2007 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Preface,
Acknowledgments,
Chapter 1. The Legend of Baby Doe,
Chapter 2. Obsessed with Baby Doe: The Legend Expands,
Chapter 3. The Wanton: Sex and Power in the Mining Frontier West,
Chapter 4. The Bad Mother and Good Widow: "Much Madness is divinest Sense",
Chapter 5. Entering the Dreamworld: Lizzie Tabor Speaks,
Chapter 6. Mining the Dreamworld,
Epilogue. In Her Own Words: "Dreams and Visions",
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,