With those seminal trips up into the once-thriving mining communities in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, Rosenberg's admiration for Baby Doe Tabor was born. "I think every little girl, if they're told the story of Baby Doe, sort of falls in love with her," says Rosenberg. "She was a young woman, and her story is so dramatic and dynamic. My family and I went up to see where she lived, and where her mine was. She lived in this tiny one-room cabin — coming from the life she had, with servants bringing her everything she might need or want, that must have been an adjustment."
Elizabeth "Baby Doe" Tabor was the second wife of Colorado silver magnate Horace Tabor, who shocked Washington, D.C., while a sitting senator, by divorcing his first wife and marrying Baby Doe. Baby Doe, also on her second marriage, was scandalous in 1880s Denver, and was shunned by much of the city's upper class. Tabor lost his fortune when the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed; he died relatively penniless, and Baby Doe moved to Leadville, where she lived in poverty for the last three decades of her life. She was found frozen to death in her shack near the Matchless Mine in 1935, at the age of 81.
Rosenberg focuses on Baby Doe in her 2018 book Gold Digger and says her new book is something of a sequel to that one. Silver Echoes: What Really Happened to Silver Dollar Tabor? continues the Tabor women's tale by focusing on Baby Doe's daughter, Rosemary Silver Dollar Tabor, who was as much a character as her more famous mother.
Rosenberg, with her latest.
Rebecca Rosenberg
Like most mysteries that require unraveling, the story of Silver Dollar Tabor isn't a happy one. She was a rising starlet in the years of the First World War — in the movies and out of them just as quickly — who soon found herself in Roaring '20s Chicago with a creative spirit that wouldn't rest, a splintering psyche resulting from a rape back home and a drug habit that eventually forced her into occasional prostitution. When she died at 36 in 1925, it was a death by scalding — the victim of a pot of boiling water.
"They had an inquest," Rosenberg says, shaking her head. "But because they could never figure out who did it, they called it an accident. She'd had boiling water poured from her head down. That's not an accident."
But Silver Echoes does begin with an accident: a very-Denver moment that would linger in Silver Dollar's life for years to come. It was called the "Slide for Life," an aerial exhibition of strength and poise in which she would fly down a zip line from a tower over Lake Rhoda next to Lakeside Amusement Park, literally by holding onto a bar with her teeth. She was supposed to gracefully descend, spinning in the air as she went, the long feathers on her costume flying behind her — but instead, she hit a snag on the wire, and fell. "Her mouth was permanently damaged," says Rosenberg. "The damage she did to her jaw and teeth bothered her the rest of her life."
That incident happened in 1908, when Silver Dollar was in her late teens. By 1914, she'd moved to Colorado Springs, where she followed some dreams of the silver screen and appeared in a film called The Greater Barrier, which dealt with the interracial and star-crossed romance between a young coed and a Native American football star. [As historian Steven Antonuccio says in the video above, the fact that this film was released the same year as the notoriously racist Birth of a Nation means it was somewhat remarkable — even constructively transgressive.] Silver Dollar wasn't the main character in the film — she was a supporting character, friend to the heroine. It was a small role, and the roles apparently didn't get any bigger. In fact, it's her only known role in a film that's survived.
Silver Dollar Tabor never really gave up her visions of performing, or the arts in general. She wrote poetry, a novel, a play, even articles for newspapers, and stayed connected to the stage and big screen, including after relocating to Chicago. Her fortunes proved no safer there, and she became an alcoholic, with big plans and little to show for them, changing her name as she moved from place to place in the Windy City. "After doing so much research on her, I recognized that she probably had some form of dissociative identity disorder," says Rosenberg, who was university-trained in psychology. "She had no way to deal with all the trauma she'd experienced."
The details of the sexual assault that turned her life sideways and forced her out of Colorado are scant, and come only from a letter Silver Dollar wrote to her mother, and some of what Baby Doe told friends in the years after. "That letter was very cryptic," Rosenberg says. "Silver says that the family lawyer had attacked her, and that was why she needed to leave Denver. That lawyer was the only one helping Baby Doe keep the Matchless Mine. She knew she couldn't accuse him of anything, or her mother would suffer. She was afraid of that man for the rest of her life."
Rosenberg says that the rape was central to her desire to tell Silver Dollar Tabor's story; it seemed to be at the core of her life and many of her troubles, and yet so few knew about it, or had done the research to connect the dots. "In all my reading, I never saw anyone detail that part of the story, so I wanted that to come out," Rosenberg says. "This girl wasn't the disappointment that so many histories paint her to be. She was dealing with some very real issues. And her story, like her mother's, deserves to be told. They typified the Colorado mining woman who came and struggled, and wouldn't let go."
Now, Rosenberg will be launching her new book and talking about Baby Doe Tabor and her daughter Rosemary "Silver Dollar" Tabor — at the very Leadville Opera House that bears their surname. It's an appropriate coda, perhaps, to the lives of two important women from Colorado history who never got a fair shake. "It's such a privilege," Rosenberg says. "It's perfect to be able to honor them there. It gives me chills."
Rebecca Rosenberg will be reading, signing, and discussing her new book Silver Echoes from 4-6 p.m. on Sunday, August 31, at the Tabor Opera House in Leadville; 4-6 p.m. Monday, September 1, at MacDonald Bookshop in Estes Park; 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, September 3, at Boulder Bookstore; 6 p.m. on Thursday, September 4, at Tattered Cover Colfax; and 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, September 6, at the Center for Colorado Women's History.
