From Westworld: What Happened to Silver Dollar Tabor?

What happened to Silver Dollar Tabor? Rebecca Rosenberg uncovers the Story of Baby Does Daughter.

A recent edition of Westworld asked those intriguing questions. Read their article below:

Author Rebecca Rosenberg writes a second book in her Gold Digger series, this time focusing on Baby Doe Tabor's daughter.

by Teague Bohlen

Award-winning author Rebecca Rosenberg grew up in Denver after moving to the Mile High City with her family when she was only five years old. "My dad would take us up into the mountains," says Rosenberg from her current home in the lavender fields of California, "and we'd run around all the gold rush towns, go through mines and graveyards in old ghost towns. We ended up in Central City quite a bit since it was an easy drive from Thornton, and back then — this would have been the 1960s and '70s — Central City still looked a lot like it had in [the 1800s] when it was founded. I just loved it."

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."

Gold Digger

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 Tabor lost his fortune when the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed; he died relatively penniless, and Baby Doe moved to Leadville, where she lived in poverty for the last three decades of her life.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.

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."

Read the full article in Westworld.