Yellow Scene Magazine recently featured this article, "The Tenacious Tabor Women and the Novelist Who Continues to Tell Their Stories," about Rebecca Rosenberg and her Gold Digger Novels.
Rebecca Rosenberg, a CU Boulder alumna and award-winning author, passed through her home state of Colorado earlier this month to tour for her new book, Silver Echoes: the second installment of her Gold Digger series.
“Baby Doe Tabor, [Silver Dollar’s mother] used to be a big deal in Colorado when I was growing up,” Rosenberg says.
“But the more I met people on this tour, they don’t really know the history. They just have a small sketch of an idea of who she was. I realized at the Tabor Opera House—we had close to 100 people [at her tour event]—when I said, “So, how many of you know about Baby Doe?”, and not even half of them really knew her.”
Silver Echoes is inspired and based on real-life actress Rosemary “Silver Dollar” Tabor, a woman of immense talent—author, playwright, poet, and performer—in the Roaring Twenties.
She seemed destined for stardom, but her dazzling facade concealed a life of devastating losses: the loss of her family’s fortune during the Panic of 1893; the death of her father, Horace Tabor, who was a former US Senator; and removal from the privileged life she knew after her mother moved them to Leadville, leading an impoverished life in the tool shed of the Matchless Mine. This, all culminating in a horrific sexual assault by a family lawyer, was a compounding story of traumas that triggered a fractured identity that haunted her life.
Silver Echoes unearths this hidden torment, exploring the complex life of a woman torn between victimhood and resilience.
“I lived here through my college years,” Rosenberg explains. “And in school, learning about history, I wondered, ‘Why don’t we hear more stories like this?’ Of course, in Colorado, there’s Molly Brown–I was aware of her. Then I read Gone With the Wind, and she wasn’t a real person, but it brought a woman to the forefront of history.”
“I realized that there weren’t women who were identified as part of history. That it’s all about war, all about politics, all about economics, and all about men. That’s where I got excited to write about these extraordinary women who existed, whose real-life stories people don’t know.”
GOLD DIGGER and SILVER ECHOES by historical novelist Rebecca Rosenberg are available now at Amazon
