Augusta Tabor 3

Augusta Tabor 3

This little clapboard dwelling originally stood on Harrison Avenue,

Leadville, where the Opera House is now. It was moved to its present

place on Fifth Street in 1879. In 1955 it was opened as a small

shop-museum. It now stands alone on the block, but for many years it

was huddled against a clapboard false-front assay office on one side

and small residences on the other._]

 

Business boomed. Tabor had to hire two clerks to take care of the post

office alone. Soon he was forced to open a banking department since he

owned an ordinary iron safe which sat outside the counter. Everyone

wanted to deposit their cash in his safe. The cashier divided his time

between the dry goods and grocery divisions, and the receipt of deposits

and writing of exchange. Tabor hired still more clerks and expanded

jovially in the balmy atmosphere of his new importance.

 

In January, 1878, the settlement comprised some seventy tents, shanties

and log cabins. The inhabitants decided to call a meeting, effect an

organization and choose a name. “Leadville” was selected, although a few

people thought “Cloud City” was more poetic. A short while afterward

they voted Tabor to the mayorship, and officially confirmed his

year-long office with a city election in April. Tabor was now worth

between $25,000 and $30,000.

 

As sleeping and eating facilities were at a premium, the Tabors decided

to build a residence for themselves, where Augusta could serve meals,

and to allow the clerks to sleep above the store. They chose a site at

310 Harrison Avenue, way off from the settlement, and began to build in

the spring. Meanwhile Tabor was handing out grubstakes and still

dreaming.

 

Then the momentous day of his Castles-in-Spain arrived. On Sunday, April

21, 1878, two German prospectors, August Rische and George Theodore

Hook, asked him for a stake while Tabor was sorting mail. Postmaster

Tabor told them to pick out what they needed, and the men chose about

$17 worth of supplies, mostly groceries. They drew up an agreement that

Tabor was entitled to a third of what they found.

 

A few days later they came back and asked for a second hand-out. They

had staked a claim and they needed shovels, a hand-switch, drills and

blasting powder to sink a shaft. This brought the total outlay to some

$60.

 

[Illustration: FAST FRIENDS

 

_Although Bush quarreled violently with both Maxcy’s father and

mother, no friction ever marred their affection. They were business

partners and friends for twenty years despite sixteen years’

difference in their age and outlook._]

 

Early in May, Augusta was coming downstairs one morning when August

Rische burst into the store. As she told the story to Flora Stevens, his

hands were full of specimens. He rushed toward her and shouted:

 

“We’ve struck it! We’ve struck it!”

 

Augusta said she was rather frigid to him.

 

“Rische, when you bring me money instead of rocks, then I’ll believe

you.”

 

But it was true. Their mine, the Little Pittsburgh, netted Tabor

$500,000 in the following fifteen months. He bought the Chrysolite which

proved to be another bonanza. Augusta continued to keep boarders during

the summer and Tabor, to supervise the store’s activities. But then

Tabor began to splurge, and in the autumn they sold out. The fall

election had made Tabor lieutenant-governor of Colorado, so they planned

to move to Denver.

 

In January, 1879, Tabor rented, and the next month purchased, the Henry

C. Brown house at 17th and Broadway, paying $40,000. According to

Augusta, when her husband took her to see it, she was very mindful of

the quick rises and equally rapid descents of Colorado fortunes. Augusta

took one look at her husband’s idea of a new home and said:

 

“I will never go up these steps, Tabor, if you think I will ever have to

go down them.”

 

Thirty-five curious callers appeared the first day she was at home. She

remarked sarcastically:

 

“I would scarcely know how to return the call of the woman next door who

arrived in a carriage.”

 

Tabor provided the means for returning the call. It was a $2,000

carriage, an exact replica of the one driven by the White House coachman

around Washington.

 

“La,” she told Flora Stevens, “If we had only had the money that is in

that carriage when we began life.”

 

Delegations from the various churches also came to call, each seeking

the Tabors’ membership. Augusta remarked:

 

[Illustration: TABOR PROPERTY DOMINATED DENVER IN 1881

 

_The Tabor Grand rose like a cathedral beyond the spired church. At

far right is Augusta’s house. The light building behind the present

Navarre Restaurant is the Windsor Hotel. The tall business building in

the middle was the Tabor block. The Brown was a triangular cow

pasture. In front of it was Augusta’s coach house that faced

Seventeenth Avenue._]

 

“I suppose Mr. Tabor’s and my souls are of more value than they were a

year ago.”

 

Poor Augusta! Time was running out. Tabor’s answer to her tartness was

to spend his evenings in the variety halls and bordellos. As his

interests and investments widened, he took the most seductive inmates

traveling with him. The newspapers reported that Tabor had given

clothes, jewelry, furs and furbelows to three or four women (one paper

said five) so that they could appear as “Mrs. Tabor.” One that he

singled out was Alice Morgan, an Indian club swinger at the Grand

Central variety hall in Leadville. Next he was charmed by Willie Deville

in Lizzie Allen’s parlor house in Chicago, and he brought Willie west

with him. Augusta discovered the affair and the miscreants promised to

part.

 

But this was a ruse. Tabor kept on seeing her secretly and took Willie

on a trip to New York. There, she was so indiscreet about their

relations that a woman in the hotel tried to blackmail the Silver King.

Tabor told Willie she talked too much and made her a gift of $5,000 to

soften the blow of saying “good-bye.” (Augusta preserved an interview,

with many more details than these, that Willie gave to a St. Louis

reporter a couple of years after the affair. Apparently, Willie was

still talking too much.)

 

In September, 1879, Tabor sold out his interest in the Little Pittsburgh

for a cool million dollars. He bought the Matchless for $117,000 (which

later proved the greatest bonanza of all) and over 800 shares of stock

of the First National Bank in Denver. Then he and Augusta went East for

six weeks while he made further investments, notably land in South

Chicago.

 

[Illustration: TWENTY ROOMS

 

_Henry C. Brown, the builder of the Brown Palace Hotel and donor of

the State Capitol ground, sold this house to Horace Tabor in 1879.

Augusta’s first act, when she obtained it as part of her divorce

settlement, was to have the grounds landscaped. Each summer thereafter

she entertained at a lawn party to aid charities of the Unity Church._]

 

On November 5 the Tabors returned to Denver and Horace left for

Leadville to see to the completion and opening of the Tabor Opera House.

Augusta remained in Denver. Tabor did not return even for Christmas. His

bachelor suite on the second floor of the Opera House (with its handy

passageway across to Bill Bush’s Clarendon Hotel) proved too delightful

for a man whose eyes wandered.

 

Augusta and he began to quarrel more violently. During 1880 they

appeared together at balls of the Tabor Hose Co. in Denver and of the

Tabor Light Cavalry in Leadville, and when Tabor entertained

ex-President and Mrs. Grant in the “Cloud City.” The two couples sat

together in the left-hand box for the second act of “Ours,” and then

left to attend a ball in the general’s honor. This was July 23, 1880, a

momentous date for forty-seven-year old Augusta—not because she had met

a president, but because just about that time Horace ceased to be her

husband.

 

In the autumn, back in Denver, Horace gave her $100,000, following his

usual practice of making a parting gift. In January, 1881, Tabor left

the Broadway mansion irrevocably and established residence in a suite at

the Windsor Hotel of which he was part-owner.

 

What had happened was that, some time during the spring or summer on one

of his frequent trips to Leadville, Tabor had met “Baby” Doe. She was

twenty-five and he was forty-nine. They were introduced by Bill Bush who

had known the Dresden-doll beauty as Mrs. Harvey Doe during her

two-and-a-half year residence in Central City. Bill Bush had been

proprietor of the Teller House and had also known her husband and

in-laws. She had obtained a divorce from Harvey Doe in March, 1880, for

adultery and non-support, and shortly after arrived in Leadville.

 

Baby Doe said that it was “love at first sight” on her part. With Tabor,

the feeling grew on him. She became his mistress almost immediately, but

it was not until January, 1881, that he began to think of divorce and

re-marriage. Augusta put her foot down. She refused successive overtures

of a handsome settlement in return for a divorce.

 

Augusta knew what was going on. In December, 1880, she bought a third

interest in the Windsor Hotel from Charles L. Hall of Leadville. The

other third was owned by Bill Bush, who also managed the hotel, assisted

by her son, Maxcy. In the next months Augusta used her ownership to

check up regularly on activities at the hotel. When Tabor brought Baby

Doe down from Leadville and installed her at the Windsor, the two women

must have passed in the lobby frequently.

 

[Illustration: AUGUSTA’S CORNER WITH TREES—THEN AND NOW

 

_When Augusta disposed of her last remaining lot at Seventeenth and

Broadway, her trees were sold and transplanted to Wolhurst,

Littleton._]

 

Augusta realized a fine monthly profit from her Windsor investment, and

in April, 1881, she treated herself to a trip abroad for several months.

Both Tabor and Bush wanted to buy out her share. Tabor did not like her

making “such a damned nuisance of herself” going in and out of the

rooms, and Bush wanted to obtain a controlling interest in the hotel.

Augusta kept on saying, “No.” No divorce and no hotel sale.