Silver Queen : The Fabulous Story of Baby Doe Tabor
by Caroline Bancroft
Category: History

This is a fascinating autobiography of Baby Doe Tabor, the second wife of pioneer Colorado businessman Horace Tabor, whose rags-to-riches and back to rags again story made her a well-known figure in her own day, and at one time hailed as the “best dressed woman in the West.” It was during Baby Doe’s final years of her life living in a shack on the site of the Matchless Mine, enduring great poverty, solitude, and repentance, that fellow Coloradan Caroline Bancroft met Baby Doe, who had known Bancroft’s father for many years, and became fascinated by her “smile, the manner, the voice and the flowery speech [...] despite her diminutive size.” Following Tabor’s death in the Matchless Mine cabin on March 7, 1935, Bancroft was commissioned to write her biography, her greatest source of information provided by Sue Bonnie, who had discovered Tabor’s body. This book, originally published in 1955, is the result: “Baby Doe Tabor tells us of her life in nearly her own words—many she actually used in talking to Sue Bonnie and others I have imagined as consonant with her character and the facts of her story.”