Horace Tabor — the Silver King of Leadville Who Died a Postmaster

Summary

Horace Austin Warner Tabor — "Haw" to the men of Leadville — was a Vermont-born stonecutter and shopkeeper who spent two decades scratching at the edges of one mining camp after another before a single grubstake made him, almost overnight, one of the richest men in America. In 1878 he staked two German prospectors who blundered into the Little Pittsburg, a fabulous silver lode; the following year he bought the Matchless Mine outright. By 1881 he was reckoned worth around nine million dollars — the equivalent of hundreds of millions today — and he spent it on the scale of a man who could not quite believe it would ever stop coming.

Tabor built opera houses in Leadville and Denver, raised the Tabor Block downtown, served as the first mayor of Leadville and as Colorado's lieutenant governor, and bought a thirty-day seat in the United States Senate. He also divorced Augusta, the frugal wife who had endured the lean years with him, and married Elizabeth "Baby Doe" McCourt in a Washington wedding so lavish and so scandalous that respectable society never quite forgave either of them.

The fortune rested on a single commodity, and that commodity rested on a single act of Congress. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 propped up the price of silver by obliging the Treasury to buy it; when the Panic of 1893 hit and President Grover Cleveland forced the Act's repeal that autumn, the silver market collapsed. Tabor, leveraged and overextended, watched mine after mine and building after building slip away to his creditors within a matter of months.

He died in 1899, six years after the crash, having spent his last year as the postmaster of Denver — a patronage appointment arranged by friends who remembered what he had been. His widow Baby Doe kept her husband's deathbed faith with the Matchless Mine, living in a cabin beside its played-out shaft until she was found frozen there in the winter of 1935. The Tabors became Colorado's enduring parable of the silver age: the speed of the rise, the completeness of the fall, and the long cold coda no one could have written for them.

Timeline

The Fortune

Tabor was born in Holland, Vermont, on November 26, 1830, trained as a stonecutter, and married Augusta Pierce, a contractor's daughter, in 1857. The couple joined the Pike's Peak Gold Rush, reaching Colorado in 1859, and spent the next two decades running stores and boardinghouses on the edge of one camp after another while Horace prospected without much luck. Augusta kept the books and the businesses; by the early 1860s their net worth was a modest few thousand dollars. Tabor's gift, it would turn out, was not for finding silver but for being standing nearby when others did.

The break came in the booming camp of Leadville, where Tabor kept a store and had been elected the town's first mayor in 1877. In the spring of 1878 two prospectors, August Rische and George Hook, could not pay for their supplies, and Tabor grubstaked them in exchange for a one-third interest in whatever they found. What they found, on Fryer Hill, was the Little Pittsburg — one of the richest silver strikes of the era. Tabor sold his share within roughly a year for something on the order of a million dollars, and used the proceeds to buy more mines, most famously the Matchless, which he purchased in 1879 for about $117,000.

The Matchless and his other holdings made him spectacularly wealthy; at its peak the Matchless alone was said to yield up to two thousand dollars a day. By 1881 Tabor's fortune was estimated at around nine million dollars. He poured it into Colorado: the Tabor Opera House in Leadville, the far grander Tabor Grand Opera House and the Tabor Block in Denver, banks, railroads, real estate, and ranch land. He became lieutenant governor of Colorado, and in early 1883 he engineered a brief, much-mocked appointment to the United States Senate, serving roughly thirty days to fill out a vacated term.

The Cracks

The first crack was personal, and it widened into public scandal. As the money flowed, Tabor and Augusta drifted apart — she remained cautious and saving, he had become a gambler and a spender who kept rooms at Denver's finest hotel. He began an affair with Elizabeth "Baby Doe" McCourt, a beautiful young divorcée, and in 1882 obtained a quiet, legally dubious divorce in Durango without Augusta's knowledge. Augusta filed for her own divorce, on grounds of desertion, and a settlement followed. On March 1, 1883, during his short Senate stint, Tabor married Baby Doe in Washington in a famously extravagant ceremony. The match left him a social outcast in the very society his money had bought him into.

The deeper crack was structural, and it ran beneath the entire fortune. Tabor's wealth was almost entirely a bet on the price of silver — and the price of silver was increasingly a creature of federal policy rather than of supply and demand. The Bland-Allison Act of 1878 and then the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 required the U.S. government to buy large quantities of silver, holding the price up artificially. Tabor, like most of the Colorado silver men, treated that political prop as if it were bedrock, and he borrowed and invested accordingly, plowing his cash into new mines and grand buildings rather than diversifying out of the metal that had made him.

Throughout the 1880s Tabor also spread his money thin in ways that did not pay. He ran repeatedly and unsuccessfully for governor. He invested in ventures far from his expertise, from mining properties he never properly evaluated to schemes in other states. The income from the Matchless and his other mines, vast as it was, was funding an even vaster outflow — lavish living, political ambition, real estate, and speculation — leaving him heavily leveraged and dangerously exposed to the one thing he could not control: the price of silver.

The Collapse

The blow fell in 1893. A financial panic swept the country that spring, and in the autumn Congress, pressed by President Cleveland, repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. With the government's standing bid removed, the price of silver collapsed. For a man whose entire fortune was leveraged on silver mines and silver-financed real estate, the effect was immediate and catastrophic: the income vanished while the debts remained. Banks failed across Colorado, and Tabor's creditors began calling in what he owed.

The liquidation was swift and nearly total. Mine after mine was lost or fell idle. The Tabor Grand Opera House, the Tabor Block, the Denver mansion, the ranch land — the trophies of fifteen years — were sold off or seized to satisfy debt. The man who had been worth nine million dollars was, within a few years, effectively penniless and reduced to working as a laborer in the mines he had once owned. His name, once synonymous with Colorado wealth, became a byword for how completely a silver fortune could evaporate.

In January 1898 friends arranged a patronage appointment that let Tabor end his days with a measure of dignity: he became postmaster of Denver. He held the job a little over a year. On April 10, 1899, Horace Tabor died of appendicitis. By one account some ten thousand people came to his funeral — many of them, no doubt, to mourn not just the man but the boom era he embodied. He left his widow almost nothing but the played-out Matchless and, according to legend, the instruction to hold on to it.

What Went Wrong

After

Augusta Tabor, the wife Horace had cast aside, proved the shrewder of the two. She invested her divorce settlement carefully and died in 1895 among the wealthier citizens of Denver, leaving a substantial estate to their son — a quiet rebuke to the husband whose recklessness had ruined him.

Baby Doe Tabor became the legend that outlived them all. After Horace's death she moved to Leadville and clung to the worthless Matchless Mine for the rest of her life, living in a bare cabin beside the shaft in deepening poverty and isolation. In March 1935, after a blizzard, neighbors broke into the cabin and found her frozen to death on the floor, an old woman who had once worn a wedding necklace said to have cost a small fortune. Her vigil over the Matchless made her one of the enduring figures of Western folklore, the subject of books and even an American opera.

The Tabors endure in Colorado memory as the definitive rise-and-fall of the silver age — opera houses still bearing the name in Leadville, a fortune of nine million dollars gone in a few years, and a postmaster's grave. Their story sits in this catalogue as the purest example of a self-made fortune destroyed not by the founder's vices alone but by an undiversified, leveraged bet on a single commodity propped up by politics, with no margin left for the day the prop was kicked away.

Lessons

References

• Horace Tabor Wikipedia
• Horace Tabor Colorado Encyclopedia
• Matchless Mine Colorado Encyclopedia
• Panic of 1893 Colorado Encyclopedia
• Baby Doe Tabor and The Matchless Mine Denver Public Library