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

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.

Evalyn Walsh McLean — the Mining Heiress and the Hope Diamond

Evalyn Walsh McLean was the last private owner of the Hope Diamond, the most famous and most fabled “cursed” gem in the world, and one of the great spenders of the American Gilded Age. The daughter of a poor Irish immigrant who struck it rich with a Colorado gold mine, she married into the family that owned The Washington Post, and for a time she commanded a fortune that let her treat money as something that simply appeared.

In January 1911 her husband bought the Hope Diamond from the Paris jeweler Pierre Cartier for $180,000, and Evalyn wore the 45-carat blue stone to parties as a casual ornament — even, by her own telling, letting her great dane wear it. She delighted in its reputation as a bringer of doom, but her own life would deliver tragedy after tragedy: the death of her young son, the disintegration of her marriage, the loss of her daughter, and the steady erosion of the wealth that had once seemed inexhaustible.

McLean’s spending was legendary and ceaseless, and the family’s income could not keep pace. Her husband, Edward “Ned” McLean, drank himself into mental collapse, lost control of the Post, and was eventually declared legally insane. In one of the most notorious episodes of her life, she was swindled out of more than $100,000 by the con man Gaston Means, who claimed he could recover the kidnapped Lindbergh baby through underworld contacts.

By the time she died in 1947, the great Walsh-McLean fortune had largely dissolved into debt, and her jewels — including the Hope Diamond — were sold to settle her estate. The diamond passed to the jeweler Harry Winston and, in 1958, was donated to the Smithsonian Institution, where it remains. Evalyn Walsh McLean’s life stands as a parable of inherited wealth spent faster than it could ever be replaced.