Read Ebook: Augusta Tabor: Her Side of the Scandal by Bancroft Caroline

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Ebook has 124 lines and 10508 words, and 3 pages

Copyright 1955 by Caroline Bancroft. Fifth edition, 1968

Johnson Publishing Co., Boulder, Colorado

The Author

Caroline Bancroft is a third generation Coloradan who began writing her first history for The Denver Post in 1928.

Her long-standing interest in western history was inherited. Her pioneer grandfather, Dr. F. J. Bancroft, was a founder of the Colorado Historical Society and its first president.

She is shown standing beside the headgate at Lake Caroline on Mt. Bancroft, a Continental Divide peak named for her grandfather. The photo was taken by Charles Eaton in the summer of 1956.

STEPHEN L. R. McNICHOLS Governor of Colorado 1957-63

"She is a blonde, I understand, and paints. But I have never seen her."

Augusta received her caller in the elegantly furnished sitting-room of her twenty-room mansion. The house stood at the corner of Seventeenth Avenue and Lincoln Street but faced Broadway. Its address was 97 Broadway, and was entered along a spruce-lined circular driveway. The house and its surrounding block of land had been part of her divorce settlement from the millionaire Silver King, Horace A. W. Tabor.

That divorce in the January preceding had been a national scandal, only to be topped by the even greater scandal of her former husband's remarriage. The wedding was performed on March 1 in Washington where Tabor had gone to serve a thirty-day term as senator. It was attended by a number of political big-wigs, including President Chester Arthur; but they came without their wives. The women drew a sharp line against recognizing "that blonde," the former Mrs. Elizabeth McCourt Doe.

The best people continued to draw that line. When the Tabors returned to Denver after their honeymoon, no one called on the second Mrs. Tabor. But shortly afterward Augusta came home from California where she had taken her broken heart. Two hundred and fifty people organized a surprise reception for her at her palatial residence.

But in the following months Augusta brooded.

"I do not consider myself divorced from Mr. Tabor," she told the reporter. "The whole proceedings were irregular. If it were not for my son, Maxcy, I would commence suit tomorrow to have the divorce annulled. I repeat, it was illegal."

"Do you think Mr. Tabor would live with you if you were to have the divorce set aside?" the reporter asked.

"No, I couldn't hope for that. But it would be a great deal of satisfaction to know that that woman was no more to him than she was before he gave her his name and mine."

Augusta glanced over to the center table where she had laid down her sewing, a piece of silk patchwork. The reporter thought she looked lonely and sad-faced. Then she sighed.

"Well, there has been scandal enough, God knows. It would make a big volume if put in book form. It has aged me."

A new chapter of the scandal was being enacted that week. Horace Tabor was suing his old friend and business manager, William H. Bush, for ,000 because of sundry debts, including a ,000 embezzlement as former manager of the Tabor Grand Opera House of Denver. Bush had retaliated with a counter-suit against Tabor, asking payment for all sorts of flagrant services performed for the Silver King. The juicy trial was the sensation of the week.

Augusta had been called to testify for Bush. Her testimony had been very titillating; and she had startled the court even further by crossing over and sitting down beside Tabor while she tried to engage him in conversation.

"Mr. Tabor has changed a great deal," she commented to the reporter. "He used to detest women of that kind. He would never allow me to whitewash my face however much I desired to do so. She wants his money and will hang to him as long as he has got a nickel. She don't want an old man."

The reporter ventured the suggestion that the fifty-two-year old Tabor was not such an old man.

"Oh, yes he is! He dyes his hair and moustache. I noticed him in the court room the other day. He was afraid to draw his handkerchief across his mouth for fear of staining it. I also noticed that the hair on his temples, which is gray, was colored nicely to give him a rejuvenated appearance."

Augusta and the reporter conversed for two solid columns of small, tightly-packed print while she revealed a number of intimate matters. The details of the secret, illegal, first divorce which Tabor had procured from her in March, 1882, were set forth. Augusta claimed the charges had been a lie from beginning to end and gave conclusive data in refutation.

"Mr. Tabor used to be a truthful man. He is changed now," she remarked indignantly. After a pause, she continued with:

"I understand that she has her family quartered at his home. I mean all in this country. I understand that a fresh invoice is coming over from Ireland."

The reporter smiled at her sally and encouraged her to talk on. She showed him three scrapbooks that she was making of clippings about Tabor. Augusta explained that at first she had only saved newspaper articles that spoke well of him. But now she was saving everything, and the later clippings were all derogatory.

"Is there really seventeen in that McCourt family? Well, there is one thing that Mr. Tabor cannot say, and that is that any of my relatives ever lived off him. Not one of them ever received a cent from him. That woman will break him up."

The first Mrs. Tabor's habit of calling on writers has preserved for us a very fine autobiography. In September of 1883 Mrs. Alice Polk Hill of Denver, who had lived in Colorado for a decade or so, decided to compile a book by collecting reminiscences and informal bits of history. She spent several months traveling about the state to obtain material. Sometime prior to the publication of her book in 1884, she arrived in Leadville and stayed at the Clarendon Hotel. Augusta, who was visiting her sister, Mrs. Melvina L. Clarke, in Leadville at the time, came to call.

Mrs. Hill was delighted and later described Augusta as a "frail, delicate-looking woman with pleasing manners."

Her romance with Tabor, a Vermont stone-cutter, began in Maine in August, 1853, when Augusta L. Pierce was twenty years old and Horace Austin Warner Tabor was twenty-two. He came to work for her father, a contractor. After a couple of years' employment he fell in love with the boss's daughter. A two-year engagement followed while Tabor homesteaded a 160-acre farm in Riley County, Kansas.

"On January 31, 1857, we were married in the room where we first met," Augusta recalled.

Farming in Kansas proved bleak, arduous and lonely for the twenty-four-year old bride, and unprofitable for her husband. When the news of gold in Colorado broke, the Tabors joined the rush. On April 5, 1859, they set out in an ox-drawn covered wagon with two men friends and their sixteen-month-old baby son, Maxcy, who was teething. They also took along several cows to provide milk. The journey to Denver took them until June 20. They camped there for two weeks because the cattle were footsore, and then moved to a site near Golden.

Here, the men decided to push on to Gregory Diggings, now Central City, and they went afoot since there was no adequate road for a wagon.

"Leaving me and my sick child in the 7 by 9 tent, that my hands had made, the men took a supply of provisions on their backs, a few blankets, and bidding me be good to myself, left on the morning of the glorious Fourth. My babe was suffering from fever and I was weak and worn. My weight was only ninety pounds. How sadly I felt, none but God, in whom I then firmly trusted, knew. Twelve miles from a human soul save my babe. The only sound I heard was the lowing of the cattle, and they, poor things, seemed to feel the loneliness of the situation and kept unusually quiet. Every morning and evening I had a 'round-up' all to myself," Augusta wrote.

After three "long, weary weeks" the men returned. On the 26th of July they again "loded" the wagon and started into the mountains. Traveling by way of Russell Gulch, it took them three weeks to reach Payne's Bar, now Idaho Springs. She remarked:

"Ours was the first wagon through and I was the first white woman there, if white I could be called, after camping out three months."

The men cut logs, laid them up four feet and put the 7 by 9 tent on top for a roof. Horace went prospecting and Augusta opened a business. She baked bread and pies, gave meals and sold milk from their cows.

Horace found no gold, but Augusta was very successful. She made enough money to buy their unpaid-for farm in Kansas and to keep them through the winter in Denver. In February Horace returned to his prospect but found his claim had been jumped. He decided to go prospecting farther afield, on the Arkansas, and returned to Denver to make plans.

They traveled by way of Ute Pass and were a month on the road before they reached South Park. Now she waxed lyrical.

"I shall never forget my first vision of the park. The sun was just setting. I can only describe it by saying it was one of Colorado's sunsets. Those who have seen them know how glorious they are. Those who have not cannot imagine how gorgeously beautiful they are. The park looked like a cultivated field with rivulets coursing through, and herds of antelope in the distance."

After two hazardous crossings of the ice-caked and tumultuous Arkansas, and after several weeks of unsuccessful placering when they could not separate heavy black particles from the gold, they arrived in California Gulch. It was May 8, 1860.

"The first thing after camping was to have the faithful old oxen butchered that had brought us all the way from Kansas--yes, from the Missouri River three years before. We divided the meat with the miners in the gulch, for they were without provisions or ammunition."

Once again Augusta was the first woman in the camp, and once again the men built her a primitive log cabin. This one had a sod roof, no window, and a dirt floor. She promptly went into business and Horace went prospecting. As the Tabors were the only people in the upper end of the gulch who owned a gold-scales, Augusta added weighing dust to her duties of taking boarders and doing laundry. In a few weeks ten thousand men were crowded in the gulch, and a mail and express office was needed. Augusta was appointed postmistress of Oro City.

"I was very happy that summer," she added.

"I put my wardrobe, what there was of it, in a carpet bag, and took passage with a mule train that was going to the Missouri River. I was five weeks in crossing and cooked for my board."

"With that ,000, I purchased 160 acres of land in Kansas, adjoining the tract we already owned. My folks dressed me up, and in the spring I bought a pair of mules and a wagon in St. Joe to return with, which took about all my money."

Horace spent the ,000 that was left of the gold dust for flour in Iowa on the way back. In the spring they opened a store in Augusta's cabin. While he mined the claim, Augusta waited on customers and raised her son. She even transported gold to Denver on horseback for the express office. In order to fool highway robbers, Tabor carried a small amount of gold, while large amounts were hidden under her skirts enjoying the protection of chivalry to ladies! That summer of 1861 the store was more profitable than mining because the easy placer gold was nearly played out.

The camp fell off rapidly and by autumn was practically deserted. The Tabors decided to try the other side of the Mosquito Range and the booming camp of Buckskin Joe. Again they opened a store and again it was selected as the post office. Horace had no better luck with mining in South Park than in Oro and so resigned himself to their small business venture.

But he still dreamt of bonanzas and hopefully grubstaked penniless prospectors. The agreement was that in return for supplies, which he gave them, they would share any rich finds. Augusta viewed the practice with disfavor.

When the Printer Boy mine was expanded in 1868 in California Gulch, the Tabors moved back to Oro City. This time they erected a four-room log cabin about a mile above the present site of Leadville and settled down to their usual routine of running a general store. For ten more years, bringing the total to eighteen, Augusta kept at her labors and Horace cherished his dreams.

As the years passed, Augusta's natural New England frankness grew more tart. She found Horace's easy-going ways irritating. His off-hand generosities made no sense to a woman who knew the value of a hard-earned dollar. Or, perhaps, some psychic intuition warned Augusta that that very same trait would bring her eventual heart-break, and she was trying subconsciously to ward off the blow.

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