By Tara Kaufman
History Colorado

Editor’s note: This story has been edited for length. To read the original story, visit historycolorado.org.

Elizabeth “Baby Doe” Tabor first became known to me in the form of a warning, during one of my first few days as a curator at History Colorado. I was walking through the galleries with one of my new colleagues, getting to know what they knew about Colorado history. Among the many facts they sprung on me was the story of Elizabeth Tabor and her infamous wedding dress, long considered to be the jewel of the museum’s collection of historic clothing.

“You should know Baby Doe,” they said, before launching into the now-familiar synopsis of her remarkable story.

My first glimpse of the dress was just a few months later when we pulled it out to examine it in advance of conservation treatment that would smooth and stabilize the wrinkles and tears it had accumulated over time. The dress laid there in its box — the biggest allotted to any one garment in our storage facilities — in a pile of carefully arranged folds. Once on the table, it unraveled to twice its folded size, requiring two additional tables to support its 7-foot train. It appeared as a sea of cream brocade, lacking any shape, as elusive to me then as Elizabeth Tabor herself.

To many Coloradans, the Tabor story is as familiar as a folk tale, passed down through the generations with evolving lessons about love, morality, and womanhood. The crux of the story begins on March 1, 1883, when the woman who had become known as “Baby Doe” stepped into her then-new wedding gown and walked down the aisle in a Washington, D.C., ceremony that made headlines nationwide and wrecked her reputation.

Elizabeth was a divorcée nearly half the age of her magnificently rich fiancé, the mining magnate and so-called “Silver King” Horace Tabor. And his own recent divorce from his faithful wife, Augusta, only made the matter more contentious. When rumors broke that neither Elizabeth nor Horace had yet been legally divorced from their previous spouses, Victorian society erupted in a gossip storm the Tabors would never live down. When Horace died 16 years later, the Tabor reputation remained in tatters and their fortune was exhausted. His death left Elizabeth to care for their two daughters and endure 36 years of poverty and public ridicule. Shunned by Denver society, Elizabeth would be spotted around town in the decades that followed, but was mostly ignored until she was famously found frozen in the Leadville cabin where she lived near the source of her husband’s brief but extraordinary wealth, the Matchless Mine.

This story has been sensationalized time and again in the press and in popular magazines. It’s been turned into an opera and into films, fictionalized in novels and reexamined by scholars. When I first began overseeing the Tabor wedding gown’s conservation, I quickly realized the scale of the project would require me to know the dress and its wearer from the inside out. I was eager to dive into the wealth of publications about Tabor, but wound up troubled by what I found.

One after the next, each author and biographer spun a tale of a gold-digging homewrecker. It wasn’t until my readings entered the 21st century that I found the nuanced, feminist arguments that I was looking for in publications like Judy Nolte Temple’s book “Baby Doe Tabor: The Madwoman in a Cabin,” in which she returns complexity and agency to the woman who preferred to be called Lizzie.

As I continued researching the history of Lizzie’s wedding dress, I began to realize just how intertwined it was with the public’s fascination with the Tabors. Throughout its existence, the dress has come in and out of public view, and each time it resurfaces, the public discourse about it reflects evolving attitudes towards women’s dress and autonomy.

A Social Sensation
The dress first made its debut at the Tabors’ Washington wedding in 1883. According to articles from the time, the private parlor in Washington’s Willard Hotel was transformed into a “perfect fairyland” for the Tabor wedding ceremony. It was a small but showy ceremony designed to advertise Horace’s unstoppable ascent into high society.

For the past month, he had been serving temporarily as Colorado’s U.S. senator, and he took the opportunity to wed his bride before an assembly of politicians and President Chester Arthur himself. Reports generally agree that Elizabeth wore a $7,000 white silk gown, matching slippers and a veil. The style of the dress is alluded to with phrases like “low neck” and “short sleeves,” indicating what reporters considered notable style choices.

Worn by a different woman in another setting, the dress and its neckline may not have caused a stir. But amid her controversial ceremony to the much older man she’d perceivably snatched from his respected wife, her stylistic choices were interpreted by some as indicative of her lack of taste and morality. Three days after the wedding, Washington’s Sunday Herald published an article in its gossip column commenting on the “astonishing” ceremony that seemed like a “joke.” Describing Elizabeth’s wedding dress, the author noted its “extremely low corsage.” This drastic shift in tone, compared to initial reporting on the dress, was almost certainly tied to the scandal that broke shortly after the wedding when the priest who performed the ceremony was informed, apparently for the first time, that both Elizabeth and Horace had previously been married. Further yet, it was rumored that neither of their divorces had been legal.

The entire affair was maligned in the press nationwide, and people close to the Tabors wrote in to provide their firsthand accounts. This list of contributors includes the priest who presided over Elizabeth’s first marriage to Harvey Doe, the man she followed to Colorado, and whose name likely inspired her own nickname. In the priest’s statement, he declared Elizabeth’s second marriage to Horace illicit.

Had Elizabeth worn a more understated gown during the ceremony, it may have gone unnoticed amid the furor surrounding the wedding. Instead, the press’s description of the open neckline as “an extremely low corsage” likely convinced the public that it was lower than it was, and no photographs of the dress were distributed to prove otherwise. The purportedly low neckline therefore became fodder for the morally superior public, who used it as evidence of Elizabeth’s indecency in marrying Horace Tabor.

In Her Shoes
At the time, economic and professional opportunities for women were expanding in Victorian-era America, but were still very limited in comparison to the opportunities available for men. Elizabeth Tabor, who had been born Elizabeth McCourt in 1854, and whose beauty earned her the nickname of the “Belle of Oshkosh” in her Wisconsin hometown, recognized the opportunity her beauty gave her to advance. This consideration factored into her first marriage to Harvey Doe in 1877, whose attention she allegedly caught by flashing her ankles during an ice skating competition in Wisconsin. By the time Elizabeth met Horace, she’d already earned the nickname and reputation as the Colorado mining community’s youthful and beautiful “Baby Doe.” When Horace publicly began to make moves to divorce Augusta and wed Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s reputation as the local belle became the foil to Augusta’s mature and modest character and further villainized her as an already-divorced homewrecker.

I assume that the Tabors put the wedding dress into storage upon their return to Colorado, where they received a chilly welcome. What little rapport Elizabeth had with local women in Denver seems to have vanished, and Horace’s reputation as a generous businessman and respectable politician faltered when he refused demands for increased wages, then threatened striking workers. Horace lost the support of both the working and upper classes, and his chance to be a full-term senator fell through.

Nevertheless, the Tabors relished their wealth and spent it extravagantly. They were seen regularly traveling through town in their carriages and attending shows at the Tabor Grand, dressed exquisitely and often toting their young daughter, Lily, who was born in July of 1884. That same year, the Tabors moved into their new Denver mansion, where they kept over 100 peacocks on their 3-acre grounds. Their second daughter, Silver Dollar, was born in 1889.

Two major factors played into the Tabors’ economic decline. First, Horace Tabor made a series of bad investments,. The second factor was the devaluation of silver. While the Coinage Act of 1873 demonetized silver, the U.S. government continued to purchase it in large quantities for the next several years until the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1893, causing a near-complete collapse of silver prices. Almost the entirety of the Tabor fortune was created by Horace’s success in silver mining, so the one-two-punch of devaluation and withdrawal of government silver purchases turned out to be disastrous for what little money he had left after his poor investments. Nonetheless, for the next six years, the Tabors tried to keep up appearances, living in their mansion for as long as possible. Horace worked for a while as a day laborer and then was appointed Denver’s city postmaster in 1898, an opportunity that could have served as a new beginning had he not become sick and died of appendicitis the next year on April 10, 1899.

Maintaining the Tabor name
This juncture in the Tabor story is typically when the legend skips a few years and has Elizabeth immediately falling into a state of despair and running to the hills of Leadville to live out the rest of her days in an abandoned shack. But Elizabeth persisted in Denver for years after her husband’s death, during which time she fought to financially support her daughters by leasing the Matchless Mine to people willing to work it, with the hopes of extracting more valuable ore.

Elizabeth’s social exile worsened as she fell deeper into poverty and removed herself to the cabin near the Matchless. Her daughters both left Leadville and though the three maintained contact, notes in the Tabor papers reveal Elizabeth’s distress at living away from her daughters and the extent to which she suffered from poverty and starvation.

By this time, Elizabeth’s role as a local spectacle had made a 180-degree turn from the elaborately dressed hyper-feminine enchantress to a disheveled, cross-dressing loner. Her mental health deteriorated into what some have called madness, but also could have been undiagnosed dementia or lead poisoning caused by the nearby mine, as researchers like Judy Nolte Temple have theorized.

Her death in 1935 quickly became front-page news, with a particularly grisly headline reading “Woman Once Sought for Beauty, Power, and Wealth Lies Alone Two Weeks on Bleak Leadville Hilltop, a Frozen Corpse.”

The Dress’s Legacy
Elizabeth’s brothers obtained the appointment of officials at the State Historical Society of Colorado (now History Colorado) to administer her estate, which she had left behind without a beneficiary. Only two weeks after her death, and with the press on site, museum staff opened several trunks containing the Tabors’ belongings in the warehouse where they had been stored, and among the many items they pulled out was the famous wedding dress. It was deemed to be “the most valuable treasure,from a historic standpoint,” though it was noted to have been “discolored with age and perhaps ruined from water and mildew.” More belongings were later found in a hospital in Leadville, where nuns Elizabeth had befriended stored them. When the Tabor estate was eventually put up for public sale, a group of local citizens purchased what they considered to be the most important items and transferred them to the Historical Society’s collection.

Just a few months later, the museum’s very first Tabor display opened to the public. A photo in the January 1936 edition of The Colorado Magazine shows the wedding dress displayed in a case dedicated to the ceremony, and it would rarely be taken off view for the next 75 years. Tabor was shunned and ignored while alive, but after her death, she and her wedding gown were perceived with a sense of nostalgia and romanticism, as if her passing automatically granted her status as one of Colorado’s beloved historical figures.

In recent years, the dress has been on display at the Center for Colorado Women’s History, but this spring it will be returned to storage where, like the Tabor papers, it will remain available for research by future generations.

Tara Kaufman is History Colorado’s Associate Curator of Clothing and Textile Arts.