Baby Doe Tabor: The Madwoman in the Cabin, by Judy Nolte Temple, $24.95. Baby Doe Tabor, the riches-to-rags wife of silver king H.A.W. Tabor, has intrigued Coloradans for more than 125 years.
The story of the blond beauty who broke up Tabor’s marriage, enjoyed a life of luxury as his second wife, then, after the silver crash, spent her final years living in poverty at the Matchless mine in Leadville is the stuff of legends. And indeed, Baby Doe has been the subject of countless biographies, a movie, an opera, even a pornographic novel.
Now, in a scholarly account that tears fact from fable, Judy Nolte Temple views the second Mrs. Tabor from the standpoint of a historian and a feminist. While most historians write about Baby Doe’s glory years, Temple concentrates on the 35 years that Baby Doe spent at the Matchless. She interprets Baby Doe, a name Mrs. Tabor never called herself, incidentally, through the dreams and visions that the widow scribbled on scraps of paper.
The book opens new insights into the Tabor story, but in some respects it is less than satisfying. While taking to task earlier biographers, primarily Caroline Bancroft, for drawing unfounded conclusions, Temple makes plenty of her own. For instance, she suggests Baby Doe’s strange ways may have been caused from drinking water in the Matchless shaft, but she offers no proof.
In addition, she overanalyzes Mrs. Tabor and compares her to, among others, Elizabeth Tabor, Jacqueline Onassis, Emily Dickinson and even the title character of “Sophie’s Choice.”
She does present some interesting information, including the name of a benefactor who may have “ruined” Silver Dollar, the Tabor daughter. The book turns up the odd fact that Baby Doe dreamed more about first husband, Harvey Doe, than about Tabor. And Temple posits that Baby Doe’s last years were spent not so much in living Tabor’s wish that she protect the Matchless but in trying to protect her daughter as well as cover up Silver’s escapades.
All and all, “Baby Doe Tabor” is a major contribution to Western history. Still, Coloradans likely will prefer the legend.
The Taylor Ranch War: Property Rights Die, by Dick Johnson, $17.98. The war that broke out in the 1960s near San Luis over use of an old Spanish land grant was really a question of Anglo property rights vs. the Hispanic custom of sharing, contends Dick Johnson in “The Taylor Ranch War.”
Hispanic residents of the valley had fished, hunted and collected wood on the grant for a century. Then a wealthy outsider, Jack T. Taylor Jr. purchased the ranch for $500,000 and tried to fence out the local people. The result was violence.
Taylor was wounded in the ensuing feud that captured the attention of the nation’s press. One reporter said Taylor thought he was Ben Cartright of the “Bonanza,” a popular television program at that time. Subsequent owners included an Enron executive and his wife, a former topless dancer, who paid $23 million for the ranch. They were largely unsuccessful in working out a compromise with the community. Eventually the courts handed down a ruling that gives the ranch little market value today.
Dick Johnson, former Denver Post reporter, has spent years delving into the ranch and its history, and “The Taylor Ranch War” is really a history of the Taylor Ranch itself. Included is the information that Gov. William Gilpin owned it in the 19th century and tried to carve it up in an early day land-development scheme.
Farmlands, Forts, and Country Life: The Story of Southwest Denver, by Sharon R. Catlett, Southwest Denver — the area south and west of Colfax and Broadway — gets short shrift in the history books because it’s a working-class neighborhood with few of the mansions and grand municipal buildings that stand in the rest of the city.
But the area is a fine collection of neighborhoods, with here and there a Colorado celebrity. Band leader Paul Whiteman bought his parents a ranch in the area, and Molly Brown had a farm and summer home there. A landmark Art Deco barbershop, a round concrete house and a cottage made from metal barrel lids and stones are part of the landscape.
Mostly, “Farmlands, Forts, and Country Life” is a story of the neighborhoods that make up Southwest Denver. Valverde, at West Alameda Avenue and South Federal Boulevard, was the celery capital of the U.S. And Barnum, at Eighth and Federal, was developed on land owned by circus magnate P.T. Barnum. Lots sold for $15 to $112. Barnum named one street Jumbo, for his favorite elephant, and others Emerson, Beecher and Holmes for men he admired. The names were changed when Denver decided to alphabetize the streets running west from Broadway.
The book is well illustrated and includes one striking photograph of a doll lying in the debris of the 1965 South Platte flood.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist who writes regularly about new regional nonfiction.
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporting error, the name of the author of the book “The Taylor Ranch War: Property Rights Die” was misspelled. The author’s name is Dick Johnson.
