Prospecting and Penance with Baby Doe Tabor: Silver, Spirit, Scandal at the Frontiers of American Religion

This paper is a religious history of Elizabeth "Baby Doe" Tabor that examines her vast archive of miscellany, including dream interpretations, accounts of spirit visions, tea and coffee divinations, palm readings, horoscopes, and prayer cards, in order to approach questions about religious sensibility, aesthetic rendering, extractive industry, and political economy in the western U.S. during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century. Tabor was a practicing Catholic who sought her fortune on the Colorado frontier and found it in the silver mines of Leadville and its leading man, Horace A.W. Tabor. Her story has been told in the annals of frontier history and in Cold War-era opera. This paper examines these and other renderings of her life in order to reconsider religious forms in the context of an imperial nation and changing monetary policy.