This paper offers a religious history of Elizabeth “Lizzie” Bonduel McCourt Tabor, in order to ask after the conjunctions of religious sensibilities, aesthetic rendering, extractive industry, and political economy in the western United States during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century. More commonly known as “Baby Doe,” Tabor’s story is most recognizable to those familiar with the dusty romances and sepia-toned histories of Colorado mining towns, as well as those well-versed in the sentimental arias of Douglas Moore’s Cold War-era, American folk opera, The Ballad of Baby Doe. Explaining his fascination with Baby Doe, Moore described his first encountered with Tabor’s story over twenty years prior to his opera’s debut:
"In 1935 I read in the morning paper of the death of an old woman who was found frozen in a miner’s shack outside Leadville, Colorado. It appears that she was the widow of one of Colorado’s richest mine owners, Horace Tabor, sometime U.S. senator, and that she had been fabulously beautiful. … The woman had been thirty years Tabor’s junior; there was a great scandal when, in order to marry her, he had divorced his first wife, Augusta....A decade after the marriage [to Baby Doe] his fortunes took a bad turn, leaving him penniless. His young wife, who had been suspected of being only a gold-digger, turned out to be his main reliance, and after his death she took up her long vigil of thirty-six years beside his abandoned mine in Leadville."[1]
Ultimately, the libretto to Moore’s opera, written by John Latouch, plotted a predictable, boom-to-bust frontier story made more provocative largely for the scandalous love triangle tied to it, before closing with the untimely death of the former “Silver King” in the wake of financial ruin. Other historians have sometimes cast Baby Doe’s life after her husband’s death in hurried epilogue, including reports that Baby Doe’s body was found in her Leadville cabin “only partially clothed” and “frozen with ten days’ stiffness into the shape of a cross.”[2] The religious sensibilities of Baby Doe are marked in sensational form and rigid Christonormativity.
This paper reviews these and related renderings, while refocusing the narrative on the later years of Baby Doe’s life, the period when she is said to have taken on and regularly performed the role of penitent, dressing in rags and living alone outside Leadville in a shack next to the silver mine where made her husband grubstaked his millions. For, it is there where the aging Baby Doe spent the remainder of her life, working the mine herself when she could, while reporting on what she called her “Dreams and Visions,” a vast collection of papers in which she recounted intimate dreams, interpreted spirit visions, cast tea and coffee divinations, recorded palm readings and horoscopes, and inscribed urgent prayers on scraps of paper scavenged from her cabin, stored at a local warehouse, and kept in trunks at St. Vincent’s Catholic hospital in Leadville. I examine these documents alongside a collection of Catholic holy cards that she gathered and saved, on the backs of which she also sometimes recorded additional dreams and visions.
The decades after her husband’s death has only rarely been examined, primarily by feminist historians eager to reclaim or correct Baby Doe’s saga, aiming to recover or ventriloquize the voice of the woman herself, often in service of curriculum on troublemaker ladies of the U.S. frontier. For one such historian, Baby Doe’s dreamwork serves as an unconventional autobiography through which she prolifically code-switched between rational and non-rational worlds, thereby authorizing a kind of “strategic madness,” through which she pioneered the frontiers of her dream world as much as the real world. [3] Historians of religion can immediately glean the secularist suppositions of such an historical interpretation, as madness is marked in what might be otherwise understood as religious scripts and spirit encounters. I aim to take a related, if somewhat different approach, one that brings together studies of secularism, histories of lived Catholicism, the genre of the “female complaint,” the material culture of silver, and the political economy of industrial excavation, extraction, and refinement.
For this practicing Irish Catholic and unconventional religious prospector, excavating the material was also a metaphysical practice. This was as true for the mining of Baby Does’ own dreams and visions as it was in the extraction of silver ore. Helen Hills has importantly described how silver was associated with purification, sanctity, and the highly wrought, even as tarnish is also “endemic to silver,” the shine of it “endlessly threatened by its own staining … kept at bay only by repeated polishing.”[4] To think of silver, Hill convincingly argues, is to think of that obscured labor, along with its bloody history of material trauma—what Walter Mignolo referred to as “the darker side of modernity and the global reach of imperial capitalism.”[4] Hills shows “that ‘darker side of modernity’” can and should be “imagined less as the tarnish of silver, than its shiny allure.”[5] Baby Doe sought ever after that shiny allure. This paper considers the labors that when into such prospecting.
Baby Doe Tabor here thus serves as a surprising cultural icon for the study of religion, economy, and aesthetics. While studies of frontier religion in the U.S. have tended to focus on the missionary efforts of Protestants intent to evangelize the world, this paper takes up a provocative Irish Catholic silver prospector-miner, her material metaphysics, and the multiple mediations of her legacy in order to trace the changing religious dynamics of an imperial nation in the context of volatile capital enterprises and political and religious economies that are always-already in flux. In the process, the project aims to enter into questions about how the metaphysics of Baby Doe figure scandal as a historical practice and how her transgressive religiosity helps showcase the hidden assumptions and formal workings of religious history. So too this project approaches questions about how a person gets commodified and how stories get sold as something grander—written even into the American mythos as cultural icons, charismatic figures, aesthetic forms, and sites of pilgrimage for remembrance, consumption, and critique.
[1] Douglas Moore, “Something on Librettos” Opera News, 30 Sept 1961.
[2] Caroline Bancroft, Silver Queen: The Fabulous Story of Baby Doe Tabor (Johnson Publishing Company), 1962
[3] Judy Nolte Temple, Baby Doe: The Madwoman in the Cabin (University of Oklahoma, 2007).
[4] Hellen Hills, “Colonial Materiality: Silver’s Alchemy of Trauma and Salvation,” MAVCOR Journal 5.1 (2021): doi: 10.22332/mav.ess.2021.6.
[5] Walter D. Mignolo, “Coloniality of Power and De-Colonial Thinking,” Introduction, Cultural Studies 21.2-3 (2007): 155-167.
[6] Hills, “Colonial Materiality.”
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.