The shape of most men's dreams forms itself around wealth.

A woman's beauty and leaving some part something of themselves behind.

Once the dream goes dark, few ever get the dream.

Horace Tabor, however, made millions, married a legendary beauty and left a legacy behind.

Rich in spirit and rich in history.

What this program attempts to tell is a bit of the man his second wife, Baby Doe.

And one thing he left behind his opera house, still standing and still filled with echoes of a time.

A place he helped shape, a dream he made tangible.

Well, like a lot of tales in the West.

This one begins.

New England, state of Vermont.

Because that's where Horace Table was born.

November 26, 1830.

His mother died, though pretty soon his father remarried.

His new stepmother didn't take much to him.

So Horace left home, came stonecutter, and wandered around New England.

In 1857, he ended up in the state of Maine, place called Augusta, employed of quarry owned by a man named Pierce.

Pierce had a daughter, also named Augusta, who was then 20 years old.

She was what most folks called mature.

Well, Horace drank a lot, fought a lot.

Agusta thought he was a pretty good fellow, though.

Convinced him.

If they Got married.

Things would be better.

They did get married.

Things weren't much better.

So they set out to the state of Kansas with $300.

Mr.

Pierce gave them for wedding present.

When they got to Kansas, wasn' at all like the state of Maine.

Augusta wasn't very happy.

Fact she wrote this in her diary.

To add to the desolation of the place, one of the Kansas winds was blowing furiously.

Sitting on an open prairie one half mile from any cabin was my future home.

I sat down upon the old trunk.

The only thing to sit on.

And the tears began to flow copiously.

Why I felt so badly I could not tell.

For I had not been deceived.

I knew the house stood upon an open prairie.

I could not realize how lonely it could be.

And we had seen so many Indians on the way I feared them.

Pretty soon, though, Augusta stop crying started fixing things up.

Made a nice little home for her and Horace.

Horace planted corn.

Well, first crop shriveled up, just wasnt any rain.

Next year the crop was better, but nobody bought it.

Horace decided to go off to this place called Colorado.

Heard a lot about it.

A lot of gold out there.

So, summer of 1859.

Lots of other folks in an infant son, Harrison Augustus, set out for the West.

Once they got their Horace Tabor became a Westerner and gave to the West one of the most extraordinary tales its ever had.

By the middle of June 1859, Horace and his family had reached Denver.

Thousands had also reached Denver.

There wasn't any gold lying around, and many went back as quickly as they had come.

Horace Tabor stayed, though, and searched for almost ten years, but found nothing.

Packed up for another man born town, his driving will ran stone down to a pocket full of worthless claims By 1870 he had all but given up the dream.

And in 1876 Horace Tabor was catering to those still searching.

He opened a general store to supply the mining camp of Leadville.

Tabor spent hours with miners discussing new prospects and grub staking for a share of the claim if it ever panned out.

The earlier places in which Horace had searched places like Gregory Gulch, California Gulch were becoming ghost towns.

But this town, Leadville, was booming.

Chestnut Street Harrison Street had log stores, banks made of brick, and a saloon every third or fourth door.

The business district was doing big business.

The streets were jammed with wagons and the sidewalks creaked under thousands of feet.

Called the Magic City and the Cloud City.

Leadville and its hills were a home for a patchwork of claims, often overlapping.

The problem of overlapping claims saw lawyers gush into Leadville.

The services of the sharp, the cunning were in great demand.

Arguments as hot as gold fever broke out between the rich and the not so rich.

Confusion and anger resulted in endless litigation and occasionally a quick murder.

Then in 1877, news not lawyers gushed in the news was not gold or legal, it was silver Tabor promptly bought out his partners, sold his general store, and started a much more creative occupation.

Millionaire.

The mine, christened the Little Pittsburg, was soon producing $20,000 worth of silver a month.

Tabors next stroke of luck came when chicken Bill, a specialist in mind salting, located a claim on Friar's Hill.

He dug down 20ft, hit water and decided to salt the mine with ore from Tabors Little Pittsburgh Then he approached Tabor with a classic miner's tale that he had struck a very rich vein, and that he had no money to continue in.

Would Tabor like to buy him out?

Well, Tabor agreed to buy the claim.

He and his men dug down 20 more feet and hit silver.

The real thing, the crystalline mine, was soon to bring in $100,000 monthly, since it's probably true that good things come in threes.

The third good thing followed in 1879, when Tabor purchased the controlling interest in another Leadville mine, the matchless.

It had been discovered a year before, but had produced nothing.

Within a year, Tabor was receiving $25,000 a month from the matchless.

Throughout the years, it gave Horace Tapers bank account a boost of about $11 million.

So just as the former mayor and postmaster of Leadville change, within three years, his town had changed too.

In fact, Leadville seemed to run 24 hours at a time.

Theater stayed open till almost dawn, dance halls and liquor shops and other houses of entertainment stayed open past dawn.

Leadville was noisy, fast and fat with money.

By the end of 1879, Horace himself was making a fat million or more a year.

He bought things.

He built things.

Opulent, splendid houses in Denver.

In Leadville, nothing was beyond him.

Nothing too much for the new elite of Colorado.

Augusta, however, took no delight in anything her husband was doing.

She was stoic, conservative, and not about to praise or participate in his spree of self-indulgence.

Soon, she was no longer a part of his life.

That space was to be filled by a woman named Lizzie McCourt, a blond from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, a lady whose legend was to become as provocative and as rich as Tabor.

Lizzie McCourt became a doe when she married Harvey Doe, also of Wisconsin.

Even though Harvey's mother collapsed when she heard of her son's plans to marry that snip.

Harvey took Lizzie's hand in marriage and the rest of her to Central City, Colorado, to oversee some mining interests.

His father had their.

Three years later, Baby Doe was on her way to Leadville without Harvey, who had decided the West was too hard and his mother was easier.

Leadville, of course, meant Tabor and Baby Doe meant another part of the dream.

Theresa O'Brien, native of Leadville, tells of when the Silver King met his silver Queen in 1880.

I am Theresa O'Brien.

And let me tell you the story of Baby Doe.

I knew her personally, so listen in.

It was the people of Central City who gave her the name Baby Doe, because they knew that she had nothing but a beauty to live on.

So she eventually came to the boomtown of Leadville with a Mr.

Sandal Whiskey, who had a clothing store adjoining this opera house, and through him she met Mr.

Tabor at the Saddle Rock Cafe.

They were attracted to one another.

He was many years her senior.

He told her to go live in the south side of the building, and he would go over to Durango and get a civil divorce.

Well, a civil divorce didn't mean anything to Augusta.

There was too much money involved.

She wasn't going to be set aside lightly.

So she too stayed here and a triangle developed.

then in 1883,Augusta finally agreed to Tabors wish for a divorce in a month, Horace and Baby Doe were married in Washington, where Tabor was serving as a temporary U.S.

Senator from Colorado.

They planned and executed one of the most extravagant weddings that city had ever seen.

The invitations were engraved with silver ink.

Baby Doe wore a $7,000 white satin gown and sweetly accepted Tabors Wedding gift a $90,000 diamond necklace.

The couple returned to Denver.

The pinnacle had been reached.

Forrest needed a house, so he bought a city block and remodeled the large house which was there into a magnificent villa.

He spent thousands on his magnificent woman furs, jewels, and within a year, their first daughter, Lily Elizabeth, was born.

And in typical tabor attire was christened in a $15,000 lace robe held together with gold and diamond pins.

Three years later, Silver Dollar was born, and Tabors happiness and wealth overflowed like a spring creek.

Two parts of the dream were now complete wealth and a beautiful woman.

The third piece, Leaving something Behind a part of himself, opened on the 20th of November, 1879.

This is the famous Tabor Opera House, a very welcome addition to the town of Leadville in those days, because we had so much money to spend lavishly and we had no fine entertainment.

It was spectacular.

Amongst the tents and small buildings encouraged the more prominent people to build their home.

& establish their business here.

It opened in 1879, on November the 20th, and ironically, the first audience was very, very small because they had a hanging scheduled in front of the courthouse.

They all needed box seats for that It took 100 days to complete the opera house, a world record considering the materials had to be brought in by horse and wagon.

And when the people came in, they walked through a door that was 12ft wide, and then continued on to sit in the finest opera chairs available.

Andrew's patent opera chairs with adjustable seats.

They were made of ornate cast iron and a poster in scarlet velvet.

If you went to the theater elsewhere, you had to sit on chairs made of wood.

On either side of the stage, two large boxes carpeted and mirrored.

A bit of privacy, for whatever reasons, were offered by lace curtains.

Common folk sat in the peanut gallery, the 15 piece orchestra sat below the stage, and the piano player sat in front of a four, not three legged piano.

You got to read your program and look at your neighbor, because there was enough light, and the light came from 72 gas jets, the first in Leadville history.

At times, the people of Leadville seemed puzzled with Tabors new fangled contraptions.

We had many il literate men, men who really needed more schooling.

One of them said, well, I want us to buy chandeliers for the opera house, but who's going to play them?

Luckily, nobody had to play the chandelier, but a number of people did play at the opera house.

The theater had ten sets of scenery, all hand-painted on canvas.

The forest scene had netting to hold up the tree trunks, and through the magic of the turn of the century technology, when the lights were turned on, the netting disappeared.

Many times.

However, scenery and equipment found their way to the theater by the same mechanisms.

The theater got their horses and wagons.

When the production called for it, the horses were brought inside.

Ben Hur, for instance, used six horses in one chariot and of course, a treadmill to give the illusion of equestrian speed.

Underneath the elephants or the lions or the actors or the magician were the stars.

Dressing rooms.

These rooms were as splendid as the theater itself.

Mirrors were framed in walnut, and tapestry covered the chairs and couches, the original carpeting still covers the floor.

It's badly worn now, but it tells a mute tale of the numbers of people who perform there and Leadville Opera House.

Not all events were cultural or dramatic or operatic.

Boxing was the sport of the times, and the likes of Jack Dempsey, James Corbett and John L Sullivan were big.

Box office two.

The productions were gaudy at times, as extravagant as Tabor himself, but nonetheless gave the residents of Leadville a flicker of fantasy entertainment and arrest from the cold or the mud, or the unending labor of a mining town.

The stagehands worked hard all night.

Sometimes they would crawl up into the fly space to spend the hour or two before dawn.

What was beginning in Denver now had all the traces of the city.

No longer a settlement of collection of cabins, Denver was straining to grow.

To help that effort, Tabor had designed and built the theater of the day.

The Tabor Grand Opera House incorporated selective features of the Covent Garden Theater in London and the Academy of Music in Paris.

From the Orient.

Red cherrywood solid, used throughout from Italy.

The best colored marble, the most expensive silk fabrics from France, and a rare tapestry as a canopy for each box.

Closer to home, Tabor made both sound and purely speculative investments.

Most silver magnates were quieting down, trying to bring everything under one roof consolidate.

Hod, though, continued to stretch himself almost to the breaking point.

In 1890, it all snapped and the silver market plummeted and crashed.

Congress decided that the federal government wasn't in the market for silver anymore.

Mines closed, prices dropped from $1.29 an ounce to $0.50 an ounce.

The Tabor block and the Leadville mining properties were up for sale, and the matchless, the real center of Tabors wealth was shut down.

Second and third mortgages on the Tabor Grand and other large pieces of property slowed the creditors, but put Tabor deeper in debt.

In January 1898, Tabor received a salary of $3,700, a fee for being the postmaster of Denver, a token appointment by the end of the decade Tabors Wealth.

Once part of the dream had gone dark, it was gone.

All that millions gone.

In 1899, Tabor was gone.

In a coma for seven days.

Baby Doe always with him and almost like a chant.

Never sell the matchless baby.

When silver comes back, it'll make millions.

And so Baby Doe, a legend of beauty and wealth, went to live at the matchless.

Without money, without friends to wait for silver.

And the end.

Two parts of the dream gone, but still standing.

The third part something left behind.

Something of oneself.

The Leadville Opera House, a hand built reminder of what is lasting and what is transient.

All the love gone.

All the money, all the pain gone.

All the splendid buildings sold.

Eventually torn down.

But the Leadville Opera house still there, still giving a hint about the kind of dreams which can be permanent.