16 SEPTEMBER 4-10, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | LETTERS | CONTENTS | What Happened to Silver Dollar Tabor? AUTHOR REBECCA ROSENBERG WRITES A SECOND BOOK IN HER GOLD DIGGER SERIES, THIS TIME FOCUSING ON BABY DOE TABOR’S DAUGHTER. BY TEAGUE BOHLEN Award-winning author Rebecca Rosenberg grew up in Denver after moving to the Mile High City with her family when she was only fi ve years old and spent much of her childhood roaming old gold rush towns and their mines and graveyards. “We ended up in Central City quite a bit since it was an easy drive from Thornton, and back then — this would have been the 1960s and ‘70s — Cen- tral City still looked a lot like it had in [the 1800s] when it was founded,” she says. “I just loved it.” With those seminal trips, Rosenberg’s ad- miration for Elizabeth “Baby Doe” Tabor was born. Baby Doe was wrapped in a scandal in 1880s Denver after sitting U.S. Senator Horace Tabor divorced his fi rst wife and married her. Tabor, also on her second marriage, lost his fortune when the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed; he died relatively penniless. Baby Doe moved to Leadville, lived in poverty for the last three decades of her life and was found frozen to death in her shack near the Matchless Mine in 1935 at the age of 81. Rosenberg focuses on Baby Doe in her 2018 book Gold Digger and says her new book is something of a sequel to that one. Silver Echoes: What Really Happened to Silver Dollar Tabor? continues the Tabor women’s tale by focusing on Baby Doe’s daughter, Rosemary “Silver Dollar” Tabor, who was as much a character as her more famous mother. Rosenberg will present her new book on Thursday, September 4, at Tattered Cover Colfax and Saturday, September 6, at the Center for Colorado Women’s History. Like most mysteries that require unrav- eling, the story of Silver Dollar Tabor isn’t a happy one. She was a rising starlet in the years of the First World War — in the movies and out of them just as quickly — who soon found herself in Roaring ‘20s Chicago with a creative spirit that wouldn’t rest, a splinter- ing psyche resulting from a rape back home and a drug habit that eventually forced her into occasional prostitution. When she died at 36 in 1925, it was a death by scalding — the victim of a pot of boiling water. “They had an inquest,” Rosenberg says, shaking her head. “But because they could never fi gure out who did it, they called it an accident. She’d had boiling water poured from her head down. That’s not an accident.” But Silver Echoes does begin with an ac- cident: a very-Denver moment that would linger in Silver Dollar’s life for years to come. It was called the “Slide for Life,” an aerial exhibition of strength and poise in which she would fl y down a zip line from a tower over Lake Rhoda next to Lakeside Amusement Park, literally by holding onto a bar with her teeth. She was supposed to gracefully descend, spinning in the air as she went, the long feathers on her costume fl ying behind her — but instead, she hit a snag on the wire, and fell. “Her mouth was permanently dam- aged,” says Rosenberg. “The damage she did to her jaw and teeth bothered her the rest of her life.” That incident happened in 1908, when Sil- ver Dollar was in her late teens. Her fortunes proved no safer after relocating to Chicago, where she became an alcoholic and changed her name as she moved from place to place in the Windy City. “After doing so much research on her, I recognized that she probably had some form of dissociative identity disorder,” says Rosenberg, who was university-trained in psychology. “She had no way to deal with all the trauma she’d experienced.” The details of the sexual assault that turned her life sideways and forced her out of Colorado are scant, and come only from a letter Silver Dollar wrote to her mother, and some of what Baby Doe told friends in the years after. “That letter was very cryptic,” Rosenberg says. “Silver says that the family lawyer had attacked her, and that was why she needed to leave Denver. That lawyer was the only one helping Baby Doe keep the Match- less Mine. She knew she couldn’t accuse him of anything, or her mother would suffer. She was afraid of that man for the rest of her life.” Rosenberg says that the rape was central to her desire to tell Silver Dollar Tabor’s story; it seemed to be at the core of her life and many of her troubles, and yet so few knew about it, or had done the research to connect the dots. “In all my reading, I never saw anyone detail that part of the story, so I wanted that to come out,” Rosenberg says. “This girl wasn’t the disappointment that so many histories paint her to be. She was deal- ing with some very real issues. And her story, like her mother’s, deserves to be told. They typifi ed the Colorado mining woman who came and struggled, and wouldn’t let go.” Rebecca Rosenberg will be reading, signing, and discussing Silver Echoes at 6 p.m. on Thurs- day, September 4, at Tattered Cover Colfax and 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, September 6, at the Center for Colorado Women’s History. CULTURE KEEP UP ON DENVER ARTS AND CULTURE AT WESTWORD.COM/ARTS
