Chapter II: Part 2

The miners in the Central City district were changing shifts at noon. In the midst of the turmoil Harvey and I got off the train at Blackhawk and caught the stage for the mile’s ride up Gregory Gulch after being handed a note from Mr. Doe directing us to a boarding house where rooms were awaiting. As the miners scuffed along the dusty road in their heavy boots, swinging lunch pails, they drifted into groups. From nearly every one of these burst song, each group lending an air to the intermingled medley. I was able to follow some of the melodies, which were of such a haunting quality I leaned forward and tapped the driver on the back.

“What are those men singing?” I asked.

“Cornish songs. The miners are all Cousin Jacks hereabouts—that is, that ain’t Irish. That’s why you see so much good stonework in them retaining walls and buildings around here. When we git into Central, look up at our school ’n ’Piscopal Church. Built by Cornishmen, or Cousin Jacks, as we calls ’em. They brought the knack from the old country.”

“But how do they have such splendid voices?”

“Oh, them’s natural. Real musical people—and then all the high-class people gets them into singin’ societies and sech. Last March a group put on ‘The Bohemian Girl’ and now we’re goin’ to build the only Opry House in Colorado for jest sech goin’s-on. When we don’t have shows goin’ through, we have some sort of doin’s of our own. We’re the up-and-comin’est camp in the West. Got some hankerin’ for higher things.”

I looked about me again after I heard this. It sounded odd to me that a mining camp should be interested in culture but it also seemed encouraging. I was thrilled to think they were building an opera house and that the town specialized in amateur theatricals. I felt certain I had come to the right place. Besides winning love and riches in this strange setting, I would also get my long-cherished wish to go on the stage!

The setting was certainly strange enough to my eyes accustomed, as I was, to flat, rolling country. The towns of Blackhawk, Mountain City, Central City, Dogtown, and Nevadaville were all huddled on top of each other in the narrow bottom of stark, treeless gulches in the most puzzling jigsaw fashion, but totaling nearly 6,000 people. Mines, ore dumps, mills, shafthouses, blacksmith shops, livery stables, railroad trestles, cottages and fine residences were perched at crazy angles, some on stilts, and scrambled together with no semblance of order while they emitted an assortment of screeching, throbbing and pounding noises.

The only corner that had any form at all was the junction of Lawrence St., Main St. and Eureka St. in the business section of Central City. Lawrence and Eureka were really continuations of the same street but Main came uphill at a funny slant from where Spring and Nevada Gulches met so that on one corner, a saloon, the building had to be shaped like a slice of pie and across from it, the First National Bank building had a corner considerably wider than a right angle.

The air of the business buildings, despite their odd architectural lines, was very substantial since, as the driver explained, they had all been rebuilt in brick and stone just three years before, after Central had had two disastrous fires in 1873 and 1874. I knew the tragedy of fire in pioneer communities and sighed, remembering how Papa had lost his money. This part of Central was more prepossessing than what we had driven through. The rest was too battered from eighteen years’ careless usage in men’s frenzy to tear the gold from the many lodes that crossed Gregory Gulch—the Bobtail, Gregory, Bates and other famous producers.

The driver pointed out our boarding house on the other side of town up Roworth St., behind where the railway station would be when they completed the switchback track that they were now building to climb the 500 feet rise from Blackhawk to Central. Harvey and I started to gather up our valises and carry-alls. We told the express office to hold our trunk until we knew our plans more definitely and trudged off. We met Colonel Doe coming down the hill to meet us.

“Hello, there, you newlyweds,” he called. “I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you at Blackhawk but I can’t drive our buggy in these hills until I get a brake put on it.”

Colonel Doe had a tall, commanding presence and he looked particularly well against this mammoth country. He was always very bluff and genial and he seemed to suit these boisterous, breezy surroundings. He laughed now at the joke on himself.

“I thought I was being so smart to ship our two-seated buggy out here to save money. But the blasted thing’s no danged good without a brake! After we have dinner, which is all ready at the boarding house, we’ll drive to a blacksmith shop and get it fixed up. Then we’ll go see the mine.”

So that’s what we did. We drove to the blacksmith shop of John R. Morgan, a Welshman who told my father-in-law he had settled in Wisconsin when he first came over from Wales. Later he had moved farther West. In turn, Colonel Doe told Morgan how he had lived in Central the first years of its existence and how after selling out, had gone back to Wisconsin where he was in the legislature in 1866 and had lived there ever since. While the buggy was being outfitted, the older men had a pleasant time exchanging comparisons of the two places.

Harvey and I, meanwhile, talked to Mr. Morgan’s son, Evan. He was a handsome nineteen-year-old lad who helped around the shop, shoeing heavy ore teams while his father completed more complicated iron-work commissions. He was quite stocky and strong and later did our work for the mine, shoeing horses and making ore buckets. Their shop was on Spring Street, just a stone’s throw from the Chinese alley whose joss sticks had started Central’s worst conflagration. He was very affable, had a good Welsh voice and sang me a few Celtic airs when I spoke of the Cornishmen I had heard singing earlier.

After the buggy was equipped for mountain travel, we set off for our mine. I could hardly wait I was so excited. We bumped and scratched along up the stiff pull of Nevada Street to Dogtown, turning out frequently to let four-horse ore wagons pass, and then we tacked back along Quartz Hill to the shafthouse. And there it was—the Fourth of July mine!

I’ll never forget how elated and excited I was, inspecting the mine that day, little knowing what sorrow it was to bring. The mine was half Colonel Doe’s and half Benoni C. Waterman’s. They had bought it in 1871 but very little work had been done on it. Father Doe’s idea was to lease the Waterman half on a two-year agreement and sink the shaft 200 feet deeper, timbering it well. Then if the Fourth of July opened up the ore he expected, Harvey could buy out the Waterman interest for $10,000 the first year or $15,000 the second. If the ore didn’t materialize after the two years were up, then Waterman was free to sell his one-half interest anytime he wanted. Colonel Doe would give all profits on his share to Harvey and if he made good, would deed it outright to us in a year.

Everything sounded glorious to me. I clapped my hands and hugged my bulky father-in-law in appreciation.

“Oh, you’re just too wonderful!” I cried. “I know your gift is going to make Harvey and me rich. Then I can help poor Mama and Papa out of all their troubles in bringing up such a large family. You’re a dear.”

The summer eased smoothly along. Harvey and I rented a little cottage on Spring Street to live in and while I was busy getting settled, I began to learn the spell of Colorado’s gaunt, tremendous mountains. By the middle of August, the lawyers had completed the agreement between Father Doe and Mr. Waterman and we had waved our benefactor off home to Oshkosh from the station at Blackhawk. I wanted Harvey to record the agreement immediately as a crew was already working at the mine. But after Father Doe left, I began to find out what Harvey was really like—his shyness was just weakness. He was lazy and procrastinating and he thought because he was a Doe that everything should be done for him.

He was not as big as his father in height or in character. Father Doe had lived in Central with his wife during the Civil War years and owned a large parcel of mining claims in both Nevadaville and Central City, a mill and a large residence in Prosser Gulch, and a boarding house nearby for the miners. He invested $5,000 and made so much profit, particularly from the Gunnell and Wood mines in Prosser Gulch, up at the head of Eureka Street, that he was able to retire rich in June, 1865, after the War was over. He made a trip to New York and closed with the Sierra Madre Investment Co., taking payment partly in cash and partly in ownership with the company. After that, he returned home to Oshkosh and occupied himself with lumber lands in Wisconsin. But he made occasional trips back to Central as superintendent of the Sierra Madre Co. He was a good business man and very civic in his interests.

But not so with his son. Three weeks later, I, myself, had to fetch out the buggy, hitch up the team, and drive Harvey to the Court House to have the agreement recorded. That day was September 6, 1877, and I remember what a peculiar sensation it gave me watching Harvey write his legal name, W. H. Doe, Jr. He and his signature seemed suddenly just a tenuous shadow of his father, a shadow having no existence if the body that casts it, moves away.

“Oh, this isn’t like me!” I thought, shaking my curls in disapproval of my doubt. “I’m really very confident—not morbid. I just _know_ Colorado will be good to me.”

We stepped out again into the September briskness and I urged him to hurry with sinking and timbering the shaft as per agreement.

“You want to get a lot of work done before the snow flies,” I urged.

He seemed wavering but I handed him the reins and urged him on toward the mine.

“I’m sure everything will be all right, dear,” I added.

At the bottom of the street we kissed and I stood there watching my young husband as he drove off up the road toward Nevadaville. All around were crowds of men intent on their business, driving heavy ore-wagons whose teams lurched with the weight and whose brakes screeched on the steep grades. Others were loading ore cars with waste and dumping them off the end of little tracks laid out on high hillocks jutting precariously into the blue sky. The steady rhythm of pumps and the whir of steam hoists resounded from each hill. You could even hear the narrow gauge railroad whistle at Blackhawk shrieking its demoniac energy while bringing in machinery, huge and unwieldy, for the hoists of mine shafts, for the stamp mills crunching ore, and a hundred other purposes. Near its track at many points were sluice boxes carrying water back to the creek after being denuded of its placer wealth. Everywhere were serious men busy making money. Gold was king!

The main street was crowded with women going to market on foot, carpet bags or carry-alls slung on their arm for supplies, some of them leading burros to pack their purchases. Most of the bars were open and men, off work at the mines, idled in and out or lounged briefly in the strangely bright Colorado sunshine of this mild day. Others were to be seen on doorsteps, chewing tobacco, chatting or whittling on an old wheel spoke. The banks were open for business and cashiers from the mines were taking in gold dust, nuggets and retorts to be weighed. It did not seem possible that among all this hustle and industry there would be no place for us.

“Hello, there, Baby! Want a ride?”

I raised my eyes. Two dashing young men, quite well dressed, expensive Stetsons on their heads, were in a gig that trotted past. They looked like mining engineers or mill managers. I couldn’t help smiling at their handsome, good-humored appearance, and one of them swept off his Stetson and bowed low. The other, with the reins, pulled up the horse.

“You’re much too pretty and young to be standing alone on a street corner,” he said.

“And you’re too fresh! I’ve just been seeing my husband off to his mine, thank you,” I replied as I flounced around and started up the hill with a great show of indignation and temper. Actually, I was quite flattered.

“When did you come to camp?” he called, paying no attention to my attitude and slapping his horse with the reins to follow along beside me on the board walk.

I did not reply but kept on climbing steadily as fast as I could go up Spring Street, puffing for wind in the high altitude.

“Oh, leave her alone, Slim—she’s a nice girl. Come on, I want to get down to the post office.”

“Hell, all right. Well, good-bye, Baby—you better tell your husband to watch out or big bad men will be after you.”

I was really furious now. I could see he didn’t believe I was a married woman. He took me for just a common girl of the streets. Turning around, I stamped my foot and started to yell at him when the other one said:

“No offense, ma’am. Slim, here, hasn’t seen a girl like you in so long he’s forgotten his manners.”

They wheeled their horse and started off down toward Main Street, leaving me still gasping on the walk. I had been insulted. I wanted to cry, to cry for the shame of it! But as their trim backs receded in the swift-wheeling gig, I told myself this was what I had come for—adventure. And here it was. I ended by trudging on up hill with a smile flickering at the corners of my mouth.

But the smile was not to remain long. When Harvey returned that night he was dirty and tired and discouraged. He had taken a lot of samples from the sump of the shaft to the assay office. But a man he had gone to for advice in Nevadaville hadn’t thought the samples worth bothering to pay for assaying.

“You might keep on sinking your shaft and strike a better vein. But these quartz lodes you got down there now are too low grade to work,” had been his verdict.

What to do now? My heart flew into my throat. We had had only the money that Harvey’s father had left us to get started on. In a few more weeks with running a crew at the mine, our capital would be used up and if the ore were no good, we would have nothing to live on. But if we did try to keep on we might strike high-grade ten feet beyond—just like so many bonanza kings. That’s what I wanted to do and suggested we borrow money at the bank.

“I’ll help you, Harvey, I’m strong.”

Our little house on Spring Street was not very well tended because for six months, besides being wife and housekeeper, I donned miner’s clothes to run the horse-pulled hoist in our mine. We each worked a crew on separate shafts. For several months we had rich ore, then the vein went “in cap.” We kept on sinking, but all to no avail. We still didn’t strike high-grade ore and the shaft caved from faulty timbering.

“I guess I better get a job in one of the big mines,” Harvey suggested.

Me, the wife of a common miner—working for a few dollars a day! The idea struck horror to my soul.

“Certainly not!” I replied. “I won’t have it.”

“Well, what else is there to do? We can’t go home. Father would be mad and Mother won’t have you in the house.”

“Your mother—with her airs. I’m just as good as she is any day!”

“I’ll thank you not to insult my mother.”

Words tumbled on words like blows. Harvey and I were in the midst of our first serious quarrel. The higher our tempers rose, the more bitter our choice of barbs to hurt each other. I hated the idea of having married a man who would give up. I thought I had married a clever man. Instead, I had married a weakling. I said all this and more.

“I’ve been brought up by self-respecting people who only spend what they’ve got,” Harvey replied heatedly. “We haven’t got the money to fulfill the agreement of timbering in a ‘good, substantial, workmanlike manner’—and besides, it’s too long a gamble. I don’t know enough about carpentry and mining. It’s better for me to learn what I’m about first by taking a steady job. Then, when I know more, and maybe have saved up some money of our own, we can try developing the mine.”

I thought this plan was cowardly and stupid. Maybe development would be a long gamble, but all mining was a gamble—even life was a gamble—and only those who had the courage to play could win.

But not Harvey Doe. He got a job mucking in the Bobtail Tunnel. We gave up our little house on Spring St. and moved down to Blackhawk, the milling and smelting center, partly to be close to the Bobtail and partly because Blackhawk being less good socially, was cheaper. We lived in two rooms of a red brick building on Gregory Street (which today has Philip Rohling painted on the door). The building was close to one erected by Sandelowsky, Pelton & Co., prosperous dry goods and clothing merchants of Central, who decided to open a branch store in Blackhawk in 1878. They occupied the corner space on the station end of Gregory Street. In our building, a store was on each side of the center stairs and living rooms occupied the second floor. I was hardly more than a bride—yet look to what I had descended!

One bright ray of hope remained—and I tried to keep thinking of it. Since I was sure after Harvey’s inefficiency, Father Doe would never deed us over his share of the Fourth of July, I had persuaded Harvey to buy some claims. I still clung to my dream of riches from out of the earth and when the Does had sent us $250 at Christmas, in January, 1878, we spent $50 for a claim on the Stonewall Lode in Prosser Gulch and $165 for three lodes on Quartz Hill not far from the Fourth of July and adjoining the English-Kansas mine. These were the Troy, Troy No. 2 and Muscatine Lodes. I had great belief in that property—fortunes were being made everyday from Quartz Hill—and if we could just develop our mine, we would, too!

Loneliness and poverty was my lot in the meantime. I had no friends and I used to take walks around Blackhawk to amuse myself. There was a Cousin Jennie, a Mrs. Richards, who liked to garden and occasionally I would go to see her. She would always pick me a bouquet of flowers for our room because she said I was so beautiful that posies suited me.

“You are like a seraph—an angel!” I can remember her saying.

To help while away the time I began a scrap-book. Things that interested me I would cut out and paste in its leaves. Left alone so much, I turned to my day-dreaming more and more, and watched for poetry, cartoons and other informative subjects to put in my book. I also read the fashion magazines and clipped pictures from them, especially members of royalty and society figures dressed up—I don’t know why, since it looked as if I was never again to have enough money for pretty, chic clothes.

“Everything is so different from what I expected,” was the thought that kept running through my unhappy mind.

Although Harvey and I were living in such close quarters, we seemed to grow further away from each other. When he was on a shift that went to work at seven in the morning he would come home in the afternoon so tired, being unused to hard work, that all he would do in the evening was read a book or write home. He spent hours composing long letters to his mother. I resented these letters very much, but I tried not to say anything while awaiting the day when he had saved enough money to start development again.

Later, he was on a shift that went to work at night and I hardly saw him. He would come home long after I had gone to bed. Meanwhile, I had nothing to occupy my time, as I did not especially like any of the women in the rooming house. For amusement, I would make long visits, looking at the bolts of cloth and other wares in Sandelowsky-Pelton, the store on our street. That’s how I came to know Jacob Sandelowsky who had been with the firm since 1866. When I met him, he was a bachelor, medium tall and twenty-six years old. Whenever he was in the Blackhawk store, he paid me extravagant compliments and we would talk about the clothing business as I had learned it from Papa’s experience with McCourt and Cameron, later Cameron and McCourt, as Papa became poorer. Occasionally, he made me gifts, particularly dainty shoes which he brought down from the Central City store.

Then Harvey lost his job at the Bobtail. I don’t know why. But I had already learned how unreliable he was and I suppose his bosses did, too. Because he had been the only boy in the family to grow up, his mother and four sisters spoiled him to such a degree that he was never able to succeed at anything. Soon he was becoming a drifter, drifting from one job to another and later from one camp to another, the women of the family helping him out if he was too close to starving. But they weren’t helping him now because of their dislike of me—and we were very hungry!

I not only had the natural appetite of a healthy young woman but, as I had found I was going to have a baby, I craved additional food for the new life. At first, the news of my condition seemed to make things better. I wrote to Father Doe and he replied that his lumber mill had just burned down in Oshkosh. He would wind up his affairs in Oshkosh and move the family to Central. He wanted to be near his grandchild and he would straighten out Harvey’s affairs.

Harvey’s affairs certainly were tangled although he kept the whole truth from his father and from me for a long time. It turned out that besides the money he owed the First National Bank, a sum that later, with accumulating interest, amounted to over a thousand dollars, he had also secretly been employing a Peter Richardson to repair the badly timbered shaft of the Fourth of July that Harvey had botched. Peter Richardson had never been paid for his work nor for a new hoist he had installed and in May, 1878, obtained a judgment against Harvey for $485 plus court costs. The Newell Brothers also had a $48 bill against him for grain and hay for our team, run up before we had had to sell the horses. He was afraid to say anything about these bills to his father.

I was becoming desperate. My own family were too poor to appeal to and I was far too proud to want anyone in Oshkosh except Father Doe to guess at the truth of how my marriage had turned out. I turned more and more to Jake for comfort and every kind of sustenance.

Harvey began to spend his time in bars, not that he drank much, just a few beers. But hanging around and talking to the customers gave him ample opportunity to feel sorry for himself and to tell people his troubles. I hated him for his weakness—I always detested any kind of blubbering. Soon we were quarreling regularly.

Although he got a few odd jobs and sometimes earned enough money for food, it was never enough to pay our rent and we were forced to move about a lot in Blackhawk and Central. That year and the next were two of the most discouraging I ever spent. I was constantly blue and dejected in spirit and frightened for the future of my baby. To try to help out, I put on miner’s clothes and attempted to do some work starting to sink a shaft on the Troy Lode next to the English-Kansas that Harvey had bought from the Hinds brothers. I really was in no condition to do this work but I knew that many of the mines on Quartz Hill, very close by, were steady lucrative producers and our claim seemed the one hope.

“Hello, there!” I heard one day, called out from a teamster driving an ore wagon down from the Patch mines up above. “What do you think you’re doing? You’re Baby Doe, aren’t you?”

That’s how I met Lincoln Allebaugh, “Link” as he was always called. He was a slim, fine-boned fifteen year old boy who, despite his age and small frame, could drive an ore wagon because of his knack with horses and excellent driving hands. He sometimes had trouble setting the brake and, after we knew him better, he would get Harvey to go along and apply his stocky strength. Link had been born in Blackhawk and lived there all his life. He knew who I was from seeing me in Jake’s store and hearing Harvey call me by one of my family nicknames—Baby, which was also the one the miners in camp had spontaneously adopted.

“You’re too little to do heavy work like that,” Link said. “You better let me give you a lift home.”

I felt the truth of what he had said in my bones. Suddenly, I was very tired, a new feeling for me and not a sensation I liked. While Link loaded my pick and shovel in with the ore, I climbed up on the high front seat.

From that day, one calamity followed another. My only friend was Jake and soon Harvey and I were quarreling about him, too. The year before in March, when Harvey had been working night shift, Jake had wanted to take me to the opening of the Opera House. The amateur players staged a gala two nights, putting on a concert the first night and two plays, “School” and “Cool as a Cucumber,” on the second. Special trains had been run from Denver and the cream of society of the two most important towns in Colorado, Denver and Central, had attended, their festive gowns being reported in the _Rocky Mt. News_ and the _Central City Register_ the next day. It had been a thrilling occasion.

But Harvey had been indignant when I had suggested that I might go with Jake.

“No respectable married woman would think of doing a thing like that!” he had said hotly.

So I had watched the event, longingly, standing on a boardwalk across the street and yearning to be one of the gay throng, to be wearing a beautiful evening dress or even better, to be one of the amateur actresses from Central City playing on the stage. But I had been a good wife and obeyed Harvey—I had not gone.

Now it was different and I was defiant. Harvey could not support me and Jake had given us too many groceries and presents of merchandise not to admit the friendship openly.

“I’d be dead—starved to death—if it wasn’t for Jake. He’s helped us out over and over again when you didn’t have a dime. I won’t let you say things against him!”

Harvey was surly but said nothing more and soon took his bad temper out to dramatize in a saloon. But the next quarrel was the end. He insinuated that my baby wasn’t his and I picked up a specimen of Fourth of July ore that we kept on the table and threw it at him with all the strength I could muster. The rock hit him on the neck, scratching him badly, and, as he felt the injured spot and the trickle of blood, he blurted out,

“Why, you common Irish hussy!”

He glared at me briefly, turned in awkward anger and stamped out the door. I did not see him again for months. I heard later that he had hitched a ride on a freight train out of camp.

When I told Jake what had happened, he said,

“Never mind, Baby, I’ll see you through—and what you need now is some gayety to forget about your troubles. Let’s go to the Shoo-Fly tonight.”

The suggestion shocked me and I peered at my friend suspiciously but he only shrugged his shoulders and asked laconically:

“What difference does it make?”

I could see his point. If I went to the Shoo-Fly who was to know or care? My husband didn’t value me enough to stay and protect me and he had been the first to unjustly impugn my good name.

The Shoo-Fly was Central’s one flashy variety hall. It was in a brick building on Nevada St. (and still stands, beside a dignified residence shaded by a fine tall spruce tree in its front yard). It housed a reception room, bar, a dance hall, and a stage. Several private rooms for gambling and bedrooms were toward the back. Its entrance was off the street, up a long flight of wooden steps hung on the side of the building. These steps led to the rear of the second floor and into the reception room. There was also another entrance down from Pine Street, darker and less conspicuous.

The whole lay-out emphasized discretion but was the crimson spot of the town, dedicated to the flattery of weakness. Unattached men, of whom there were a great many in the camp, liked to come to this favorite rendezvous of sensational women. No nice, married lady would be seen there. But, so far, had any matron of gentility extended me the slightest kindness? If I met any in the streets they regarded me with a distrustful air, and passed on. It was their men who wanted to meet me.

“All right!” I determined. “I’ll go.”

I was terribly depressed and perhaps Jake was right that I needed cheering up. That night I put on my prettiest blue and pink foulard for it brought out the unusual blue of my eyes and the soft, fresh tints of my hair and cheeks. Together, we sallied forth.

When we turned off Main Street toward the Shoo-Fly stairs, I had one moment of panic as if I were taking an inevitable step, a step from which there would be no return, something like Caesar crossing the Rubicon. But I laughed the moment away—I was twenty-four years old, pretty and gay, and my friends said I had Irish wit. Surely life should give me more than a drab boarding house and the charity of one Jewish friend? I tossed my curls and stepped on.

Once inside, Jake ordered champagne. He enjoyed watching the dancing girls in the variety show and indulging in a little gambling. Later he brought several well-known men to join us at our table. It was fun to be laughing and talking with several new acquaintances.

“So you’re Baby Doe!” one of the merry men with bold eyes reflected. “I hear the manager of my mill tried to pick you up in the street one day, and you snubbed him!” He laughed as though greatly amused.

“I am Mrs. Harvey Doe, if you please. My husband is out of town on business.”

“Well, you’re Baby Doe to all the miners in camp! They all know you—your beauty’s enough to advertise you, even if you didn’t spend so danged much time walking all over the place. They’ve also told me how unfriendly you are.”

“I’m not unfriendly. I’m delighted to meet people if they are properly introduced—”

“What are you doing here then? This is no place for a nice girl.”

“I know it. But I’m so lonely that my good friend, Mr. Sandelowsky, offered to watch out for me if I came.”

Baby Doe I was from that night on—and nearly every night I was at the Shoo-Fly under Jake’s protection. It was lively and gay and I made lots of friends among the men and girls who frequented the place. As I got to know these sporting girls, I liked them much better than the girls I had known in Oshkosh. They weren’t very well educated, but they had a great zest for living. Their generosity was genuine—their courage tremendous. None of the girls at home possessed such qualities. I really felt I understood them and when they seemed to like me, I knew they really did. That meant a great deal to a lonely girl.

“Why don’t you get rid of that mama’s-boy husband of yours? Why, with your looks, you could get any man you wanted!” one of them said to me.

Most of the talk at the Shoo-Fly that summer and autumn was about the sensational rise of silver and Leadville and Horace Tabor. It was like a fairy tale. For years, placer miners at the head of the Arkansas River had been irritated by peculiar black sand which was very heavy and could not be separated from the gold easily. A decade passed without their recognizing its true worth but during the ’70s several miners worked on secret assays which proved the sand was eroding from carbonates of lead and silver ore. Quietly they began to look for veins and by 1877, after several mines had been located, the news was out.

A mad rush was on and many an odd fluke of luck followed. The veins did not outcrop on the surface. This made it possible for a prospector to start sinking a shaft almost anywhere and hit an ore body from a few feet to three hundred and fifty feet beneath the surface. That fact created some fantastic and astonishing fortunes.

Living in this locality for a number of years had been Horace Tabor, a middle-aged storekeeper. He and his wife were New Englanders who had come West in the first wild gold rush of ’59 and after failing to make any money out of mining despite repeated attempts, had dismissed the gold bug from their heads. They had settled down with their one son, Maxcy, now grown, to a steady respectable middle-class life at Oro City, three miles from the site of what was later to be Leadville.

But silver was to change all that. During July, 1877, Tabor recognized the excitement in the air and moved his grocery stock and supplies from Oro City to a fairly large log cabin in Leadville. By January, 1878, about seventy cabins, shanties and tents made up the camp and during the next month the inhabitants held a town election in which the forty-seven-year-old Tabor was chosen mayor. During the next few months the town grew and prospered and so did Tabor’s store profits.

One spring day, two German prospectors, August Rische and George Hook, dropped into the grocery and asked Tabor if he would put up supplies for them to search for a vein of carbonates. Tabor had grubstaked many a miner to no avail but he was naturally generous. He probably expected no better this time, but he made an outlay of some seventeen dollars in return for an agreement that he was to have a third interest in any mine they found. Off they went and located a claim on Fryer Hill which they named the Little Pittsburgh.

They worked along steadily for some time and when their shaft was but twenty-six feet deep, they broke through the layer of hard rock they had been drilling into a body of soft, black, heavy ore. The next day, a fine May morning, Tabor left the grocery store in charge of Augusta, his efficient, managerial wife, and with pick and shovel wielded in vigorous, high anticipation, helped his partners dig and hoist the first wagon load of ore. The smelter bought it immediately for over $200!

By July nearly a hundred tons of ore were being hoisted and shipped each week and the three partners had an income of about fifty thousand dollars a month. Toward fall, Hook sold out to Tabor and Rische for $98,000 and Rische later sold out his interest plus some adjoining claims to Jerome B. Chaffee and David Moffat for over a quarter of a million dollars. Tabor clung to his share and the talk now was how he and his new partners had consolidated all their claims on Fryer Hill and incorporated for twenty million dollars. The fabulous story of silver and Leadville and Tabor—you heard it every night!

Everybody at the Shoo-Fly said Central was dying. Prof. N. P. Hill had taken his family to Denver and moved his smelter from Blackhawk to Argo, outside Denver. They quoted his opinion that no new strikes would be made in the district although the established producers might maintain their output for decades. In any case it would be cheaper hauling ore downhill to the smelter than coal up. Other top families were deserting the district. The Frank Halls, J. O. Raynolds and Eben Smiths had already gone and it was said that the George Randolphs, Henry Haningtons, Frank Youngs, Joseph Thatchers and Hal Sayres were contemplating departure. This kind of conversation was very depressing for me in addition to all my other troubles.

After that, things happened fast. I don’t know what would have become of me if it hadn’t been for Jake.

My baby boy came July 13, 1879, and was still-born. It was Jake who paid the bills and made all the arrangements. He was a marvelous friend. By then he was talking about opening a store in Leadville, and he told me he thought that was where I should go, too, that is, if I no longer loved Harvey. Rich strikes were being made there every day.

“Looks to me like he’s deserted you. You have your own future to look out for now. First, see if you like it over there. Then, if you do, you can get a divorce for non-support and you’ll be free to build a new life for yourself. Anyway, let me give you the trip and then decide.”

My love for Harvey _was_ dead, but I hated to think of the disgrace of divorce. That ignominy would kill Papa and Mama!

I had hoped that when Father Doe reached Central, matters would straighten out. The family moved just at the time that alone and destitute, I was having the humiliating, heart-rending experience of giving birth to a dead baby, attended only by a negro mid-wife. If the baby had lived, maybe my story would have been entirely different; but without that bond, I could not live down the calumnies that Mrs. Doe believed.

Father Doe opened a mining office in Central in 1879 and Harvey turned up again from wherever he had been to live with his parents. I suspected that he had spent the time in Oshkosh since Mrs. Doe proved more bitter about me than she had been before we were married, probably influenced by Harvey’s lies. Father Doe came to see me several times and gave me money. He liked and felt sorry for me and tried to offset the contention of his wife that I had disgraced the Doe name.

I thought it was Harvey who had disgraced the Doe name by deserting me when I was pregnant; but for everyone’s sake, that autumn of 1879, Harvey and I patched up our quarrel and tried to make a go of it again. A few months later, I thought I saw him go into a bagnio and I immediately ran across the street to demand: “Who’s disgracing the Doe name now?” He said he was just collecting a bill ... that he would never be unfaithful.... But I wasn’t sure....

The elder Does decided to move to Idaho Springs, inasmuch as Central was declining and there seemed to be no way of straightening out Harvey. For the next five years until he died in 1884, Father Doe was one of the pillars of the town. In 1880, he was elected to the legislature and in 1881, he was chosen Speaker of the House. He was president of the Idaho Springs bank and owned two houses, one for revenue. The large bargeboard trimmed frame house in which they lived was the scene of many a social function written up in the Clear Creek _Miner_. But after 1880, Father Doe refused to support Harvey or pay his debts.

Harvey and I moved to Denver where he ineffectively looked for work. I sold the last of my furniture and clothes to keep us alive. After we were divorced, he drifted off. Evan Morgan said he saw him in Gunnison in 1881 and at the time of Father Doe’s death, he was in Antonito, Colorado, with Flora, one of his sisters. After the estate was settled, Mrs. Doe moved back to Oshkosh and Harvey went with her. There, and in Milwaukee, he lived out his life, running a cigar store and acting as a hotel detective, and fulfilling the epithet used about him at the Shoo-Fly, “Mama’s Boy.”

I could not forget nor forgive the painful, galling humiliation of having to have our baby alone in a mining camp. Save for Jake Sandelowsky I had been without friends, without money, and was disgraced, since my husband’s absence was talked about everywhere. Harvey’s failure to attend to these primary needs for his own wife and child I could not forgive—my heart was emptied of his image for years.

“I think maybe you’re right,” I told Jake before the second break with Harvey. “I’ve been here in Central City for over two years, and very unhappy ones. I think a change would do me good.”

Jake sent me over to Leadville on a visit to see what it was like in December, 1879. At the time, although he had moved to Leadville already, he was back in Blackhawk to talk business with Sam Pelton. I traveled by the Colorado Central narrow gauge from Blackhawk to the Forks and then up to Georgetown. From there I went by stagecoach, over lofty Argentine Pass, through Ten Mile Canyon and into the “Cloud City.” The stage coach ride was fifty-six miles and the fare, ten dollars. In Leadville I stayed at the then fashionable Clarendon Hotel, built by W. H. Bush, formerly manager of the Teller House in Central City. It was on Harrison Avenue, right next door to the newly opened Tabor Opera House.

Everyone was talking about Tabor and his gifts to Leadville when they weren’t exclaiming about the silver discoveries on Fryer and Breece Hills. The air was full of the wildest conversation and buzzing excitement everywhere you turned, and the camp itself made Central look like a one-horse town.

“Oh, I’m sure something marvelous will happen to me here!” I exclaimed as I surveyed busy Harrison Avenue down its four-block length to the juncture with Chestnut Street.

Concord stages, belated because of the recent heavy snows, were rolling into camp hauled by six-horse teams. Huge freight vans, lumbering prairie schooners and all sorts of buggies and wheeled vehicles were toiling up and down the street, separated from the boardwalk by parallel mounds of snow piled in the gutter three and four feet deep. Everywhere was noisy activity, even lot jumping and cabin-jumping, since the population that year had grown from 1,200 to 16,000!

The boardwalks on each side of the street were filled with a seething mass of humanity that had sprung from every quarter of the globe and from every walk of life. Stalwart teamsters jostled bankers from Chicago. Heavy-hooted grimy miners, fresh from underground workings, shared a walk with debonair salesmen from Boston. The gambler and bunco-steerer strolled arm in arm with their freshest victim picked up in a hotel lobby.

I had bought “The Tourist Guide to Colorado and Leadville,” written by Cass Carpenter in May of that year. The pamphlet said that at the time of writing Leadville had “19 hotels, 41 lodging houses, 82 drinking saloons, 38 restaurants, 13 wholesale liquor houses ... 10 lumber yards, 7 smelting and reduction works, 2 sampling works for testing ores, 12 blacksmith shops, 6 livery stables, 6 jewelry stores, 3 undertakers and 21 gambling houses where all sorts of games are played as openly as the Sunday School sermon is conducted.”

As I now regarded the town, this description seemed to me to be already outdated and the camp to be three times as built up as the guide said.

H. A. W. Tabor, who had been elected Leadville’s first mayor and first postmaster, had also organized its first bank. The building stood at the corner of Harrison Avenue and Chestnut, a two-story structure with the design of a huge silver dollar in the gable. The First National Bank, the Merchants and Mechanics Bank and the Carbonate National had also been built. Tabor had already erected a building to house the Tabor Hose Co. (for which he had given the hose carriage) and the equipment of the Tabor Light Cavalry, which he had also organized. Two newspaper offices were already built and a third was preparing to start publishing in January.

“What do you think of our camp?” a stranger said to me somewhat later, accosting me in the lobby of the Clarendon.

I no longer resented the efforts of men to pick me up. Two years in Colorado mining camps had taught me some of the carefree friendliness of the atmosphere. I knew now it wasn’t considered an insult.

“Oh, it’s wonderful!” I answered, “and has such a beautiful setting.”

“Yes, those are marvelous peaks over there, Massive and Elbert—it’s a stunning country. I’ve never seen anything like Colorado. I’m from the South. The man I bunked with was from Missouri. He was scared of the wildness and casual shootings we have around here—so he took one look at that sign over there and beat it home to Missouri to raise some.”

I peered across the street. A feed and supply store had a high false front on which was painted in big letters, HAY $40 A TON.

The idea tickled me and I laughed out loud. As I laughed, a great weight fell from my shoulders. It seemed as if it had been a long time since I had really laughed, almost as if my gayety had been boxed in by the ugly gulches of Blackhawk and crushed in the cramped space of Central. But here the whole atmosphere was wide and different!

The man sat down in a rocking chair beside me in the lobby and was soon entertaining me with the many colorful stories of the camp, of the wild nights where everyone whooped it up till dawn, in the saloons, in the variety theatres, in the gambling houses, in the dance halls, in the bagnios and in the streets, milling from door to door.

He also told me of the unusual characters of the town, all the way from the popular Tabor who was Leadville’s leading citizen down to “the waffle woman” who could be seen any night regularly at twelve o’clock going from saloon to saloon and from dance house to gambling and other dens selling hot waffles. He had stopped her once and spoken to her. She had replied in a cultured voice:

“My best trade is between two and three in the morning after the theatres are out. It is not pleasant being out so late among so rough a class as is found on the streets after midnight and about the saloons. I have led a pleasanter life. Should I tell you who I am and what I have been, you would not believe me....”

His tales fascinated me. But his stories of Tabor and Augusta, Tabor’s severe New England wife with whom he was not getting along, interested me more than any others. Tabor, he said, could be seen almost any evening he was in camp in the lobby or across the street in the Board of Trade which was the gambling house and saloon that got most of the after-theatre trade from the Tabor Opera House, opened a month before in November. Tabor was a splendid poker player and was fond of gambling of all sorts. Since he had made so much money in the last two years, he had started playing roulette for enormous stakes.

“Every night?” I asked. “What does Mrs. Tabor do?”

“Don’t know—she’s down in Denver. But he’s gone pretty wild lately. She don’t like it and I guess nags him terrible. So he just stays out of her way. He likes his liquor and women, too, and naturally that don’t set so good with her. Wouldn’t with any wife. But he spends a lot of time on the move nowadays.”

“What’s he doing in Denver?”

“Oh, he and his right hand man, Bill Bush, are making real estate investments mostly. He’s building the Tabor block at 16th and Larimer Streets—costing two hundred thousand dollars—of stone quarried in Ohio. Expects it to be finished in March. And he bought the Henry P. Brown house on Broadway last winter for a residence. Paid $40,000 for it.”

“He must be a very great man.”

“Some says he is and some says he isn’t. I’ve played poker with him a time or two and he’s right smart at that game. But some of the folks around here say he’s too fond of show and throwin’ his money around. I reckon the Republican politicians trimmed him a heap of money a year ago before they gave him the lieutenant governorship!”

“My, I would love to meet him,” I remarked, thinking that never had a description of any man so captured my imagination. “How old is he?”

“Must be right close to fifty. He was one of the early prospectors out here—came in an ox-wagon across the plains in ’59. Mrs. Tabor was the first woman in the Jackson Diggings. That’s where Idaho Springs is now. He had a claim jumped at Payne’s Bar and never done anything about it. An awful easy-going sort of fellow.”

Our conversation ran along like this for some time and was continued again in the afternoon. That evening my new friend suggested he take me next door to the Opera House where Jack Langrishe’s stock company, brought from New York a month ago, was playing “Two Orphans.” He seemed such a pleasant companion and so well-informed on this particular camp and mining in general that I accepted his suggestion with alacrity.

“Thank you very much. I should be delighted and won’t you let me introduce myself? I’m Mrs. Doe.”

“Not the famous beauty of Central! Most of us miners have already heard about you.”

He then introduced himself. But since he is still alive I won’t give him away after all these years. We always remained good friends, although on a rather formal basis and never called each other by our first names. In the course of the evening, I asked his opinion about the quartz lodes of Nevadaville, still having in mind that something could be done with Harvey’s mine.

“Most of my Colorado mining’s been done down in La Plata and San Juan counties. I wouldn’t be much help. But my advice to you is to hang on to it and maybe work it on shares with some man in the spring when the snow breaks.”

“A new vista for me!” was my reaction. I had always thought of myself as a married woman but now I began to think in terms of a career—I didn’t know what. Jake Sands (as he now called himself in order to shorten his name) wanted me to go into business with him when he opened his new clothing store. But in this glamorous, adventurous world it seemed as if that would be too tame a life for a girl whose exotic name had already spread from one mining camp to another.

(I don’t mind saying that I was flattered at my new friend’s having heard of me—and I am sure that if I hadn’t already fallen in love with Leadville, this tribute alone would have persuaded me to change camps.)

When I returned to Central, my mind was made up. I had gone away with a bruised soul, confused and hurt and undecided. My church did not sanction divorce and it was a dreadful wrench to face what such a step would mean.

But the romance of Colorado mining had caught me forever in its mesh—I would never be happy again away from these mountains and away from the gay, tantalizing feeling that tomorrow anything might happen. And did!