The history of Horace, Augusta and Elizabeth McCourt Baby Doe Tabor is a rags to riches story full of scandal and intrigue in the Rocky Mountains. Horace Tabor, a simple merchant, grubstaked a couple of miners in Leadville, Colorado, and soon became wealthy and influential. He left his wife for a much younger woman -- Baby Doe, resulting in high scandal. He died in poverty.

Horace and Augusta

Horace Tabor was born on April 6, 1830 to Cornelius Dunham Tabor and Sarah Ferrin in Holland, Vermont and had a sister and three brothers.  When he was 19, he left home to work in the stone quarries of Massachusetts and Maine. William B. Pierce, who owned a quarry in Augusta, Maine, hired both Horace and his brother, John, and would later become Horace's father-in-law.   

Augusta Pierce was one of seven daughters and three sons born to William B. Pierce and Lucy Eaton. Growing up in a comfortable middle-class home, she was a fragile child but also strong willed. Horace and Augusta began a courtship that would eventually lead to marriage.

In 1855, Horace joined a group organized by the New England Immigrant Aid Society to populate the Kansas territory with anti-slave settlers. He moved to Kansas and homesteaded a piece of land on Deep Creek in Riley County, which is called "Tabor Valley" to this day. His hard work and willingness to help the anti-slavery cause got him elected to the "Free Soil" legislature, which sat in defiance of the so-called legitimate territorial government during a violent period of civil unrest, which earned the territory the name of "Bleeding Kansas."

Early in 1857, he returned to Maine to marry the twenty-four year old Augusta Pierce and bring her back to Kansas. Rattlesnakes and Indians too often visited the area and Augusta, appalled by the raw ruggedness of the territory and the rough cabin, often fell to tears.  However, they spent the next two years trying to make the farm productive until Horace began to hear stories of gold discoveries in the western part of the Kansas Territory (now Colorado.) 

In the spring of 1859, they left Deep Creek with their baby son Maxcy and two friends from Maine.  Following the Republican River Trail, they walked across the barely explored landscape of northern Kansas and southern Nebraska until they reached Denver.  While the men hunted for food, Augusta tried to keep the campfire alive, often with only buffalo chips, since there was no wood on the high plains. It took them six weeks to make a trip that could be made a decade later by train in under thirty hours. Just one month after their journey on the Republican River Trail, Horace Greeley took the same route, describing it as "the acme of barrenness and desolation."

Though Horace at first tried to prospect in fields close to Denver, he decided to try his luck farther inland, and in the spring of 1860, they headed to California Gulch, just south of Leadville. Their previous journey across the high plains was easy, compared to their trip to California Gulch.