AUGUSTA
TABOR
HER SIDE OF THE SCANDAL
By Caroline Bancroft Price 75c
Copyright 1955 by Caroline Bancroft. Fifth edition, 1968
All rights in this book are reserved. It may not be used for dramatic, radio, television, motion or talking picture purposes without written authorization.
Johnson Publishing Co., Boulder, Colorado
The Author
Caroline Bancroft is a third generation Coloradan who began writing her firsthistory for The Denver Post in 1928.
Her long-standing interest in western history was inherited. Her pioneergrandfather, Dr. F. J. Bancroft, was a founder of the Colorado Historical Societyand its first president.
His granddaughter has carried on the family tradition. She is the author ofthe interesting series of Bancroft Booklets, Silver Queen: The FabulousStory of Baby Doe Tabor, Famous Aspen, Denver’s Lively Past, HistoricCentral City, The Brown Palace in Denver, Tabor’s Matchless Mine andLusty Leadville, Glenwood’s Early Glamor, Augusta Tabor: Her Side ofthe Scandal, The Unsinkable Mrs. Brown, Unique Ghost Towns, Colorado’sLost Gold Mines and Buried Treasure, and the basic, over-all history,Colorful Colorado.
A Bachelor of Arts from Smith College, she later obtained a Masterof Arts degree from the University of Denver, writing her thesis on CentralCity, Colorado. Her full-sized Gulch of Gold is the attractive, definitivehistory of that well-known area.
She is shown standing beside the headgate at Lake Caroline on Mt.Bancroft, a Continental Divide peak named for her grandfather. The photowas taken by Charles Eaton in the summer of 1956.
STEPHEN L. R. McNICHOLSGovernor of Colorado1957-63
Augusta Tabor:
Her Side of the Scandal
“She is a blonde, I understand, and paints. But I have never seen her.”
Augusta Tabor made this remark about Baby Doe in the course of along interview that she gave to a reporter for the Denver Republican. Theaccount appeared on October 31, 1883, and carried several heads. One ofthese read, “Mrs. Tabor No. 1 makes some spicy revelations.”
Augusta received her caller in the elegantly furnished sitting-room ofher twenty-room mansion. The house stood at the corner of SeventeenthAvenue and Lincoln Street but faced Broadway. Its address was 97 Broadway,and was entered along a spruce-lined circular driveway. The houseand its surrounding block of land had been part of her divorce settlementfrom the millionaire Silver King, Horace A. W. Tabor.
That divorce in the January preceding had been a national scandal,only to be topped by the even greater scandal of her former husband’s remarriage.The wedding was performed on March 1 in Washington whereTabor had gone to serve a thirty-day term as senator. It was attended by anumber of political big-wigs, including President Chester Arthur; but theycame without their wives. The