Local History Challenge

Lynch Law, Guilty or not guilty? The last to go. True case histories of 5 men.

John H. Holliday, D. D. S., better known as Doc Holliday, has become a legendary figure in the history of the American West. In Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait, Karen Holliday Tanner reveals the real man behind the legend. Shedding light on Holliday's early years, in a prominent Georgia family during the Civil War and Reconstruction, she examines the elements that shaped his destiny: his birth defect, the death of his mother and estrangement from his father, and the diagnosis of tuberculosis, which led to his journey west. The influence of Holliday's genteel upbringing never disappeared, but it was increasingly overshadowed by his emerging western personality. Holliday himself nurtured his image as a frontier gambler and gunman. Using previously undisclosed family documents and reminiscences as well as other primary sources, Tanner documents the true story of Doc's friendship with the Earp brothers and his run-ins with the law, including the climactic shootout at the O. K. Corral and its aftermath. This first authoritative biography of Doc Holliday should appeal both to historians of the West and to general readers who are interested in his poignant story.

Since the Pikes Peak gold rush in the mid–nineteenth century, women have gone into the mountains of Colorado to hike, climb, ski, homestead, botanize, act as guides, practice medicine, and meet a variety of other challenges, whether for sport or for livelihood. Janet Robertson recounts their exploits in a lively, well-illustrated book that measures up to its title, The Magnificent Mountain Women. Arlene Blum provides a new introduction to this edition.

Harriet Backus writes about her life as an assayer's wife and true pioneer of the West with heart-felt emotion and vivid detail. Sharing her amusing and often challenging experiences as a new bride in the high San Juan Mountains where the Tomboy Mine operated above Telluride, Colorado, she paints a poignant picture of the people, and the life centered around silver mining where most of the book takes place. It is a skillfully written account from a women's perspective in a rough and tumble mining town that has made this book a classic for women's studies.  Harriet's life followed her husband George's career which took them many places beyond the San Juan Mountains including the rugged coast of British Columbia, and the mountainous mining town of Elk City, Idaho and back to Colorado's Leadville. Although both Hattie and George were from the San Francisco bay area where they eventually retired, her heart never quite left the rugged mountain trails of the high San Juans of Colorado.  

Harriet Fish Backus provided us with fascinating glimpses into an era long gone in her classic book "Tomboy Bride." In "A Visit With the Tomboy Bride" the well-known Colorado historian Duane Smith gives us a further look into her adventurous life at the Tomboy Mine, high above Telluride, Colorado. Harriet wrote to Duane after he reviewed her book in 1970, starting a correspondence that continued until her death. The result was a potpourri of Harriet Backus' life and those of some of her friends at the Tomboy Mine. Smith's book is an exciting trip into a wonderful vista of times gone by, a story of an amazing woman, and the tale of an adventuresome life above timberline in the rugged San Juan Mountains of Southwestern Colorado.

Vignettes of colorful individuals who have had an impact on Colorado's history, including Zebulon Pike, Chief Ouray, Horace Tabor, Mollie Brown, Nicholas Creede, and cannibal Alferd Packer, whose judge said, "There was seven Democrats in Hinsdale County and you ate five of them!"

124 individuals from 200 were selected for this book. No attempt has been made to rank their greatness. Discover people you didn't know about and begin your own list of people who have been left out!

They weren't born in Colorado and only Doc Holliday died in Colorado. However, Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp (whose lives were very closely intertwined) spent a considerable portion of their careers in Colorado. Bat and Doc were involved in the Royal Gorge Railroad War in 1978-79. Bat was a peace officer in Trinidad, Colorado. Wyatt and Doc came to Pueblo, Colorado just a few months after the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Doc was arrested in Denver, then the trio traveled their various ways all over Colorado's mining towns including Silverton, Leadville, Gunnison, Trinidad, Pueblo, and Aspen. Doc died November 8, 1887 at Glenwood Springs, but Bat was back in 1892 during the Creede mining boom and continued to hang around as a gunfighter and fight promoter before leaving Colorado for good in 1900.

"John Myers Myers has written Doc's story with a skill that matches the sureness of a bullet from Doc's gun."-Dallas Times Herald. "As for the general reader, he'll eat this up and beg for more."-San Francisco Chronicle.

Buckskin Clad Scout, Indian Fighter, Plainsman, Cowboy, Hunter, Guide And Actor, And His Wife Morlacchi, Premier Danseuse In Satin Slippers.

The story of "Chicken" Bill Lovell, mining con man in 19th century Leadville, Colorado.

Respectable society century gave of nineteenth Colorado women little leeway when it came to supporting themselves. Women who strayed from the accepted norm of the day soon found themselves outcasts, doomed to find their way to the bars and brothels of the West. Ladies of the Lamplight tells the stories of some of these infamous women -- Silver Heels, Poker Alice, Cattle Kate, Etta Place, Mattie Silks and Mollie May, to name just a few. This revised edition has been expanded to include more women whose stories continue to captivate us and hold our attention into the wee hours of the night.

Born in 1831, Isabella, daughter of a clergyman, set off alone to the Antipodes in 1872 'in search of health' and found she had embarked on a life of adventurous travel. In 1873, wearing Hawaiian riding dress, she rode on her spirited horse Birdie through the American 'Wild West', a terrain only recently opened to pioneer settlement. Here she met Rocky Mountain Jim, her 'dear (one-eyed) desperado', fond of poetry and whisky - 'a man any women might love, but no sane woman would marry'. He helped her climb the 'American Matterhorn' and round up cattle on horseback. The wonderful letters which make up this volume were first published in 1879 and were enormously popular in Isabella Bird's lifetime. They tell of magnificent unspoilt landscapes and abundant wildlife, of small remote townships, of her encounters with rattlesnakes, wolves, pumas and grizzly bears and her reactions to the volatile passions of the miners and pioneer settlers.

Throughout the Gold Rush years and beyond, prostitution grew and flourished within the mining camps, small towns, and cities of nineteenth-century Colorado. Whether escaping a bad home life, lured by false advertising, or seeking to subsidize their income, thousands of women chose or were forced to enter an industry where they faced segregation and persecution, fines and jailing, and battled the hazards of their profession. Some dreamed of escape through marriage or retirement, and some became infamous and even successful, but more often found relief only in death. An integral part of western history, the stories of these women continue to fascinate readers and captivate the minds of historians today. The Centennial State had its share of working girls and madams like Mattie Silks and Jennie Rogers who remain notorious celebrities in the annals of history, but Collins also includes the stories of lesser-known women whose roles in this illicit trade help shape our understanding of the American West.

In his lifetime Edward Jonathan Hoyt, better known as Buckskin Joe, staged more excitement than Buffalo Bill, Fairbanks and Flynn, Karl Wallenda, and Batman put together. Born in Canada in 1840, he fought in the Civil War, homesteaded in southern Kansas, chased outlaws as a U.S. marshal in the Cherokee Outlet, prospected for gold from Nova Scotia to Central America, and served as a troubleshooter for "Haw" Tabor, the Silver King of Leadville. But essentially he was an entertainer, specializing in fêtes of music and feats of strength and agility. The master of sixteen musical instruments, he played in frontier bands. An acrobat and aerialist, he toured in circuses, once walking a tightrope two thousand feet above the Royal Gorge. His last hurrah, before pursuing his fortune in the jungles of Honduras, was a tour in Pawnee Bill's Wild West show.

Tales Behind the Tombstones tells the stories behind the deaths (or supposed deaths) and burials of the Old West's most nefarious outlaws, notorious women, and celebrated lawmen. Readers will learn the story behind Calamity Jane's wish to be buried next to Wild Bill Hickok, discover how and where the Earp brothers came to be buried, and visit the sites of tombs long forgotten while legends have lived on.

Features stories of 26 of Colorado's most flamboyant outlaws and lawmen.

Thomas Walsh discovered fabulous wealth at the Camp Bird Mine near Ouray, Colorado. No one except Walsh thought to check the mines for gold at a time when the San Juan Mountains were silver country. When he learned the fabulous results of his secret assays, he whispered to Evalyn, Daughter, I've struck it rich.Daughter Evalyn went on to lead a fabulously rich and extravagant life after she married Edward Beale McLean, whose family owned The Washington Post. They threw spectacular parties, entertained kings and presidents, and lived in huge, grandiose homes. Edward bought Evalyn the Hope diamond, but the curse of the diamond struck their family too. Tragedy struck, and struck hard. A son died and the family fortune was lost.Father Struck It Rich takes the reader from humble times to unbelievable riches and then through tragic bad times.

When Margaret Tobin Brown arrived in New York City shortly after her perilous night in Titanic's Lifeboat Six, a legend was born. Through magazines, books, a Broadway musical, and a Hollywood movie, she became "The Unsinkable Molly Brown," but in the process her life story was distorted beyond recognition. Even her name was changed--she was never known as Molly during her lifetime. Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth is the first full-length biography of this American icon, and the story it tells is of a passionate and outspoken crusader for the rights of women, children, mine workers, and others struggling for their voice in the early twentieth century.

Tales from the pioneers of Leadville, Colorado

"The unsinkable Molly Brown" ; "Tabors - The Ballad of Baby Doe" ; "Texas Jack - The last of the great scouts" ; "Irish priest survived wild west gold rush."

A girl's search for the truth about a legendary woman teaches her a lot about what bravery and loyalty really mean in this gorgeous novel from the author of Katerina's Wish. In her small Colorado town Pearl spends the summers helping her mother run the family café and entertaining tourists with the legend of Silverheels, a beautiful dancer who nursed miners through a smallpox epidemic in 1861 and then mysteriously disappeared. According to lore, the miners loved her so much they named their mountain after her. Pearl believes the tale is true, but she is mocked by her neighbor, Josie, a suffragette campaigning for women's right to vote. Josie says that Silverheels was a crook, not a savior, and she challenges Pearl to a bet: prove that Silverheels was the kindhearted angel of legend, or help Josie pass out the suffragist pamphlets that Pearl thinks drive away the tourists. Not to mention driving away handsome George Crawford. As Pearl looks for the truth, darker forces are at work in her small town. The United States's entry into World War I casts suspicion on German immigrants, and also on anyone who criticizes the president during wartime--including Josie. How do you choose what's right when it could cost you everything you have?

Horace Tabor: His Life and the Legend is the first biography to give full attention to Tabor's mining, business, and political activities as well as to his matrimonial escapades. It is a careful and detailed portrait of a man so extraordinary that even in his own lifetime the facts were largely obscured behind the legend. Rarely has the Victorian American West, both good and bad, been better synopsized in the figure of one man.Show More an.Show Less An 1858er who had spent nearly two decades following the will-o-the-wisp Colorado mining frontier, in 1876 Tabor was then living and working in out-of-the-way Oro City, near where Leadville would be one day. Soon thereafter came the Little Pittsburg silver strike, and Tabor's fortune took flight. Very quickly, Colorado - and the rest of the nation - was hearing about Horace Tabor. "Denver's lucky star was on high when Governor Tabor decided to spend his fortune here," praised the Denver Tribune in 1881. The Leadville Daily Herald (July 8, 1882) also understood his contribution: "Colorado has produced fortunes for many men, but no man who has met with success has so freely made investments in this state, as has Governor Tabor." The events that followed that amazing silver discovery on Fryer Hill, May 1878 unfolded like a classic Greek tragedy. Tabor weathered them all, and his name has resounded through the succeeding decades. No other Coloradan of his generation is so well remembered, nor does anyone else so typify the tempo of this legendary mining era.

The story of Augusta Pierce Tabor. Traveling as a pioneer to Colorado suffering through untold hardships on the frontier. This unusual and remarkable person was the first white woman in the Leadville area. Her life exemplifies that one brave and determined woman can do.

Everyone who knows Colorado history knows the story of Horace Tabor and his child bride, Baby Doe, their fabulous wealth, and their sudden fall to poverty. This is the story of one of the children of the marriage, Silver Dollar Tabor who born into wealth lived the majority of her life in poverty and tragedy. Written by a long-time Leadville resident who dedicated her life to preserving the Tabor Opera House and knows the true stories of the Tabor family.

This book is an account of the author's research into the great Baby Doe Tabor legend. It contains 22 essays covering the lives and fates of the three major players in the legend. First there is Horace, the one time "Silver King," who was worth $10 million when he divorced his first wife, the faithful Augusta, and married the beautiful, vivacious, and much younger Baby Doe. Horace lost all his fortune after about 10 years of marriage to Baby Doe and for the last 18 months of his life was the postmaster of Denver at an annual salary of $3,700. He died unexpectedly of natural causes leaving Baby Doe and his two daughters penniless. Then there is Baby Doe herself, who in her maiden years was known as the "Belle of Oshkosh," and came out west with her first husband, Harvey Doe; divorced him when he did not meet her standards, then stole Horace away from Augusta, his wife of 24 years. Many people considered Baby Doe a "gold digger" and were surprised that she stayed with Horace after he went broke. The legend has it that Horace told Baby Doe on his death bed to "hang on to the Matchless Mine, it will make you millions when the price of silver comes back." Myth or not, Baby Doe did just that, living in a cabin beside the mine for most of the next 36 years. The cabin had no electricity, running water, bathroom, or kitchen. She was found dead in the cabin, frozen, after a severe blizzard. She was 81, and had $2.00. Finally there is Silver Dollar, the ill-fated daughter, born an heiress to a fortune, but died at age 36 in one of Chicago's worse slums, when she scalded herself while drunk. She was a chronic alcoholic, a drug addict, and a prostitute. The lives and fates of these three Tabors presents an ultimate riches to rags story that has intrigued those aware of the legend for over a hundred years. The author is an "avocational" researcher who has been interested in, and has studied the Baby Doe legend for about 20 years and this book represents his serious effort to understand the many myths and mysteries surrounding the Tabors. However, he has also interjected some humor in his essays as he sometimes pokes fun at the "popular" historians that have written books on Baby Doe; for their lack of verifiable history and their excessive use of pure fiction and romanticism. He also pokes fun at the Tabors from time to time because of their outrageous antics or illogical behavior, even though they have all been dead for 80 years or more. The author has expressed that he thoroughly enjoyed his efforts in preparing this book and encourages his readers to join him in further researching the legend. He concludes his book with a list of unanswered questions and unexplained mysteries still remaining to be solved that should provide a formidable challenge to any future researcher.

The first wife of Horace Tabor, wealthy owner of the Matchless mine in Colorado and owned the Tabor block in Denver, Colorado.

Elizabeth Bonduel McCourt was born in 1854 in Wisconsin. She moved west, married a man named Harvey Doe, and came to be called "Baby" by the miners in Central City, Colorado. After attracting the attention of wealthy Horace Tabor of Leadville, she began a very public affair with Tabor ending with marriage in a private ceremony in 1882.
A lavish lifestyle ended after fifteen years with loss of the Tabor fortune in the Silver Crash and Horace's death in 1899.
Baby Doe spent the last thirty-five years of her life in a small cabin outside the Matchless Mine in Leadville.

Biography of Augusta Tabor.

Unravels the psyche of Colorado's most adored adulteress

This is a fascinating autobiography of Baby Doe Tabor, the second wife of pioneer Colorado businessman Horace Tabor, whose rags-to-riches and back to rags again story made her a well-known figure in her own day, and at one time hailed as the “best dressed woman in the West.” It was during Baby Doe's final years of her life living in a shack on the site of the Matchless Mine, enduring great poverty, solitude, and repentance, that fellow Coloradan Caroline Bancroft met Baby Doe, who had known Bancroft's father for many years, and became fascinated by her “smile, the manner, the voice and the flowery speech [...] despite her diminutive size.” Following Tabor's death in the Matchless Mine cabin on March 7, 1935, Bancroft was commissioned to write her biography, her greatest source of information provided by Sue Bonnie, who had discovered Tabor's body. This book, originally published in 1955, is the result: “Baby Doe Tabor tells us of her life in nearly her own words-many she actually used in talking to Sue Bonnie and others I have imagined as consonant with her character and the facts of her story.”

Contemporary linguistic forms are partially the product of their historical antecedents, and the same is true for cognitive conceptualization. The book presents the results of several diachronic corpus studies of conceptual metaphor in a longitudinal and empirical âeoemixed methodsâe#157; design, employing both quantitative and qualitative analysis measures; the study design was informed by usage-based theory. The goal was to investigate the interaction over time between conceptualization and cultural models in historical English-speaking society. The main study of two linguistic metaphors of anger spans five centuries (A.D. 1500 to 1990). The results show that conceptualization and cultural modelsâe"understood as non-autonomous, encyclopedic knowledgeâe"work together to determine both the meaning and use of a linguistic metaphor. In addition, historically a wide variety of emotion concepts formed a complex cognitive array called the Domain Matrix of emotion. The implications for conceptual metaphor theory, research methodology, and future study are discussed in detail.

Horace Austin Warren Tabor (1830-1899) was born near Holland, Vermont, son of Sarah Ferrin and Cornelius Tabor. He married Augusta Pierce in 1857 and later moved to Colorado. He married later Elizabeth McCourt Doe (1854-1935) who was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

In her pulchritudinous prime Baby Doe was called the Silver Queen of Colorado by journalists and "that shameless hussy" by the proper wives of the men who eyed her. Flirtatious, adventurous, ambitious, Elizabeth McCourt Doe gave everyone a lot to talk about when she met Horace Tabor, the Silver King of Leadville, in 1880. Three years later they were free to legalize their passion. Although thirty years separated them, they were well matched in romantic recklessness. If The Legend of Baby Doe is the lowdown on the high jinks of two public lives, it is also the story of a love that survived spectacularly good times and bad. Before bad times came, Baby and Horace went on a spending spree. They built an opulent opera house in Denver and bought an Italian-ate villa. Baby Doe went out bejeweled and ermined, and sat at home alone, snubbed by the social dragons. John Burke has written about the giddy rise of a bonanza king who dreamed of entering the White House with Baby Doe on his arm and about the disastrous fall they took together. Wiped out by unwise investments and the Panic of 1893, Tabor soon died, leaving Baby Doe and their two daughters penniless. Reportedly, his deathbed order was to "hang on to the Matchless," a played-out mine filled with water. She managed to do that for almost four decades, struggling heroically against loneliness, poverty, and heartbreak, and becoming one of the great legends of the American West.

The genuine creative achievements of nineteenth-century western women have often been obscured by sentimental tributes to their devotion and diligence, while men are praised as pathfinders, entrepreneurs, and community builders. But the nineteen narratives in So Much to Be Done by women of diverse status and background reveal women's involvement in every aspect of settlement. Their part in making hard decisions, producing essential income, and developing new communities was as important as their flexibility, humor, and sense of adventure. This collection describes the experiences of pioneer women responding in individual ways to the challenge of frontier hardships. The letters, diaries, and memoirs presented here offer glimpses of women's courage, physical strength, and independence that were the equal of any man's, even as they also reveal the failures, weaknesses, and tragedies that beset both sexes during the complex settlement process. Women describe their multiple daily tasks, the ingenuity by which they asserted themselves or circumvented patriarchal authority, the networks of relatives and friends who made the survival of both men and women possible. Such information is seldom found in men's narratives. Women's words provide rich veins of new material for social historians.