Horace Tabor left his wife for Baby Doe, lost his silver fortune in 1893, and Baby Doe was found frozen at his last mine

Horace Tabor was a Colorado storekeeper who struck silver at Leadville. By 1879 he was worth "six million or more dollars", and that September he bought the Matchless Mine. In 1882 he obtained an irregular divorce from his wife Augusta in Durango; pages in the court file were pasted together to hide it. That September he secretly married Elizabeth "Baby Doe" McCourt in St. Louis, which made them both technically bigamists. Augusta sued in January 1883 and received a settlement reported as $250,000 in property or $400,000. Tabor married Baby Doe publicly at the Willard Hotel in Washington on 1 March 1883. In 1893 Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which had propped up silver prices. Silver collapsed in the Panic of 1893, and Tabor's holdings were sold. In 1898 he was made Denver postmaster. He died of appendicitis in 1899. Augusta had died in 1895. Baby Doe lived on in a cabin at the Matchless. The mine was sold to pay a debt in 1927, and the new owners let her stay. She was found frozen in the cabin in March 1935; the death certificate gave acute myocarditis. In 2026 the Matchless Mine is on the National Register of Historic Places and is part of the National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum.