by Francisco A. Rios
(Editor’s note: Dr. Rios, a retired professor from the University of Colorado at Denver, spent 805 volunteer hours over a span of one year and seven months cataloging hundreds of letters from the Tabor Collection at the Colorado Historical Society (CHS) onto a computer database. We are reproducing some of these letters as a series with the generous permission of the CHS.)
In the Tabor correspondence, no one uses the name Baby Doe. Her family calls her Lizzie, and Horace, after opening his letters with “My Darling Wife,” calls her Babe. In the Tabor collection at the Historical Society, she appears, for brevity’s sake, as EBT, for Elizabeth Bonduel Tabor, which will come in handy for her later, as she plays off this name to create aliases for herself. This series will refer to her as EBT or Mrs. Tabor and reserve the name Baby Doe for her early years in Leadville.