Matchless Mine

The Matchless Mine, a mile east of town, was Horace Tabor's most productive silver mine during Leadville's boom years. When the silver market collapsed in 1893, the mine went bust along with Tabor's fortune. What makes the site compelling now is not the mine shaft but the tool shack beside it, where Baby Doe Tabor — Horace's devoted second wife — lived alone in poverty for 35 years after his death, guarding a played-out mine she believed would one day make the family rich again.

The shack is preserved as she left it. Tours of the mine shaft run in summer. The combination of the physical ruin and the story of Baby Doe's loyalty and death makes this one of the more haunting historic sites in Colorado.

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A story
Baby Doe Tabor, wife of silver baron Horace Tabor, was widowed in 1899 when her husband died penniless after the silver crash. She moved into the tool shack beside the Matchless Mine — which Horace had allegedly told her to "hang onto" — and lived there in poverty for 35 winters. When workers found her frozen body in 1935, she had been dead for several days. The shack still stands.