Spotlight: Rebecca Rosenberg – The Tenacious Tabor Women and the Novelist Who Continues to Tell Their Stories

Rebecca Rosenberg, a CU Boulder alumna and award-winning author, passed through her home state of Colorado earlier this month to tour for her new book, Silver Echoes: the second installment of her Gold Digger series.

“Baby Doe Tabor, [Silver Dollar’s mother] used to be a big deal in Colorado when I was growing up,” Rosenberg says. “But the more I met people on this tour, they don’t really know the history. They just have a small sketch of an idea of who she was. I realized at the Tabor Opera House—we had close to 100 people [at her tour event]—when I said, “So, how many of you know about Baby Doe?”, and not even half of them really knew her.”

Silver Echoes is inspired and based on real-life actress Rosemary “Silver Dollar” Tabor, a woman of immense talent—author, playwright, poet, and performer—in the Roaring Twenties. She seemed destined for stardom, but her dazzling facade concealed a life of devastating losses: the loss of her family’s fortune during the Panic of 1893; the death of her father, Horace Tabor, who was a former US Senator; and removal from the privileged life she knew after her mother moved them to Leadville, leading an impoverished life in the tool shed of the Matchless Mine. This, all culminating in a horrific sexual assault by a family lawyer, was a compounding story of traumas that triggered a fractured identity that haunted her life.

Silver Echoes unearths this hidden torment, exploring the complex life of a woman torn between victimhood and resilience.

“I lived here through my college years,” Rosenberg explains. “And in school, learning about history, I wondered, ‘Why don’t we hear more stories like this?’ Of course, in Colorado, there’s Molly Brown–I was aware of her. Then I read Gone With the Wind, and she wasn’t a real person, but it brought a woman to the forefront of history.”

“I realized that there weren’t women who were identified as part of history. That it’s all about war, all about politics, all about economics, and all about men. That’s where I got excited to write about these extraordinary women who existed, whose real-life stories people don’t know.”

Rosenberg, as a historical fiction author, has dedicated herself as an advocate to convey the in-depth nuances of the Tabor women’s lives, which extend beyond just the tragedies.

“I love to write about women who’ve done extraordinary things or who were misunderstood,” Rosenberg said. “That’s how I feel about Baby Doe and Silver Dollar. They were misunderstood, and they had more complex challenges than anyone ever knew.

After taking a class at Stanford University on how to write a novel and finishing her first book, she came back to Baby Doe. Now, she’s telling Silver Dollar’s story.

“I went to History Colorado and read all of Baby Doe’s diaries,” Rosenberg says. “They let you read the diaries—the actual writing, her actual writing—and make copies of it and everything. I really got her point of view of what she was doing, what happened to her later in life, and that’s where I discovered that [Baby Doe] was sick to death with worry about [her daughter], Silver Dollar, who had moved to Chicago.”

Silver Dollar, Rosenberg speculates, may have experienced dissociative identity disorder (DID). She was found scalded to death at age 35 under suspicious circumstances, though Baby Doe suspected the young woman found was not actually her daughter.

“I knew that there was a major problem going on with Silver Dollar,” Rosenberg says. “She was involved with vaudeville and burlesque and the speakeasies. She was also a silent movie actress. She was so beautiful, so talented. All that seemed to be too much, though, so I really dove into that history and started reading about her to get a better understanding of her as a person, not just the scandal we know.”

Ultimately, Rosenberg will keep writing about famous, historical women whose stories continue to influence us and the times we live in—in ways we can’t totally comprehend yet.

“I find that women, given the chance, are very tenacious,” Rosenberg says. “And inventive and really determined to do things in life, and that really inspires me. And not just me. All of us. The next generation, and the next generation, and the next generation. Women are already doing way more than they were ever allowed to, and that’s inspiring.”

Rebecca Rosenberg is the author of seven best-selling and award-winning historical novels, including her Champagne Widows and Gold Diggers series. Silver Echoes (Lion Heart Publishing) is available now. 

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