Augusta tabor biography

Colorado pioneer, mining camp provisioner, real estate investor

One of seven daughters and three sons of building contractor William B.

Pierce and Lucy Eaton, Augusta was a fragile child who survived as much by force-of-will as by the strength of her genuine middle-class upbringing. At twenty-four Augusta married Horace A.W. Tabor, a Vermonter who had been a stonecutter working in her father's quarry, and emigrated to his homestead on Deep Creek in Riley County, Kansas.

Quickly Augusta's comfortable upbringing clashed head-on with the raw reality she found there. The rugged cabin Horace had built as shelter, the rattlesnakes that snuggled under their bed, the occasional Indian begging for food, even the lack of reading material were a world away from the warmth of her family's hearth in Maine. Augusta was devastated by the alienness of it all.