Born in Vermont, Tabor had arrived in the mining regions of Colorado in the 1860s, moving from camp to camp in a (so far) fruitless search for a big strike, supplementing his income by operating a general store wherever he settled. In 1877 he came to Leadville and opened a store where he also had an informal bank. In May 1878 two German immigrants, August Rische and George Hook, came to Tabor for “grubstaking” support. In return for about $65 worth of supplies, Tabor got a one-third interest in whatever the Germans found. On Fryer Hill, about a mile from Tabor’s store, Rische and Hook struck silver. Before long, this mine, now called the Little Pittsburg (sic), was generating $8,000 a week. In 1879 Tabor sold his interest in the mine for $1 million and used his position of prominence—he had been elected mayor—to turn Leadville from a mining camp into a real city. He organized a fire department, created a municipal water system, and founded the Bank of Leadville. But he hadn’t lost his interest in mining. He took a portion of his proceeds from the Little Pittsburg and became the sole owner of the Matchless, a mine that had been open for months in Leadville without producing much of note. In January 1880, after chronic flooding problems at the mine were resolved, so much silver ore was found in the Matchless that Tabor’s personal take rose upward of $2,000 per day.
Tabor wasn’t in Leadville when Wilde arrived on April 13—he was living in a mansion he had built in Denver—but many of his employees and associates were. One of them, the house physician at the Clarendon Hotel, was called to attend to Wilde shortly after he took possession of his suite at the hotel. Apparently the altitude—at 10,152 feet, Leadville was, and still is, the highest incorporated city in America—had left him dizzy and nauseous. The doctor diagnosed the condition as “a case of light air” and sent Wilde’s valet out for medication. (We don’t know what it was, but it very well could have been laudanum, a tincture of opium used to treat all sorts of disorders in the late nineteenth century.) “Prescription $1,” Wilde wrote in his expense log.
By eight p.m., a crowd described by the Leadville Daily Herald as “a whole house of curiosity seekers” had assembled—those in reserved seats paying $1.25—at the Tabor Opera House, built in 1879 by Tabor, who immediately declared it to be the finest theater between St. Louis and San Francisco. The official opening of the hall in 1879 was memorable, but not for the reason Tabor wished. A pair of criminals named Frodsham and Stewart had been lynched by vigilantes the night before, and their bodies were still hanging from the beams of a partially completed building across the street. Pinned to Frodsham’s corpse was a note saying, “Notice to all thieves….This is our commencement, and this shall be your fates. We mean business, and let this be your last warning. [Signed] Vigilantes’ Committee. We are 700 strong.” According to one historian, far more locals came to see the two dead men dangling than came to opening night at the Opera House, and attendance that evening for “Serious Family!” a comedy starring Jack S. Langrishe, was poor, though the show did sell out the rest of its run.
As reported in the Herald, Wilde, after keeping his audience waiting for several minutes, “stumbled onto the stage”—the medication, perhaps?—“with a stride more becoming a giant backwoodsman than an aesthete,” wearing his “low-necked knee-pants costume,” and immediately began speaking. His topic was “The Decorative Arts,” and he urged his baffled listeners to have their rapidly growing but still primitive city follow the lead of sixteenth-century Pisa, where artists were inspired by “brilliantly lighted palace arches and pillars of marble and porphyry, noble knights with glorious mantles flowing over their mail riding in the sunlight, groves of oranges and pomegranates, and through these groves the most beautiful women that the world has ever known, pure as lilies, faithful, noble, and intellectual.” Apparently one listener couldn’t contain himself, shouting: “We live in adobes in this country!”
Months later, Wilde said that, because there were so many silver miners in his audience in Leadville, he had “read them passages from the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini,” the celebrated silversmith of the Italian Renaissance, “and they seemed much delighted.” But “I was reproached by my hearers,” Wilde added, “for not having brought him with me. I explained that he had been dead for some little time which elicited the enquiry, ‘Who shot him?’”