Baby Doe Tabor of the most beautiful, flamboyant, and alluring women in the mining West". Her story inspired the opera "The Ballad of Baby Doe". Elizabeth Bonduel McCourt (or according to some accounts Elizabeth Nellis McCourt) was born in 1854 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin to Irish-Catholic immigrants Peter and Elizabeth McCourt. She later claimed to have been born in 1860. She appears to have been christened on October 7, 1854 at St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church. Called Lizzie as a child, the fourth of eleven children, she grew up in a middle-class family in a two-story house. Her father was a partner in a
Wozzeck on the compositional direction of "Wozzeck". In a letter to his wife written in June 1918, he wrote, "There is a little bit of me in his character, since I have been spending these war years just as dependent on people I hate, have been in chains, sick, captive, resigned, in fact, humiliated." His correspondence and notebooks dating from the war years reveal a painful obsession with completing "Wozzeck". Compositional sketches and notes for both Wozzeck and the "" of Three Pieces for Orchestra that Berg made during the war are strewn with disjointed fragments of military ordinances and terminology.