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
Baby Doe Tabor boarding house, where she had been living under the name "Ruth Norman". For the rest of her life, Baby Doe refused to believe the woman found as Ruth Norman had been her daughter, stating, "I did not see the body they said was my little girl." Alone in the cabin outside Leadville, Baby Doe turned to religion. She considered her life of great wealth a period of vanity and created penances for herself. During the frigidly bitter Colorado high-country winters, she wound burlap sacks around her legs. With no money, she ate very little, living on stale bread and suet,