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 to visit her relatives, Lily decided then to prolong her visit, to stay and provide care for her elderly grandmother. Later, Lily moved to Chicago, where in 1908 she married her first cousin, and soon after gave birth to Baby Doe's grandchild. In 1911, Baby Doe and Silver again visited relatives in Wisconsin, going on to visit Lily in Chicago. After such a prolonged absence, Lily claimed she barely knew Silver Dollar. After Lily's departure, Baby Doe and Silver Dollar moved into a cabin on the site of the Matchless mine. The living quarters were basic and inadequate for Colorado