From Vermont, that land of stone and marble, it was fitting that Tabor should come to our mountains where similar conditions prevail. He came by the way of Kansas where he farmed with indifferent success from 1855 to 1859. His entrance there into the political arena had a disastrous ending. There used to be the Free Soilers, a party whose battle cry was "free soil, free speech, free labor and free men." No state had more troubles in the way of political happenings than Kansas. One consisted in having this Free Soil party, to which Tabor belonged and which made him a member of the Legislature of that State in 1857, just after its admission into the Union. As Cromwell prorogued the Parliament, so did the Federal Troops under orders of the Secretary of War send every member of that Free Soil Legislature to their homes, robbed of their law-making prerogatives and relegated to common citizenship. Tabor came to Denver in 1859 and from this point his career reads like a story from the Arabian Nights. In the Spring of 1860 he started to California Gulch, which name gave way later to Leadville; he drove an ox team to a covered wagon that was six weeks in the going. With the close of the first season he had five thousand dollars of gold dust in his pocket. That amount of money suggested merchandising, which he followed in the winters, alternating to the mines every summer. At the end of the second year he had wrested fifteen thousand dollars more in gold from the mines. He was a likeable man, generous, and known to be such, always doing his fellowman a good turn. Two prospectors down on their luck, proposed that he should help them by "grub-staking," as it was called in those days. He was to give them what they would eat and wear, furnish them with tools for digging and powder for blasting. In return they would share with him if they won, while if they lost, it would be his sole loss. It turned out to be a most fortunate alliance for them all. They had no more than started to digging, having reached a depth of only twenty-six feet, when they struck a rich vein of ore, and every inch they went down after that, the rich deposit grew in extent, both in quantity and quality. "Little Pittsburg," they called it, and it began turning out eight thousand dollars a week to the three fortunate owners. In a little while Hook sold his share to his partners for ninety thousand dollars, that being all the money he said he needed. Soon Rische reached the limit of his money-making ambitions which was two hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars, and that sum was paid him by David H. Moffat and J. B. Chaffee. The three new partners, which included Tabor, purchased other mines in the vicinity and consolidated them, taking out over four million dollars in the two years from 1878 to 1880. The other two partners now bought out Tabor for one million dollars, that being as much he thought as he could ever spend. It seemed that these original partners only had to figure