As a young woman in the 1870s, Lizzie Tabor notoriously defied convention: When her first husband failed as a provider, she descended into the silver mines herself to earn their living. When she caught her husband in a brothel with a young girl, she divorced him. And when she captured the attention of Horace Tabor, a silver baron 30 years her senior, she married him after he left his wife and son amid huge scandal—officially branding Lizzie one of the wealthiest women in America, and a social outcast in Denver society. Lizzie and Horace sent out wedding invitations bordered in solid silver, raised two daughters in a villa where 100 peacocks roamed the lawns, entertained Sarah Bernhardt when the actress performed at Tabor’s Opera House— and lost everything with the repeal of the Sherman Silver Act.

After her second husband’s death, Lizzie moved to a one-room shack at the Matchless Mine where she lived the last 35 years of her life, writing down thousands of her dreams and noting visitations of spirits on her calendar. Hers is the tale of a fiercely independent woman who bucked all social and gender expectations by working in defiance of 19th century convention, becoming the key figure in the West’s most scandalous love triangle, and, after the Tabor’s vast fortune was destroyed, living in eccentric isolation in her final years.