Adventuress, miner, home-wrecker, pauper, dreamer - the drama of Colorado legend Baby Doe's life has inspired several biographies, a 1932 film starring Edward G. Robinson, even an opera, but never before a novel.

Yet few lives have been so dramatic, even in the barest outlines of historical fact. Leaving staid Oshkosh, Wisconsin, for the booming, rowdy Colorado mining territory in 1879, Baby ditched her hapless husband and snared silver magnate Horace Tabor, owner of the immensely productive Matchless, a mine so renowned that Oscar Wilde dined in its depths during his 1882 lecture tour of the West.

Tabor divorced his wife to marry Baby in the wedding of the century (President Chester Arthur attended) and live with her in gaudy splendor in Denver. Their glory was short-lived: Horace died in 1899, leaving Baby the now worthless Matchless. He also left her two little girls, the younger of whom, Silver Dollar, wrote poetry, turned tricks, and died tragically in 1925.

But Baby lived on until 1935 in a shack next to the Matchless, wearing burlap on her feet and scribbling her dreams and visions on scraps of paper.