River of Lost Souls. Jonathan P. Thompson

peddlers of the wild, wild west, with their fake gunfights, might portray the history of Silverton and Durango, the reality is, this sort of lawless, highway-robbing, gun-slinging, and frontier justice were a mere blip on the region’s record.

      The murder of Marshal Ogsbury and the lynchings that followed were not just the climax of this short period in history, but also the dying gasp. In Silverton, the Diamond Saloon was shut down and demolished and Bronco Lou run out of town. Ike Stockton was gunned down in the streets of Durango, not because he was an outlaw, but because he betrayed his young friend. Stockton’s gang disintegrated and the Coe-Stockton feud evaporated. Communities moved to end the lawlessness, and even implemented gun control statutes that are far stricter than today’s. “Firearms in the daily walks of life have no place in our modern civilization and should not be carried,” noted a Durango mayor in 1903. The communities of the San Juan country, though still brand new, were maturing.

      ELEVEN MONTHS AFTER THE SILVERTON SHOOTING, a far more cataclysmic sound than a gunshot would echo through Baker’s Park: the whistle of the first steam locomotive. The railroad had finally arrived, marking a huge pivot in the region’s history.

      Prior to that fateful day in July 1882, mail and supplies were brought into Baker’s Park by horse, mule, or wagon on rugged trails over high mountains. Throughout the 1870s, the most traveled route to the outside world was a seventy-mile journey to Del Norte, in the San Luis Valley. The trail crossed the Continental Divide at Cunningham Pass, elevation 12,090 feet (currently part of the Hardrock Hundred ultramarathon course). During the winter, which at these elevations can last six months or more, the horses and burros were traded for wooden skis, ranging from six to twelve feet in length, known as snowshoes.

      Heroic and hardy mail carriers—mostly Nelson’s fellow Scandinavians—plied the long boards, usually tag-teaming the route and braving avalanches, frostbite, hypothermia, and snow blindness to keep Silverton running through the winter. One mailman once carried sixty pounds of newsprint over the route in order to keep the local rag in print. Astoundingly, only one mail carrier perished. On November 27, 1876, John Greenell, née Greenhalgh, set out from Carr’s Cabin on the other side of the divide on the return trip to Silverton. He never arrived. A group of searchers found his body a few days later, frozen to death near the top of the pass, his hand rigidly clutching his mailbag.

      The train was challenged by snow, as well, but it opened up a thick artery connecting Durango, rich with coal, timber, cattle, and crops, with the mineral-rich veins around Silverton.¹⁹ The miners got access to heavy equipment that would have been almost impossible to haul over the passes with mules, and they could then send their ore by the railcar-load back down to Durango and the new San Juan & New York smelter built along the Animas River’s banks. Potential investors in the mines no longer had to brave sphincter-puckering wagon rides over steep passes to see future prospects.

      The rails stretched from Denver down to Alamosa, in the San Luis Valley, then further south to Chama, New Mexico, where they picked up the old Ute and Spanish trail to Durango before following the Animas River to Silverton. The railroad’s advent didn’t just impact the mining camps. The pair of steel ribbons and the coal-eating, smoke-belching locomotives that rode on them rapidly transformed the entire region’s landscape, cultures, and economy. The locomotives sucked up water from rivers and streams, and new coal mines were opened to feed the chugging beasts. Glades of tall, straight, and wise old ponderosas near Chama, on the Tierra Amarilla Land Grant, were sheared down en masse now that there was an easy way to haul them to market. Once-isolated villages along the old Spanish trail, settled in the 1870s by members of the New Mexican Penitente Brotherhood looking to flee religious persecution from mainstream Catholics, were suddenly linked to the outside world.

      Towns and sawmills and cattle-loading chutes popped up along the tracks; subsistence farms and ranches morphed into commercial-sized operations. And in the high country, the mostly entrepreneurial mining trade slowly transformed into an industrial-scale concern, funded by outside capital. In 1881, approximately six hundred tons of ore were pulled out of Silverton-area mines. A couple of years later, it had jumped to fourteen thousand tons and climbing. The population of Silverton and surrounding towns ballooned into the thousands.

      By then, Olaf Nelson had another mouth to feed, a son named Oscar. Freelance prospecting wasn’t paying off, so he got a real job up at the Sampson Mine, located on the upper slopes of Bonita Peak. It was one of the upstart mines in the area, first staked in the early 1880s. In 1883 its owner, Theodore Stahl, had a mill built in Gladstone along with a tram to link mine and mill, one of the first in the San Juans. Nelson’s job was to run the tram, which carried ore down to the mill and served as a sketchy, primitive chairlift for miners, adding to the long list of ways to die while in the trade. Nelson and his family moved into the mine’s boardinghouse, perched at twelve thousand feet above sea level near the mine portal, in 1885.

      That is where Louisa, Olaf, Anna, and two-year-old Oscar found themselves on a January evening in 1886. A blizzard had raged outside since late the previous night and even during the light of day the flakes came down so thick that Olaf couldn’t see beyond the second tram tower. As they sat in the dim light of lanterns they occasionally heard a deep and eerie whoomph as slabs of snow tumbled from the roof. But inside, with a stoked stove and the deep snow providing insulation, they were warm, at least. The baby slept, Anna read, and Louisa knitted. Olaf felt another whoomph, only deeper, louder. He heard a hissing, and noticed that a stream of smoke was blowing out of the stove door. Then the crashing, the world moving, the wall rushing towards them: Avalanche.

      A baby was crying. Louisa called out: “Anna. Anna.” Olaf Nelson moved silently and quickly through the darkness. Amid the wreckage he found the pipe from the stove, still hot, and used it as a shovel. He dug frantically through the snow toward the cries, tears rolling down his face.

      Once again, Olaf Arvid Nelson had cheated death. Louisa, Anna, and Oscar made it out of the catastrophe with nothing worse than a few scratches, bruises, and a lot of fear. The time-line gets fuzzy here, but it seems that the family relocated down the slope to Gladstone, where Louisa operated a store while Nelson stayed on at the Sampson, now working underground.

      Nelson was no geologist, but he had spent enough time poking around in these rocks to get a gut sense of how mineral-loaded veins operate, and what sorts of trajectories they tend to follow through a mountainside. Every day that he stepped into the Sampson Mine and hammered and drilled and blasted at the stope, he was also calculating. He deduced that he and his coworkers were mining in the wrong place; the vein would be richer, thicker, riper elsewhere. He kept his thoughts under wraps, though, and on April 11, 1887, he acted on his hunch, quietly staking a 1,500-foot by 300-foot lode claim on Bonita Peak’s slope, not far below the Sampson workings. He called it the Gold King.

      Nelson quit the Sampson and he and the family—he now had five children—moved to Howardsville. Louisa started up another store, while Nelson leased the Philadelphia Mine, a proven producer, so that he’d have a semi-reliable source of income. It was a success; he was pulling out ore that netted two hundred dollars (equal to $5,000 today) per ton, a relatively high grade. He also was appointed constable of Howardsville in 1890, adding to his workload. But what Nelson really wanted was to build a mine from the ground up, to strike it rich on his own, and he spent all of his spare time up on Bonita Peak at the Gold King, working at night, on Sundays, in storms, and in sunshine.

      This wasn’t the way mining worked anymore. You were supposed to stake a claim then go out and promote it and bring in some venture capital to finance development. That’s the kind of large-scale capitalism that had turned San Juan County into a mining powerhouse, with the industry employing more than 1,200 people at 176 mines, thirteen mills, and two electric plants. But no, that wasn’t Nelson’s way. He kept his find quiet, working surreptitiously and alone. He endured cold and rain and the dank and dusty underground air for more than three years, sometimes working all night long, ultimately sinking a fifty-foot shaft and a fifty-foot drift. Then he became so sick that he could work no more. They called it pneumonia, a common affliction of the day. It might have been silicosis, or miner’s lung, which had yet to be classified. Maybe Nelson had just worked himself into his deathbed.

      Nelson’s breathing is shallow