River of Lost Souls. Jonathan P. Thompson

They prayed for winter snow and summer rain; they danced to summon the sun and to beckon the land to bloom and bear fruit. When that failed, they adapted accordingly, sometimes even moving, giving the land a chance to rest. The place shapes them, not the other way around. “We’re a corn culture,” Kuwanwisiwma told me. “The environment can force you to be humble.”

      It’s especially ironic, then, that the remains of those same corn fields at Ridges Basin are now inundated by a reservoir, Lake Nighthorse, the end product of an anything-but-humble, decades-old dream to plumb the watershed, to lift up a portion of the Animas River and send it over the ridge to the La Plata River, where arable land is plentiful but water scarce. The plan for the Animas-La Plata Project, which initially included several reservoirs, a coal power plant on the Southern Ute reservation, and hundreds of miles of canals, pipes, and tunnels, was diminished over the years, finally ending up being no more than one pumping plant lifting Animas River water hundreds of feet uphill into Ridges Basin, where it currently sits, stagnant, in order to fulfill Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute water rights. Someday the water will be piped to distant fields, or to another power plant, or even to a golf course in the desert.

      In advance of the reservoir’s creation, archaeologists were sent in to catalog what forever would be entombed by Lake Nighthorse. The most intriguing, and disturbing, finds were made at a village the archaeologists called Sacred Ridge. Atop this knoll sat a little hamlet made up of several structures. Another dozen pit structures, with associated surface dwellings, were situated on the knoll’s slopes, oriented toward the top of the knoll like people sitting around a fire. The pit structures tended to be larger than those found elsewhere in the region during this time, and some were surrounded by “stockades” or fences of a sort—possibly an early form of AWUF. The entire knoll-top hamlet was similarly fenced in, and its pit structures seem to have been used not just for living in, but also for community ceremonies. Perhaps most notable was the tower, made of wood and adobe in the jacal style, on top of the knoll. Though masonry towers would become commonplace at pueblos hundreds of years later, this appears to be the only one from this particular time period.¹¹ Its function is also unknown.

      Archaeologists who excavated the sites in Ridges Basin theorize that the architecture and prominent location suggest that Sacred Ridge was home to the upper class, the community’s elite.

      In the early 800s the clouds were offering less rain than they had a few decades earlier, and the dense population was beginning to put pressure on local resources. It was nowhere near a crisis, yet something must have gone awry. The community, the landscape, or both were somehow out of balance.

      And over a short period of time, maybe even in just one day, someone came in and overpowered nearly three dozen of Sacred Ridge’s residents—men, women, children, even domestic dogs. Some of the captives were hobbled, their feet, ankles, or toes broken to keep them from running and to scare others from doing the same. Then the perpetrators tortured, scalped, and finally killed the victims, butchered the corpses, tossed the thousands of pieces into the Sacred Ridge pit structures, and then lit the structures on fire.

      The dehumanizing stereotype of the Pueblo people as “peaceful farmers” was long ago debunked. Archaeological evidence and oral history reveal that violence, whether it was one-on-one murders, mass killings, or warfare between different tribes or groups, was not unheard of in prehistoric or historic times. Like every other society throughout history, these ones had their moments of darkness. Yet evidence suggests Sacred Ridge was among the most brutal, particularly for that time period. Archaeologists have a handful of hypotheses. It appears as if neighbors massacred neighbors. Maybe it was ethnic cleansing, a populist revolt, or a reaction to suspected witchcraft.

      Soon thereafter, everyone in the Durango area up and left. By 820, the place was devoid of humanity. “What is intriguing about the abandonment of the Durango area is the suddenness and totality of the exodus,” writes archaeologist James M. Potter. “Even with a climatic downturn and depleted local environment, the Durango area could have continued to support a smaller population.”¹²

      Over the following centuries, the Chaco region bloomed and the population ballooned. When that society waned, new ones grew up along the Animas River near present-day Aztec, New Mexico, in the Mesa Verde region, and in southeastern Utah. Yet no Pueblo people ever came back to the Durango area to live, despite the reliable water sources, fertile soils, and abundance of low, farmable mesas. The trauma from the Sacred Ridge massacre not only must have rippled throughout the Animas River valley, but also reached down through the generations, leaving a dark pall over this place, its spot on the symbolic map forever tainted.

      THE PUEBLO PEOPLE TENDED TO GENTLY PULL UP THE ROOTS AND MOVE in response to broad climatic shifts. The Utes, who probably arrived in the Four Corners country from the West at the tail-end of the Puebloan era, moved with the seasons. They were nimble, light on the land, mindful of subtle shifts in flora and fauna. If the Pueblo people’s calendar was marked by a shaft of sunlight touching the center of a spiral carved in stone, the Utes’ was imprinted by the first bear emerging from hibernation or bucks shedding their antlers or the skunk cabbage’s hue transforming from green to rust.

      After the Animas River swelled up with snowmelt, the Weenuchiu band followed well-worn trails up the river and into the high country, following the deer, collecting osha, feasting on tart wild raspberries and tiny, sweet alpine strawberries. When the aspen leaves turned yellow and they’d awake to lace-like frost clinging to the grass, they’d pack up and head back down to the lowlands, gather into larger groups, and stay in one place for the winter. They followed the annual cycle in the San Juan Mountains and the surrounding lowlands for three centuries before the Spanish arrived in 1598. Even then, the Ute people were mostly left alone; when in the early 1600s an escaping band of Ute captives managed to get away with some Spanish horses, they became even more formidable warriors and hunters.

      When Rivera arrived at what he called the Animas River, he encountered a Ute rancheria, or encampment. He plied the people there with tobacco, corn, and pinole, in hopes of finding a man named Cuero de Lobo, who purportedly knew the source of the silver. Instead, Rivera was sent on a goose chase of sorts; while the Utes were willing to help Rivera find his way, they seem to have suspected his motives, and purposefully sent him astray more than once. When he finally found Cuero de Lobo, Rivera was led to a “mountain of metal” in the range west of Durango. Rivera referred to this branch of the San Juans as Sierra de la Plata, because he thought it was where the silver had come from. Again, he was disappointed; the samples taken from the mountain didn’t have much in the way of precious metals. While Spanish and then Mexican travelers would continue to come into the Animas River country, they only passed through, oblivious of the mineral bounty hidden away in the nearby mountains and, most likely, their ceremonial significance, as well.

      “In the north, First Man placed the Dark Mountain (Dibé Ntsaa),” writes Diné, or Navajo, historian Clyde Benally. “He planted it with a Rainbow and covered it with Darkness, Dark Mist, Female Rain, and Blue Water. He sent Darkness Boy and Girl there, to what is known now as Hesperus Peak in the La Plata Mountains of Colorado.” And so, the northern boundary of Diné cosmology, one of its most sacred places, was established. Diné oral history refers to the builders at Chaco, which would have meant the Diné were in the Four Corners country as early as the 900s. Archaeologists generally believe, however, that the Diné came much later—in the 1400s or 1500s—from the North, crossing through the San Juan Mountains into the lowlands along what would become their sacred river of the North, Bits’íís Doo ninít’i’í, or the San Juan River, and beyond. They lived, farmed, and hunted in the lower Animas River watershed, and Totah, where the Animas and La Plata rivers join the San Juan, is a significant region. To this day they continue to make pilgrimages to their sacred mountain of the North.

      When Rivera stood on the steep banks of the river, he was undoubtedly oblivious to the thousands of years of indigenous history that had already unfolded there. He didn’t know the Diné name for the Animas River, Kinteeldéé’ ´Nlíní, or “Which Flows from the Wide Ruin.” And he must not have cared about the Ute name, or any of the many names before. Maybe on some intuitive level, though, he felt that presence in the water, the trees, the mountains, and that is why he said the river