River of Lost Souls. Jonathan P. Thompson

       Awful in Their Sublimity

      It is ever thus; when you feel you are treading a path never trod by a living thing before, and your imagination begins to build for itself a romantic picture, if some such vile, worldly thing as a paper collar or a whisky-bottle does not intrude itself on the sight, some beastly quadruped needs must break the precious solitude and scatter your airy castle to the winds.

      —Franklin Rhoda, upon encountering a grizzly bear on Mount Oso in 1874

      FRANKLIN RHODA, WEARING A WIDE-BRIMMED HAT AND A PONCHO-LIKE TOPCOAT, clutched his leather-bound sketchbook to his side. His older half-brother, A. D. Wilson, had a surveyor’s tripod slung over his shoulder as the two men made their way up the craggy, rocky slope of fourteen-thousand-foot-high Sunshine Peak in the “great mass” of mountains known as the San Juans. It was August 1874, and a violent thunderstorm loomed on the horizon. Wilson was the topographer and director of the San Juan Division of the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey, or the Hayden Survey. Rhoda, just twenty years old at the time, was his assistant. Along with geologist Frederic M. Endlich, a chef, and a support crew, they had been tasked with taking stock of some of the last territory to be invaded by Euro-Americans in the United States.

      After Rivera had skirted the foothills of the San Juans a century earlier, Escalante and Dominguez came through, giving a much more complete accounting than their Spanish predecessor of what lay there. Other Spaniards followed, usually on their way westward, but none stuck around; the same was true after Mexico had wrested independence from Spain. Any eighteenth-century conquistador dreams of expanding the empire northward were dashed upon Ute resistance and the impenetrability of the mountains—the San Juan country remained firmly in Ute hands.

      In 1859, John N. Macomb led the first official American expedition into the San Juan country, generally following the Old Spanish Trail, but throwing in a few side trips along the way. Macomb was somewhat baffled, sometimes disgusted, by the land he passed through. His geologist, J. S. Newberry, was more sagacious. He predicted that the hot springs at Pagosa, east of Durango, would someday become a resort, and he described the San Juan Mountains as a “thousand interlocking spurs and narrow valleys, [which] form a labyrinth whose extent and intricacy will at present defy all attempts at detailed topographical analysis. Among these are precipices, ornamented with imitations of columns, arches, and pilasters, which form some of the grandest specimens of nature’s Gothic architecture I have ever beheld. When viewed from some nearer point they must be even awful in their sublimity.”

      Macomb and company never did view the daunting mountains from up close. The following year, Capt. Charles Baker made his way into the San Juans and the Animas River watershed from the river’s headwaters. His promises of oodles of gold and silver lured hundreds of would-be prospectors to the high country. They based themselves in a little cluster of cabins they called Animas City, located next to today’s Baker’s Bridge, at the north end of the Animas Valley, and traveled and prospected upstream to Baker’s Park, the valley in which Silverton sits today. The rush lasted for maybe a year before folks got discouraged, heeded the warnings from local Utes and Diné to get out, or went back home to fight in the Civil War. By late 1862, Animas City was empty. Boom. Bust.

      The next wave arrived in Baker’s Park in 1870 to mine in nearby Arrastra Gulch. This time, the Utes let the prospectors be, despite the fact that the white men were trespassing on their land. In 1873, the Brunot Agreement was signed, taking the mineral-rich San Juans and the surrounding foothills and valleys from the Utes. The various bands reserved the rights to hunt in and roam through the mountains “so long as the game lasts and the Indians are at peace with the white people.”

      By the time Rhoda and friends arrived for their peak-bagging extravaganza, hundreds of miners had oozed into the mountains and were staking claims and digging prospect holes by hand. Silverton was founded that same year, and consisted of no more than a dozen homes spread out near the confluence of Cement Creek and the Animas River. Rhoda wasn’t impressed, but had he looked a bit more closely he would have seen that this was no mere fly-by-night mining camp. Rather, it was already gaining some permanence, even in its infancy. The first white woman to settle in this part of the San Juan Mountains, Amanda Cotton, had come that year from Salina, Kansas, with her husband, John. They set up a store and restaurant in Howardsville, just upstream, before moving to Silverton and building one of the first structures there, which they would run as a lively boardinghouse for years and which still stands. They were also social dynamos, organizing parties and often supplying the music, with John on the fiddle and Amanda on the melodeon. Downstream from the ruins of Baker’s cabins, in the broad, fertile Animas Valley, farmers had just started tilling the land, growing potatoes, melons, and corn.

      Even these early white settlers left a deeper footprint on the land than their Native American predecessors had. Still, their impact was limited to a few valleys. Most of the high country, its log-choked valleys, tundra-covered slopes, cascading streams, and wildflower-spackled meadows, remained, if not pristine, then at least wild, primal, alive.

      Rhoda, a born adventurer with a way with words, reveled in it. On climbing Uncompahgre Peak, the highest, but certainly not the most difficult, in the San Juans, he wrote: “We were terribly taken aback, when, at an elevation of over 13,000 feet, a she grizzly, with her two cubs, came rushing past us from the top of the peak. We found that the bears had been all over the summit of the peak, though how they got up over one or two short but steep passages in the ascent, puzzled us not a little.”

      When again they ran into a grizzly above thirteen thousand feet, Rhoda became frustrated with the bruins’ ubiquity. “To show our utter disgust for all animate things that could not live below this altitude, we yelled and threw stones after the bear till he finally was lost to sight far down the mountainsides. After this experience, we named the peak Mount Oso . . .”

      Finally, on the ascent of Mt. Sneffels, probably the most challenging climb, Rhoda surrendered to the bears: “Everything seemed to conspire to make a beautiful day, and we lacked only time to let our imaginations run on and make a sublimely-romantic picture of sunrise at a high elevation. The claw marks on the rocks, on either side of the summit of the pass, showed that the grizzly had been before us. We gave up all hope of ever beating the bear climbing mountains.”

      They encountered black bears, more grizzly, huge stampeding flocks of mountain sheep, and, near Lizard Head, “a few cranes, which, with their long legs and unearthly noises, only served to add to the funereal aspect of the scenery.”

      By Rhoda’s reckoning, the feral bounty of the San Juans, unspoiled and indigenous, was invulnerable to the invaders. The swarms of settlers that looked like insects far below as he climbed peak after peak were mere irritants to this grand place, and the nascent towns would never amount to much. It was too hard to get to the isolated valleys, the climate too severe, there was no nearby coal for fuel, and nothing would grow here. Little did he know to what lengths greed and Manifest Destiny, fueled by the General Mining Act of 1872 that literally gave federal land away on a first-come, first-serve basis, would drive men. “No natural obstacles,” wrote Frederick Ransome, another USGS surveyor, in 1901, “have ever long withstood the restlessness and indomitable perseverance of the seekers after precious metals.”

      The whole region in the mid-1870s teetered on the precipice between the old world and the new, between wildness and human restlessness. Hordes of people would pour into the mountains from Kansas, Missouri, Sweden, Italy, China. Within a couple of decades, every mountainside near every mining camp—Gladstone, Howardsville, Silverton, Eureka—would be shorn of all of its trees. Massive mills and boardinghouses would perch where sheep once roamed, and hundreds of miles of tram lines would be strung across hillsides. Tunnels would be blasted and drilled into mountains until their innards resembled Swiss cheese, the streams would run grey, yellow, or orange on a daily basis. The Utes would be pushed farther and farther out of their hallowed and sustaining mountains, crammed onto a tiny sliver of land where the federal government would try to force them to become farmers. The San Juan hunting rights that