River of Lost Souls. Jonathan P. Thompson

usurped, and would not be reinstated for another 130 years. All those grizzlies, so plentiful in Rhoda’s time as to be almost pesky, would be murdered systematically, their pelts paraded down Silverton’s Greene Street, until they were all gone.¹³

      Several years after his San Juan adventure, Rhoda would go to the Bay Area and become a radical preacher. One can’t help but wonder if his journey toward God didn’t begin on the rocky slope just below the summit of Sunshine Peak, where he had his most intimate and frightening encounter with nature’s grandeur. The dense, dark, swirling clouds sped towards them like freighters on a choppy sea as Rhoda and Wilson set up their instruments. They rushed their work, taking measurements and sketching the skyline, not because of any danger in the clouds, but because they’d affect visibility.

      “We had scarcely got started to work when we both began to feel a peculiar tickling sensation along the roots of our hair, just at the edge of our hats, caused by the electricity in the air,” wrote Rhoda, in a remarkably detached way. “By holding up our hands above our heads a ticking sound was produced, which was still louder if we held a hammer or other instrument in our hand . . . and presently was accompanied by a peculiar sound almost exactly like that produced by the frying of bacon. This latter phenomenon, when continued for any length of time, becomes highly monotonous and disagreeable.”

      Surely a sane person today would at that point launch himself down the slope, scrambling to lower and perhaps safer ground. Rhoda and Wilson, however, continued their work, marveling at the phenomenon that enveloped them.

      The instrument on the tripod began to click like a telegraph-machine when it is made to work rapidly; at the same time we noticed that the pencils in our fingers made a similar but finer sound whenever we let them lie back so as to touch the flesh of the hand between the thumb and forefinger. The effect on our hair became more and more marked, till, ten or fifteen minutes after its appearance, there was sudden and instantaneous relief, as if all the electricity had been suddenly drawn from us. After the lapse of a few seconds the cause became apparent, as a peal of thunder reached our ears. The lightning had struck a neighboring peak, and the electricity in the air had been discharged.

      The clouds soon began to rise up and approach us. As they did so, the electricity became stronger and stronger, till another stroke of lightning afforded instantaneous relief; but now the relief was only for an instant, and the tension increased faster and faster till the next stroke. By this time, the work was getting exciting.

      All around the two young men, the stones sang, each producing its own peculiar note. Finally they decided it was time to go. Wilson folded up his tripod and got a nasty static shock when he hefted it to his shoulder. When the brass lens protector fell clanking to the stones, he didn’t bother to pick it up. Maybe it’s still there, sitting amongst lichen-covered stones, a tiny reminder of a world that was.

       Dandelion Brew

      A FEW YEARS AFTER RHODA PASSED THROUGH, my maternal great-great-great-grandmother, Julia Mead, her daughter Emily, and son-in-law Harry Hathaway, joined the fledgling Animas Valley community. They came from Bourbon County, Kansas, leaving shortly after the death of Julia’s husband, Joseph, making the arduous trek by wagon from Kansas to the San Luis Valley, east of the San Juan Mountains, and over Cumbres Pass to Chama, New Mexico. From there they followed roughly the same well-trodden path that Rivera had taken a century earlier.¹⁴

      Our family creation story does not explain why a sixty-seven-year-old widow would venture into a land so fraught with uncertainty and danger. But by most accounts she was strong-willed, independent, and adventurous. Nor do we know why she and her companions chose to stop here in the Animas Valley. I suspect they had heard news of the San Juan rush and the flood of opportunity spilling out of the mountains. Or maybe they knew that any westward journey would soon get more rugged as they passed into Utah’s canyon country and then into Latter-day Saints territory, where just two decades before more than one hundred gentile travelers had been massacred by a group of Mormons.

      I like to think that they came down the little gulch south of the not-yet-born Durango in the early evening, just after the sun had settled behind Carbon Mountain. That’s when the water gets dark and smooth and wrinkles up against the rocks as if it is made of molten glass. Nighthawks boom through the lavender sky hunting insects. Mayflies bounce across the river’s surface, and metallic-looking trout shoot skyward in pursuit, momentarily blemishing the big, moving mirror. Maybe in the uncanny calm of that moment between light and dark, Julia, a spiritualist who spoke with the dead, heard the river’s souls speaking to her, beckoning her to remain.

      They headed upstream on the east side of the river, across the low, sagebrush-covered mesas on which Durango’s residential neighborhoods would sprout several years later, past a new Animas City that was taking root on the glacial moraine at the Animas Valley’s south edge, and onward several miles more to a place where towering red cliffs watched over ponderosas and scrub oak. They carved a cave out of the sandy river bank, and lived there until they upgraded to a small cabin nearby, which Julia described as a “well insulated chicken house.” Henry made a claim on a 160-acre homestead on the east side of the Animas River, adjacent to the confluence with Hermosa Creek.

      Some called Julia a witch. And it’s true that, being of a spiritualist bent, she attended séances. More importantly, she was a healer. Still a largely unsettled land, the valley lacked the professional medical resources to serve the growing population. Julia Mead filled in the gaps, serving as doctor, nurse, and, most notably, midwife. She supervised the births of countless babies in Hermosa and its surroundings and she tended to the sick with elixirs made from roots and flowers gathered from the fields and hillsides. A half century after her death, old-timers still spoke of the healing powers of Julia’s pitch plaster and her Oregon grape root and dandelion brews. Some even blamed her for spreading noxious dandelions throughout the valley. I hope it’s true.

      After a year or two, Julia’s son, Ervin Washington Mead, his wife Emily, and their son Ervin (Lyman), followed mother, sibling, and in-laws west. The Hathaways eventually went back to Iowa, and apparently sold the homestead, but Julia and the others stayed. With the money she had earned from her medical practice, Julia bought forty acres of land south of Hermosa Creek, a tributary of the Animas that runs in from the northwest side of the valley, and started a small farm there.

      As she grew older, Julia liked to sit in the shade of a towering ponderosa pine on a corner of the farm on warm summer afternoons. She asked her son Ervin to bury her under the tree, so that her body could mingle with the old giant’s roots, but when she died in 1894 he went against her wishes, and she was interred in the staid and manicured cemetery above Durango, instead. Legend has it that some years after Julia died, Ervin heard a voice telling him to dig under the ponderosa. When he did so, he found a box full of money left by his mother.

       Olaf and the Gold King

      IT’S APRIL 1891 AND OLAF ARVID NELSON IS DYING. He lies in his bed in the little house in Howardsville, a few miles upriver from Silverton. When he tries to stand he’s gently pushed back to the pillow by Louisa, his wife. His lungs are filling up with fluid, his body drowning itself. Whenever he moves, or breathes too deeply, it feels and sounds as if nutshells are rattling around in his lungs.

      “The Mighty Swede” does not complain. Even before he was sick he didn’t talk much. Words don’t have much to them. They flitter away forgotten as soon as they leave your lips. Work is everything. And damn did he ever work. Six days a week drilling, blasting, and hauling ore out of the Philadelphia Mine, which he leased. And nights and Sundays up at his own claim on Bonita Peak.

      NELSON FIRST EMERGED INTO THE HISTORICAL RECORD, and was nearly wiped right off of it, as a