River of Lost Souls. Jonathan P. Thompson

the winter of 1878–79, he and fellow Swede Jonathan Peterson headed up Cement Creek on the brand new wagon road to the nascent camp of Gladstone. From there they continued up the canyon to Brown Mountain, where they set up a prospecting camp in a rickety cabin dug into the south-facing slope. During a normal winter, the mountainside would be covered with several feet of snow, but it had been unusually warm and dry, making life easier for the miners. One February evening, after a long day of digging, the miners retired to their hut, kicked off their soggy boots, and settled in for the night. Meanwhile, the mountain slope was doing some settling of its own as melting snow oozed into the earth, softening and lubricating things. Soon, a chunk of the slope broke free, and a torrent of rocks, dirt, and ice rained down on the cabin, crushing it.

      Both men survived the calamity, though both were pinned under debris, with no one nearby to come to their rescue. Peterson was able to free himself, then went to work on Nelson, who was more thoroughly stuck. He had little more to work with than his hands, a straight razor, and his stubbornness. Eleven hours later, Nelson, too, was free and virtually unscathed. The two walked down Cement Creek, barefoot, to Gladstone and caught a ride back to Silverton.

      The February warmth that had loosened the earth and nearly taken Nelson’s life continued into the spring. Today that sort of climatic anomaly would be considered a threatening drought; the newspapers at the time hailed the mild weather as yet another reason to put down roots in the San Juan Mountains. By then, the main route in and out of Silverton via Stony Pass to the east was being replaced by the Animas Toll Road that followed the Animas River to the south, opening up the Silverton market to Animas Valley farmers and ranchers. The farmers, Julia Mead among them, put seeds in the ground in mid-March that year, two months ahead of time. By May, most of the snow had melted off of even the highest mountain passes, and the relentless high-altitude sun had turned the forests to tinder.

      During the first days of June 1879, somewhere near present-day Purgatory ski resort, a spark or flame or hot ember leftover from a traveler’s campfire ignited some ponderosa pine needles on the forest floor. The flames jumped to the gambel oak, then to the spruce trees, their canopies exploding into fire. The conflagration marched steadily up the Lime Creek drainage toward Silverton, charring everything in its path.

      L. W. Pattison was working just south of Silverton at the Molas Mine as the flames approached, and wrote this account:

      One of the most terrific fires that has ever come under my observation occurred yesterday down the Animas Trail. We had noticed the heavy columns of smoke from the South and southwest for some days but anticipated no danger until after dinner yesterday, when the air became so heavy with smoke and the flames appeared to be moving so rapidly, that we began to pay attention to the matter.

      Pattison and his fellow miners buried their explosives and shored up the cabin against the flames. A big, cinnamon-colored bear barreled through the camp, followed by several deer, oblivious to the humans there. Too late to outrun the flames, the men bolted to the mine tunnel. From that place of relative safety they watched in dismay as one of their burros wandered directly into the inferno.

      The Lime Creek Burn, as this “scene of unusual and weird magnificence” would become known, charred twenty-six thousand acres of high country before subsiding. It would stand as the largest fire to burn in Colorado until the mega-fires of the early 2000s blackened hundreds of thousands of acres of the state’s forests. The Burn forever altered the landscape south of Silverton. Before the blaze, the area around Molas Lake and Molas Pass was densely forested with conifers; today, it’s mostly wide open meadows studded by blackened stumps, a smattering of aspen trees, and incongruously green Scotch pines, a non-native species that was planted by the U.S. Forest Service beginning thirty years after the fire.

      The flames stopped just short of Silverton, due, perhaps, to the fact that all the surrounding slopes had been clear-cut. But ash and smoke rained down on the town for days. For a few settlers, Nature’s terror had crept a little too close to home, and they pulled up stakes and moved elsewhere. Most, however, dug in their heels and stubbornly vowed to stay.

      The blaze was likely caused by the unattended campfire of one of the many mountain-roaming cowboys or hunters who were out and about at the time. But a few months later, a more useful scapegoat would emerge. In September members of the White River band of Utes in northwestern Colorado rose up and killed Indian agent Nathan Meeker and his staff and kidnapped his family, an event that came to be known as the Meeker Massacre. Meeker was a racist, and one who endeavored to convert the White River band from nomadic “savages” to sedentary Christian farmers. He kept pushing the Utes, who had already been squeezed out of much of their homeland, until finally they stood up to him. Meeker called in the cavalry, leaving the Utes little choice but to fight. The isolated incident inflamed a statewide Ute-phobic rage.

      “Indians are off their reservation, seeking to destroy your settlements with fire,” warned Colorado Governor Frederick Pitkin, who had enriched himself with San Juan Mountain mine investments. “The Utes must go!” Someone should have reminded Pitkin that the Brunot Agreement explicitly gave the Utes free rein to roam, hunt, and forage “off the reservation” in the San Juan Mountains; to take that freedom away was equivalent to robbing them of their identity. Silvertonians took up arms and prepared for a fight. My ancestors, in the Animas Valley, joined with others at a hastily constructed sod fort on the north end of the valley. Extremists ached for a provocation, so they could settle the “Ute Question” once and for all. “Here in Silverton we have received 40 stand of arms and have perfected a military organization,” noted the Miner newspaper, describing a sort of nineteenth century version of today’s right-wing “militias.” “We say bring on your Utes—the Johns and Joes can soon exterminate them.”

      The attack never came, however, leaving the settlers and their representatives in Denver and Washington to resort to more subtle forms of extermination—like labeling the Native Americans as terrorists. The Lime Creek Burn was retroactively attributed to the Utes. A La Plata County resolution forwarded in 1880—a year after the blaze had gone out—claimed that the Utes set the fire to roust game or “to maliciously injure the settlers and miners . . . destroying millions of dollars worth of timber and a vast amount of private property.”

      For the next twenty years, every skirmish that involved one of the “Rabid Reds” was framed by newspaper accounts and politicians as a precursor to the next Indian War. Every Ute was deemed a potential terrorist, aching to launch another Meeker Massacre, regardless of the fact that the southern bands, under the leadership of diplomatic peacekeeper Chief Ouray, put up little resistance to the encroachment on their homeland. The persecution was part plain-old racism, and fear of the “other.” Mostly, though, it was a calculated campaign designed to give the white newcomers more land and resources. By 1880, the game populations were already dwindling, thanks to over-hunting by the newcomers, and the Utes competed ably for that scarce resource. In the lowlands, the farmers and ranchers were outgrowing the land that had been stolen on their behalf in earlier treaties, and they wanted more. Meanwhile, the people who had established businesses in Durango had saturated the market. They needed more customers, and a new land rush for Ute reservation lands was just the ticket.

      Portraying the Utes as a threat provided a justification for the feds to push them further and further into the margins in the hope that they just might go away. Meanwhile, whites who were truly violent and threatening were allowed, quite literally, to get away with murder, so long as some of their violence was directed toward the Utes.

      A LATE SUMMER CHILL SETTLED OVER THE YOUNG TOWN OF SILVERTON as the sun fell behind Anvil Mountain on the evening of August 24, 1881. The light faded, and the saloons—the Tivoli, the Senate, the Blue Front, the Golden Star, the Rosebud, the Star of the West—filled up with miners, merchants, and travelers. It was a rowdy night. Every night was a rowdy night in Silverton.

      The crews building grade and laying tracks for the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad had yet to make it into Baker’s Park, but by now their arrival was imminent, and in anticipation the little smattering of houses Rhoda had witnessed had blossomed into a bona fide town with stately residences and a lively commercial district, replete with two bakeries, a furniture-making and undertaker business, and two shoemakers. A man could get his dingy clothes