until this point, Silverton mining interests had mostly ignored Day’s concerns. But now that he had gotten an official audience, they lashed back, with the Silverton Standard as their mouthpiece. That May, the Standard ran a piece headlined, “Would Kill the Goose That Laid the Golden Egg”:
As to mill tailings, there can be no controversy except that no one but the law of gravitation has committed an open ‘violation of the law.’ It is true that the tailings from the half-dozen mills in San Juan County, and the impregnated water therefrom, eventually reaches the Animas River.
But there is reason in all things. We do not deny the proposition that the pollution of the waters of the streams of the state in any manner is contrary to law. Neither do we deny that mill tailings in a stream to a certain extent pollutes it—not of course the pollution that sewage is, but rather a filling of the water with mineral matter that makes its use extremely obnoxious if not positively dangerous to health.
But is the practice, under the existing conditions, a willful violation of the law, as Colonel Day suggests? Here are a half-dozen mills giving employment directly and indirectly to 1,000 men, whose work in turn gives employment to another 1,000 men in Durango. They are public benefactors to the extent that perhaps 5,000 people are and have been depending on their operation for a living. To compel the owners to build settling tanks and handle the settlings would be at best but a costly experiment and would result in ruining the mining industry of the San Juan County, as her ores are essentially a low grade milling proposition.
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