up some of the bounty.
The valley floor here is wide and flat. The glaciers pushed all the rocks downstream or ground them into coarse sand, so the river runs slow here, meandering between steep and sandy banks, nearly twisting back on itself at times like a giant, murky green umbilical cord. In the spring, when the water’s big and red and brown, listen and you might hear it eating its way through the soft earth. At the Sandbar, the banks were softened into a beach by the current. As we get close, I run off ahead of my father and brother. I take off my shoes. The sand burns my feet. The water whispers.
I stare at the old, crushed cars all lined up against the opposite bank, their front ends underwater.
“That was a drive-in theatre,” my towheaded, freckle-nosed brother tells me, again. “And one day the bank collapsed and they all fell in the river and died.”
Maybe I believe him, maybe I don’t, but I do wonder what movie they were watching when it happened. Upstream from the Sandbar, around the next corner, an ancient-looking rowboat sits half buried on the gravelly shore. Sometimes we try to get it out so we can float down the river on it, but it won’t budge. An ancient boxelder tree grows at the edge of the sand, its canopy so dense and low that we can crawl under there and sleep and stay dry even in a downpour.
Just downstream from the Sandbar, polished and crooked cottonwood branches jut out from the murky deep green swirling water. Suckers and carp and brown trout so big you don’t want to catch them lurk down there. The lost souls, the animas perdidas of the river’s name, linger there, too. And if you venture in, my grandmother says, the undertow will pull you down into the cold, deep, and dark, and you will join them. Sometimes, my brother coaxes me into wandering over to that place, and to stand close enough to the edge to peer into the depths. Look hard enough, he says, and you’ll see a big brown trout coming up for a meal. But when I dare to look in there, I see only darkness and my reflection gazing back, both curious and scared.
TEN MILES DOWNSTREAM AND 210 YEARS EARLIER, Spanish explorer Juan Maria Antonio de Rivera stood on the banks of the river and gave the river its soulful name.
Rivera had headed out from the Pueblo of Santa Rosa de Abiquiu, in the New Mexico province of Spain, in June 1765 at the order of the governor. Abiquiu, some fifty miles from Santa Fe, was the northwest outpost of the Spanish empire. Though the conquistadors and missionaries had invaded this land 167 years earlier, very few of the colonists had dared venture beyond Abiquiu, in part because the Crown forbid it. The extensive San Juan mountain range, along with the rugged valleys, mesas, and basins that spread out from it, was the domain of the Weenuchiu, Tabeguache, Caputa, and Mouache bands of Ute, and Spain didn’t want to provoke them any more than necessary. It had made that mistake before: In 1637, Spanish conquistadors took eighty Utes as slaves, then suffered a barrage of brutal retaliatory raids (and got their horses stolen, which were then used against them). And in 1680 more than a dozen Pueblo tribes up and down the Rio Grande and stretching west all the way to Hopi in Arizona revolted, killed at least four hundred Spaniards, and drove the colonists back to El Paso, where they stayed for more than a decade before returning, somewhat humbled. The best way to keep a shaky peace was to keep Spaniards out of Ute territory; if Utes wanted to trade with the colonists, they could come to Abiquiu to do so.
On one such occasion, a Ute, whose name has been lost to time, reputedly paid an Abiquiu blacksmith for his services with an ingot of silver that came from somewhere in the San Juan country. It gave the New Mexico governor a pretense—find the source of the precious metal—to send Rivera into the forbidden territory. This first official European expedition into the San Juan River watershed was really more of an undercover conquistador mission to scout the region for possible future colonization, and to confirm the existence of the mythical Rio Tizon, now known as the Colorado River.
Rivera never found the source of the silver ingot. He thought he reached the Colorado River near what is now Moab, but recent scrutiny of Rivera’s diaries by historian Steven Baker reveals that the explorer actually stood on the bank of the Gunnison River near present-day Delta, Colorado.3 Utes, suspicious of his motives, led him astray. Still, he earned a reputation as a blazer of trails and namer of places throughout the terra incognita of the Four Corners country. Eleven years after Rivera’s journey, Franciscan priests Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante would follow Rivera’s approximate route, as would a host of Spanish and then Mexican travelers over the next century.
In fact, Rivera merely followed well-established routes through a land that had been inhabited for millennia, and that had been intimately mapped in the collective consciousness of oral histories. Rivera probably wasn’t even the first Spaniard to tread these paths; mavericks defied the travel and trade ban to acquire deerskins or to try their luck in the mineralized slopes of the high San Juan Mountains, or Sierra de la Grulla—Mountains of the Crane. The Spanish mavericks, in turn, were merely following paths already well trodden by Utes, Diné, Pueblos, and nomadic hunters long before that. Almost all of the country that Rivera traveled through was not just the homeland, present and past, to a number of tribes. It was also holy land.
After leaving the Chama River, as he headed toward the Continental Divide, Rivera passed by the deep-green lake from which the people of Jemez Pueblo emerged into the Fourth World.4 He passed under the shadow of Piedra Parada, now known as Chimney Rock, an ancient lunar observatory, and he forded the chilly Pine River a dozen miles upstream of Tó Aheedlí, the residence of the Diné Hero Twins and the heart of Dinetah, the Diné ancestral homeland.
On July 4, with Utes guiding them, the explorers crossed el Rio Florido and followed a path through sagebrush, piñon, juniper, and ponderosas to the valley south of present-day Durango. Here, near a Ute encampment, Rivera stood on the steep and cobbled bank of the river the Utes called Sagwavanukwiti, or Blue River. As the Spaniard pondered the swift, cold current swirling around the boulders as big as bulls that the glaciers had pushed down from the high country so many years before, he decided to give it his own name: Rio de las Animas, or River of Souls. Contrary to current legend, the souls in the river were not perdidas, or lost, though some historians believe that it was originally implied. That adjective wouldn’t be tacked on to the name for another century or so, for reasons unknown, but it has stuck—along with an apocryphal but false origin story.
Rivera’s journals are infamously terse, and he doesn’t explain to whose souls he referred. Maybe his Ute guides had told him stories about people drowning in the river or its propensity to flood cataclysmically. He may have thought that the river had a lot of spirit, or soul. More likely, he sensed the presence of the many that had treaded this ground for centuries before he arrived.
Rivera and his men had to go several miles downstream before they could find a place to safely ford the Animas River, and still the water was up to the horses’ bellies. The Spanish explorer then made his way back upstream and climbed up into Ridges Basin, a gentle valley that runs from east to west between Smelter Mountain, Durango’s southern backdrop, and the Hogback Monocline, one of the region’s most geologically distinctive landforms. Here, Rivera encountered the remnants of a large pueblo atop a hill in the middle of the basin.5
This was most likely what archaeologists today refer to as Sacred Ridge, a small village within the larger Pueblo community of Ridges Basin, a sort of eighth-century boomtown that rose up quickly, flourished for a relatively brief period, and then—after a horrific incidence of violence—was left empty, despite the local abundance of resources.
TEN THOUSAND YEARS BEFORE RIVERA WANDERED THROUGH HERE, when the scars were still fresh from the last wave of glaciers pushing aside mountains like battleships, nomads known as Paleoindians roamed these valleys and mesas, chasing down wooly mammoth and other megafauna. They were followed by Archaic people, who most likely camped in and around the Animas Valley in the summers, subsisting on game and wild nuts, plants, and
