three centuries before the Spanish arrived in 1598. Even then, the Ute people were mostly left alone; when in the early 1600s an escaping band of Ute captives managed to get away with some Spanish horses, they became even more formidable warriors and hunters.
When Rivera arrived at what he called the Animas River, he encountered a Ute rancheria, or encampment. He plied the people there with tobacco, corn, and pinole, in hopes of finding a man named Cuero de Lobo, who purportedly knew the source of the silver. Instead, Rivera was sent on a goose chase of sorts; while the Utes were willing to help Rivera find his way, they seem to have suspected his motives, and purposefully sent him astray more than once. When he finally found Cuero de Lobo, Rivera was led to a “mountain of metal” in the range west of Durango. Rivera referred to this branch of the San Juans as Sierra de la Plata, because he thought it was where the silver had come from. Again, he was disappointed; the samples taken from the mountain didn’t have much in the way of precious metals. While Spanish and then Mexican travelers would continue to come into the Animas River country, they only passed through, oblivious of the mineral bounty hidden away in the nearby mountains and, most likely, their ceremonial significance, as well.
“In the north, First Man placed the Dark Mountain (Dibé Ntsaa),” writes Diné, or Navajo, historian Clyde Benally. “He planted it with a Rainbow and covered it with Darkness, Dark Mist, Female Rain, and Blue Water. He sent Darkness Boy and Girl there, to what is known now as Hesperus Peak in the La Plata Mountains of Colorado.” And so, the northern boundary of Diné cosmology, one of its most sacred places, was established. Diné oral history refers to the builders at Chaco, which would have meant the Diné were in the Four Corners country as early as the 900s. Archaeologists generally believe, however, that the Diné came much later—in the 1400s or 1500s—from the North, crossing through the San Juan Mountains into the lowlands along what would become their sacred river of the North, Bits’íís Doo ninít’i’í, or the San Juan River, and beyond. They lived, farmed, and hunted in the lower Animas River watershed, and Totah, where the Animas and La Plata rivers join the San Juan, is a significant region. To this day they continue to make pilgrimages to their sacred mountain of the North.
When Rivera stood on the steep banks of the river, he was undoubtedly oblivious to the thousands of years of indigenous history that had already unfolded there. He didn’t know the Diné name for the Animas River, Kinteeldéé’ ´Nlíní, or “Which Flows from the Wide Ruin.” And he must not have cared about the Ute name, or any of the many names before. Maybe on some intuitive level, though, he felt that presence in the water, the trees, the mountains, and that is why he said the river was full of souls.
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
