certainly not the most difficult, in the San Juans, he wrote: “We were terribly taken aback, when, at an elevation of over 13,000 feet, a she grizzly, with her two cubs, came rushing past us from the top of the peak. We found that the bears had been all over the summit of the peak, though how they got up over one or two short but steep passages in the ascent, puzzled us not a little.”
When again they ran into a grizzly above thirteen thousand feet, Rhoda became frustrated with the bruins’ ubiquity. “To show our utter disgust for all animate things that could not live below this altitude, we yelled and threw stones after the bear till he finally was lost to sight far down the mountainsides. After this experience, we named the peak Mount Oso . . .”
Finally, on the ascent of Mt. Sneffels, probably the most challenging climb, Rhoda surrendered to the bears: “Everything seemed to conspire to make a beautiful day, and we lacked only time to let our imaginations run on and make a sublimely-romantic picture of sunrise at a high elevation. The claw marks on the rocks, on either side of the summit of the pass, showed that the grizzly had been before us. We gave up all hope of ever beating the bear climbing mountains.”
They encountered black bears, more grizzly, huge stampeding flocks of mountain sheep, and, near Lizard Head, “a few cranes, which, with their long legs and unearthly noises, only served to add to the funereal aspect of the scenery.”
By Rhoda’s reckoning, the feral bounty of the San Juans, unspoiled and indigenous, was invulnerable to the invaders. The swarms of settlers that looked like insects far below as he climbed peak after peak were mere irritants to this grand place, and the nascent towns would never amount to much. It was too hard to get to the isolated valleys, the climate too severe, there was no nearby coal for fuel, and nothing would grow here. Little did he know to what lengths greed and Manifest Destiny, fueled by the General Mining Act of 1872 that literally gave federal land away on a first-come, first-serve basis, would drive men. “No natural obstacles,” wrote Frederick Ransome, another USGS surveyor, in 1901, “have ever long withstood the restlessness and indomitable perseverance of the seekers after precious metals.”
The whole region in the mid-1870s teetered on the precipice between the old world and the new, between wildness and human restlessness. Hordes of people would pour into the mountains from Kansas, Missouri, Sweden, Italy, China. Within a couple of decades, every mountainside near every mining camp—Gladstone, Howardsville, Silverton, Eureka—would be shorn of all of its trees. Massive mills and boardinghouses would perch where sheep once roamed, and hundreds of miles of tram lines would be strung across hillsides. Tunnels would be blasted and drilled into mountains until their innards resembled Swiss cheese, the streams would run grey, yellow, or orange on a daily basis. The Utes would be pushed farther and farther out of their hallowed and sustaining mountains, crammed onto a tiny sliver of land where the federal government would try to force them to become farmers. The San Juan hunting rights that were guaranteed to the Utes in the Brunot Agreement were quickly 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.
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
