City that was taking root on the glacial moraine at the Animas Valley’s south edge, and onward several miles more to a place where towering red cliffs watched over ponderosas and scrub oak. They carved a cave out of the sandy river bank, and lived there until they upgraded to a small cabin nearby, which Julia described as a “well insulated chicken house.” Henry made a claim on a 160-acre homestead on the east side of the Animas River, adjacent to the confluence with Hermosa Creek.
Some called Julia a witch. And it’s true that, being of a spiritualist bent, she attended séances. More importantly, she was a healer. Still a largely unsettled land, the valley lacked the professional medical resources to serve the growing population. Julia Mead filled in the gaps, serving as doctor, nurse, and, most notably, midwife. She supervised the births of countless babies in Hermosa and its surroundings and she tended to the sick with elixirs made from roots and flowers gathered from the fields and hillsides. A half century after her death, old-timers still spoke of the healing powers of Julia’s pitch plaster and her Oregon grape root and dandelion brews. Some even blamed her for spreading noxious dandelions throughout the valley. I hope it’s true.
After a year or two, Julia’s son, Ervin Washington Mead, his wife Emily, and their son Ervin (Lyman), followed mother, sibling, and in-laws west. The Hathaways eventually went back to Iowa, and apparently sold the homestead, but Julia and the others stayed. With the money she had earned from her medical practice, Julia bought forty acres of land south of Hermosa Creek, a tributary of the Animas that runs in from the northwest side of the valley, and started a small farm there.
As she grew older, Julia liked to sit in the shade of a towering ponderosa pine on a corner of the farm on warm summer afternoons. She asked her son Ervin to bury her under the tree, so that her body could mingle with the old giant’s roots, but when she died in 1894 he went against her wishes, and she was interred in the staid and manicured cemetery above Durango, instead. Legend has it that some years after Julia died, Ervin heard a voice telling him to dig under the ponderosa. When he did so, he found a box full of money left by his mother.
IT’S APRIL 1891 AND OLAF ARVID NELSON IS DYING. He lies in his bed in the little house in Howardsville, a few miles upriver from Silverton. When he tries to stand he’s gently pushed back to the pillow by Louisa, his wife. His lungs are filling up with fluid, his body drowning itself. Whenever he moves, or breathes too deeply, it feels and sounds as if nutshells are rattling around in his lungs.
“The Mighty Swede” does not complain. Even before he was sick he didn’t talk much. Words don’t have much to them. They flitter away forgotten as soon as they leave your lips. Work is everything. And damn did he ever work. Six days a week drilling, blasting, and hauling ore out of the Philadelphia Mine, which he leased. And nights and Sundays up at his own claim on Bonita Peak.
NELSON FIRST EMERGED INTO THE HISTORICAL RECORD, and was nearly wiped right off of it, as a twenty-two-year-old wannabe miner in search of opportunity.15 During 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
