• A TCP is a permanent location; not an object or a moved item.

• A TCP is rooted in community history and important to maintaining cultural identity in the community.

• The integrity of the location remains--the landscape has not changed so significantly that the practice or belief no longer applies or makes sense.

Universally applied assumptions for this project include:

• Prehistoric sites should be considered potential TCPs unless consultation with appropriate descendent native tribes determines otherwise.

• Temporary sites such as arborglyghs or vegetation affected by a cultural activity may be potential TCPs.

• Some TCPs will have multiple cultural and temporal affiliations.

• The site should be greater than 50 years old to meet the National Register significance criteria.

The team considered land located under the jurisdiction of the San Juan National Forest and Bureau of Land Management in southwest Colorado.  The rugged and varied terrain in this region led to conclusions that most TCPs would relate to the use of the landscape, the amount of impact on the land, or conversely, the impacts of the terrain on the cultural practice.

Organizational Approach
Defining all of the existing and prospective traditional cultural places within the jurisdiction of the San Juan National Forest and Bureau of Land Management is a Herculean task. One way to manage the huge quantity of data is to divide the universe of TCPs into broad subjects representing major historical/cultural contexts of the area.  This method allows us to both identify known TCPs and to define categories for newly discovered cultural resources. The team initially defined a list of contexts that were amended and refined throughout the process.  The team created an overview of the category with examples and notes of known TCPs.

One type of forest resource that represents both intangible, impermanent resources, and traditional cultural properties, are culturally modified trees, which may be Ute ritually scarred trees or Hispanic arborglyphs. In either case, in situ the resource can not be protected or stabilized and will eventually topple. How then do we preserve and protect these cultural expressions unique to the San Juan National Forest and landscape? Some sites, such as Hispanic arborglyphs on high elevation aspen trees, may no longer be part of an active tradition because the sheep industry has collapsed since the 1950s because of increased use of synthetic materials instead of wool. Though sheep have lost their economic value in the state, herding traditions continue and ranching families may still retain high elevation grazing permits on public lands.

Similarly, Ute culturally peeled Ponderosa pine trees may represent a centuries old tradition of utilizing forest resources that is no longer practiced, but sufficient research has not been done to discuss the cultural significance of scarred trees one way or another.  Hence, the need for more research, interviews, and fieldwork.  This report is an overview for consideration and comment. TCPs remain cutting edge historic preservation because in most states, eligibility on the National Register is limited to two types of sites: archeological and historical sites.  TCPs, on the other hand, represent landscape use that may not fall into either category. As of  2002, no Colorado sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places have been cataloged as TCPs.  The federal guidelines exist for evaluating and documenting Traditional Cultural Properties, but most nominations to the Register, follow the standard criteria:

a.         Association with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of our history.

b.         Association with the lives of persons significant in our past.

c.         Embodiment of the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction.

d.         History of yielding, or potential to yield, information important in prehistory or history.

An excellent example of a potential TCP from southwest Colorado is Mt. Hesperus, also known as Big Sheep Mountain.    This peak is one of the four sacred mountains for the Navajos, and it is an historic gathering area for Navajo medicine men, and yet no artifacts may be found at the base of the mountain.  Other potential TCPs, often associated with trails, are Native American collecting sites for roots, herbs, and other forest resources.  Information on these sites rarely appears in the literature and will require extensive ethnography to analyze, designate and understand.  Hispanic herders on the San Juan National Forest and Rio Grande National Forest in the 1930s gathered plants and herbs in high elevation meadows to take back to their villages in northern New Mexico.  Whether that tradition continues is unknown.

Of the 4,751 archaeological sites on the Forest as identified by Dr. Philip Duke, these sites or corridors require further investigation as potential Traditional Cultural Properties of value to living inhabitants of the Four Corners area.  The scope of this project does not include formal tribal consultation, which should take place in a government-to-government relationship between the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management and interested tribes.

Equally intriguing are TCPs that may represent community continuity for hardrock miners in Silverton and other small towns, as well as ranching communities.  In each case, groups of people have used public land as part of their occupation over the last century, and there may be sites of traditional significance over and above economic pursuits.  Ancient Indian trails, which became mining trails, are still used by miners as well as hikers and backpackers.  Cowboys may still follow the same stock drives, and use the same corrals and meadows as they have done for a century on the west side of the San Juan National Forest.  Whether such sites actually represent traditional cultural properties, will take more time to determine.

An intriguing class of high elevation sites unique to Colorado and the United States may be known and named avalanche runs.  There are more avalanches between Durango and Ouray than anywhere else in the continental United States.  Those avalanches killed dozens of miners and settlers and both oral and written accounts abound concerning avalanche dangers.  Some sites have been commemorated with memorials and hence “are rooted in the community’s history and are important in maintaining the continuing cultural identity of the community.”  The San Juan TCP Team will conclude with specific recommendations, but our goal is to present data and information for further consideration.  Case studies will also be included, as well as a working bibliography.

II.  SAN JUAN HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

Prehistoric Native American Overview

Native Americans have used and accessed what is now the San Juan National Forest for possibly 10,000 years.  Archaic sites have been found on several ranger districts, and this research is best summarized in An Overview of the Archaeological Resources in the San Juan-Rio Grande National Forests by Dr. Philip Duke.  A high elevation hunting blind may be found just east of Kennebec Pass where there is a natural corridor for game to flow east to west along what is now part of the Colorado Trail.  After the Archaic hunter-gatherers left the area, Basketmaker peoples (? B.C. - A.D. 750) inhabited southwest Colorado planting corn at elevations of 8,000 feet and living in rock shelters, most noticeably the Falls Creek shelter north of Durango.  Burials at the site were excavated by both amateur and professional archaeologists and collections from the site are scattered among several repositories.  References to Falls Creek include Helen Sloan Daniels: Adventures with the Anasazi of Falls Creek (Occasional Paper #3 by the Center of Southwest Studies, 1976) and Prehistory in Peril: The Worst and Best of Durango Archaeology (1997) by Florence Lister.

Ancestral Puebloan peoples lived in the San Juan region beginning millennia ago, and their habitation sites cover the entire corner of the state though at lower elevations than the Basketmakers.  Research on Ancestral Puebloan sites, both in published reports and by contract archaeologists, is voluminous and ongoing thanks to major projects such as the Animas La Plata Project in Ridges Basin, the Fort Lewis College Field Schools which have excavated sites such as Puzzle House and the Pigg House, and the work of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Montezuma County where thousands of archaeological sites have been determined eligible for the National Register.  Connections between prehistoric Ancestral Puebloan sites and contemporary Pueblo tribes bear further research, investigation and consultation.  Within oral traditions of Pueblo groups, specifically the Hopi and Zuni, their ancestors accessed high elevation sites in the San Juan Mountains and they had ties to habitation sites in what is now the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument.

Because of drought and escalating violence, which may have culminated in cannibalism as a means of social control, by 1300 Ancestral Puebloans had left the Four Corners area and continued their migrations elsewhere.  As with all great human migrations, there are both “push” and “pull” factors that stimulate movement. Ancestral Puebloans may have been “pushed” out of the Four Corners area by environmental and social factors, but they may also have been “pulled” to other areas by the new religion of the Katsinas.

Prehistoric:  The study area contains archaeological evidence of prehistoric activities from the PaleoIndian periods to the present.  Per the National Register definition for a traditional cultural location, a prehistoric site would require confirmation of cultural value from modern informants before a site could be considered a TCP.  Many specific site locations probably have lost their meaning to modern descendents, but the descendents may carry traditions associated with a larger area encompassing the specific site location.  Certain site types, however, would be more likely to have maintained site-specific importance as a TCP.  Sites that are clearly used for resource procurement and appear to have been visited more than once are likely TCP candidates.  If reviewed on a larger scale, rather than site by site, certain areas containing a higher density of certain site types could be identified as a TCP.  The best sources to further this research would be the site files of the Colorado Historical Society and the San Juan National Forest, and the Colorado Prehistory Context for the Southern Colorado River Basin by Lipe & Varien et al., 1999.  

Suggested Traditional Cultural Properties in this Category:

Historic Native American Overview 

The time period between 1300 and the coming of the Spanish to New Mexico in 1540 represents one of the most intriguing epochs in southwestern history.  Pueblo peoples had moved southeast towards the Rio Grande river valley and Ute peoples moved into Colorado, apparently from the Great Basin area to the West.  Uto-Aztecan speakers, the Utes became the mountain people whose territory included all of Colorado, northern New Mexico and Utah.  Ancestors of Ute bands now living in southwest Colorado, particularly the Weeminuche, lived on the Uncompahgre Plateau and adjacent San Juan Forest lands.  The White Mesa Ute Indians in southeastern Utah, who are enrolled as members of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, also are a source of information about traditional Ute properties in the western portions of Montezuma and Dolores Counties.

The Athabaskan-speaking Navajos also moved into the Four Corners area from the north but moved south of Ute territory into an area of Arizona and New Mexico and southern Colorado roughly bounded by the four sacred mountains of Mt. Hesperus to the northwest, Mt. Blanca to the northeast, the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff to the southwest, and Mt. Taylor near Grants, New Mexico to the southeast.  They warred and fought with the Utes, and the San Juan River became the northern boundary for the Navajos and the southern boundary for the Utes. Early Spanish accounts describe nomadic peoples as “Apache de Nabajo,” and it is not until later in the 18th century that distinctions are made between Navajos living among the four sacred mountains and Apaches living to the north and east of Taos and the Spanish settlements.

At the beginning of Spanish contact, no tribes had horses, sheep or domesticated animals other than dogs.  From 1540 until 1680 nomadic tribes warily watched Spanish soldiers and priests force their will upon the Pueblo peoples.  Then, with the successful Pueblo revolt of 1680, everything changed for Indians in the West.  The Pueblos made little use of horses and sought to kill them during the revolt, but the Utes and Navajos felt otherwise and minor horse stealing prior to 1680 increased to major theft after the Spanish had been forced to retreat all the way south to El Paso.  The Utes, who had been primarily involved in the deer trade by bringing prime finished buckskin into the trade fairs at Abiquiu and Taos, saw the opportunity to become rich with horses as did the Navajo.  Major horse herds were acquired by both tribes, as well as churro sheep herds for Navajo weavers.  Utes traded horses far to the north, and in northern Wyoming and southern Montana they received a valuable trade item they could never barter for with the Spanish—guns traded across the Great Lakes by the British.  Guns were also acquired from tribes to the east and French trappers and traders.

By the 1740s the entire Southwest was re-made by the swift and deadly combination of armed Native American raiders on horseback.  The territorial boundaries for the historic tribes became more distinct with Apaches to the east of the Rio Grande and south into southwest New Mexico; Navajos within their Four Sacred Mountains, and Utes ranging across all of Colorado and onto the Great Plains to hunt buffalo.  No longer confined to the mountains, Utes could now travel far and wide to hunt, and they began to adopt the material culture of leather shirts, leggings, teepees, and parfleches similar to the Plains tribes.

The Gobernador area of northwest New Mexico may have been especially important for the Navajo clans as they moved into the Four Corners.  This area seems to have served as a “cultural hearth” and an origin place for many songs, chants, and ceremonies.  In addition there is the architectural enigma of the “pueblitos” or tiny pueblos that dot the mesa tops and are built close to ancient male forked-stick hogans.  Whatever the Athabascan people learned in the gobernador area, it helped solidify them as distinctly Navajo, though certain chants and ceremonies also seem to reflect Pueblo traditions.  Intriguing ceremonial rock art suggests both Navajo and Pueblo influence.

The northern boundary for the Spanish frontier was the genizaro community of Abiquiu, which was constantly raided by Utes, Apaches, and Navajos.  As the slave trade increased on the Old Spanish Trail, women and children were taken captives and brought east to Taos and Santa Fe or west to Los Angeles.  The Paiutes so feared that their children would be taken as slaves by Ute war parties that they insisted on reservation lands to the north of Salt Lake City and well off the Spanish Trail.  By the first decades of the 19th century Taos Pueblo had been rebuilt with few doors and entrances, and exits only by roof hatches, which could be secured when raiders came near.  Ute oral traditions recount “cannibal” stories that may reflect family fears about losing children along mountain trails.  Navajo oral stories also describe the slave trade, and one vivid story depicts the plight of a young girl, taken by Ute raiders, who escaped by stealing two horses.  She rode so hard and fast to the south that one horse died beneath her.  She cut the saddle off the horse, hung it in a tree, and rode on with the second horse until it died.  Finally she walked and ran to safety.  Three decades ago, in the same canyons where tradition says the story took place, an old cottonwood frame Ute saddle was found in a pinyon-juniper tree.  The saddle is now in the Wheelright Museum in Santa Fe.  Navajos believe the saddle is proof of the oral tradition.

Historic American Indians:

Suggested Traditional Cultural Properties in this Category

Case Study: Hesperus Mountain or Dibe’nsta

Hesperus Peak in the La Plata Mountains is one of the four sacred mountains in Navajo cosmology and represents the northwest boundary of the Navajo cultural area.  In 1868 when the Navajos were still incarcerated at Bosque Redondo, the chief Barbacito said they would do anything if only they could go home and not be sent to Oklahoma.  In his speech to General Sherman he described the boundary areas including Hesperus Peak as one of the Four Sacred Mountains.

Hesperus Peak figures in Navajo lore not only from the treaty’s nineteenth century date but also much earlier in Navajo myth and legend.  One of the most important of all Navajo ceremonies, the Yei Bi Chai or Nightway Ceremony is performed only certain times of the year and is one of two major healing ceremonies held only during the winter months when the snakes are hibernating and there is no danger of lightning.  This ceremony is performed for eight days and nine nights and is initiated when a patient first seeks the help of a hand trembler, who can sense and feel symptoms of a certain nature.

By mid-afternoon of the second day of the ceremony sand is used to make figures on the four sacred mountains and the sand is placed in all directions beginning with the east, south, west and finally the north.  Talking God enters the hogan where the ceremony is being performed and he rotates himself around the patient four times in a clockwise motion beginning with the east and finishing in the north.

To this day Navajo medicine men, especially from Shiprock, New Mexico go to the area near Mt. Hesperus to gather sacred dirt and special plants for their medicine bundles.  The heart and soul of the Navajo start with the four sacred mountains.  Navajo medicine man George Blueeyes explains, “These mountains and the land between them are the only things that keep us strong…. We carry soil from the sacred mountains in a prayer bundle that we call dah nidiilyeeh.  Because of this bundle, we gain possessions and things of value turquoise, necklaces, and bracelets.  With this we speak, with this we pray.  This is where the prayers begin.”

First Man and First Woman built the sacred mountains of the present Navajo land.  According to author Raymond Locke, “They made them all of earth which they had brought from similar mountains in the Fourth World.”  The sacred mountain of the north was named Dibentsaa or Mount Hesperus.  Shonto Begay recalls a part of the Navajo creation story often told around the fire of his hogan.  He explains, “The hero twins . . . were born for their mother Changing Woman, and their father, the sun . . . Monsters of great size and power roamed the land making life miserable . . . the hero twins were to save the people . . . in a great battle mountain ranges fell, lakes dried up and the earth trembled.  One by one, the great giants were felled.  After the people of the Fourth World were saved . . . they were given the four sacred mountains as guardians of our holy land, Dine tali.”

According to legend, the sacred mountains were the pillars that held up the sky and so as pillars they had to be fastened down.  The sacred north mountain, or Hesperus, was tied down with a rainbow, black beads, mist, and many plants and animals were added.  A dish of black beads, paszini, held two blackbird eggs under a cover of darkness, and on Dibentsaa lived Pollen Boy and Grasshopper Girl.  Because of the sacred nature of Hesperus, “sacred mountains should not be climbed unless it is done in a proper way through prayer and song, and they should be returned to by medicine men every twelve years to renew their Blessingway prayers,” wrote Robert S. McPherson.

Peggy Beck, Anna L. Waters and Nia Francisco in The Sacred: Ways of Knowledge, Sources of Life explain, “There were four Holy Boys.  These beings First Man called to him.  He told the White Bead Boy to enter the Mountain of the East, Sisnajini (Blanca Peak in the San Luis Valley of south central Colorado).  The Turquoise boy he told to go into the mountain of the South, Tsodzil (Mt. Taylor near Grants, New Mexico).  The Abalone Shell Boy entered the mountain of the West, Dook’oslid (San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff, Arizona).  And in the Mountain of the North, Dibe’nsta (La Plata Mountains near Durango) went Jet Boy.”

The authors explain that the Holy Beings “fastened the mountain of the North, Dibe’nsta, to the earth with a rainbow.  Over it they spread a blanket of darkness.  They decorated it with bash’zhini, obsidian, black vapors, and different plants and animals.  The lightning was sent to guard the Jet Boy’s doorway to the north.”  Part of the sacred nature of Mt. Hesperus comes from the sacred nature of all four of the Navajo boundary mountains.  They are visited by medicine men because “all the sacred mountains have their prayers and chants which are called Dressing the Mountains.  All the corner posts have their prayers and chants, as have the stars and markings in the sky and on the earth.  It is their custom to keep the sky and the earth and the day and the night beautiful.  The belief is that if this is done, living among the people of earth will be good.”  This knowledge is learned and practiced among the Navajo to maintain hozho or beauty.

Hesperus Peak is also known as “Big Sheep Mountain” because it was “made of sheep—both rams and ewes.”  The Holy Beings provided riches in the form of livestock so herders petitioned Big Sheep Mountain for assistance to grow and bless their herds.  Navajos believe “The mountains were put here for our continuing existence . . . All of the living creatures, like sheep, horses, cows, etc. said we will help with furthering man’s existence.”

The soil Navajos gather at Hesperus Peak, or dzillezh, is brought home to protect families and livestock.  Blessing animals with prayers and special soil brings rain and more animals to the herds.  An elder explained, “livestock is what life is about, so people ask for this blessing through dzillezh.  From the sheep and cattle, life renews itself.  Who would give birth in a dry place?  This does not happen.  You get many lambs and calves from the plants around here.  On the tip of these plants are horses, cattle, and sheep.  They are made of plants which are sheep.”  Just as in accounts described in the book The Ecological Indian, the belief that there is a relationship among spirits, livestock, and plants is not unique to the Navajo.  Authors Aton and McPherson add, “Navajo expansion north (of the San Juan River) and the use of natural resources were based in religious faith not scientific practice.  For this reason, Navajos believed the more sheep there were, the more rain and plants would be available to feed them.”  Hence, the religious aspect of Hesperus Peak takes on even deeper meaning.

Hesperus Peak Traditional Cultural Property Sources

George Blue Eyes quoted in Robert S. McPherson, Sacred Land, Sacred View: Navajo Perceptions of the Four Corners Region (Provo: Charles Redd Center for Western Studies of Brigham Young University, 1992) ; Raymond Friday Locke, The Book of the Navajo, 5^th edition, (Los Angeles: Mankind Publishing Co., 1992); Shonto Begay, Navajo, Visions and Voices Across the Mesa (New York: Scholastic Books, 1995); Klara B. Kelley and Harris Francis, Navajo Sacred Places (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994) Andrew Gulliford, Sacred Objects and Sacred Places: Preserving Tribal Traditions (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2000); Peggy Beck, Anna Lee Walters and Nia Francisco, The Sacred: Ways of Knowledge, Sources of Life (Tsaile, Arizona: Navajo Community College Press, 1996); and James M. Aton and Robert S. McPherson, River Flowing From the Sunrise: An Environmental History of the Lower San Juan (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2000).

EuroAmericans:

SOUTHWEST COLORADO HISTORIC OVERVIEW

Traditional cultural sites have usually been found along trails or routes that represent linear corridors between natural resource areas and the 94 natural lakes and 10 reservoirs found in the area.  Because of the rich tri-ethnic roots of the San Juan Mountains, different ethnic groups would have used the same access routes at different times.  Both the Utes and the Navajos knew the southern edge of the San Juans and traveled widely throughout the area.  Historically the current U.S. Highway 160 between Cortez and Durango was known as the Navajo Trail.

Key access routes into the San Juans include what became known as the La Garita Stock Driveway used by Hispanic sheepherders who brought thousands of sheep west from the San Luis Valley in the spring to the high mountains near Silverton in the summer.  They traveled westward from the mouth of La Garita Canyon following La Garita Creek and moved on horseback up into the high country.  Herders gathered herbs and high altitude plants and watched carefully over their sheep.  Other routes the herders took followed some of the same trails used by the first miners and prospectors who came into Silverton via Cunningham Gulch after they followed the Rio Grande to its headwaters north from Del Norte.

The Baker prospecting party, varying in number from 100-300 people, arrived in Baker’s Park, the town site of Silverton, in 1860, having ridden north from Santa Fe upon hearing of gold discoveries in Colorado territory near Pikes Peak.  Further developments waited until after the Civil War when military veterans returned to the San Juans and began prospecting in earnest in the 1870s.  Those prospectors would have followed Indian trails and noted Native American cairns and well-used Indian springs and water sources.  Because the land had been designated Ute land based on the 1868 treaty, a second treaty had to be written to exclude the mineral-rich San Juans.  Known as the San Juan Cession, or Brunot Agreement of 1873, originally Utes had opposed signing the treaty but Ouray finally agreed because the government promised to locate his lost son—a promise that was never kept. Utes reluctantly signed the treaty but agreed to give up only the mountaintops where the minerals were, not the excellent hunting in the valleys of the Animas, La Plata, and Los Pinos rivers.

Despite the misunderstanding (or fraud) in which the Utes thought they were only selling the mountains peaks and the Anglos thought they were buying the entire San Juans including deep mountain parks and valleys, the Utes ceded all of the San Juans and were then forced on to a reservation considerably south of their traditional summer hunting ranges.  Further restrictions came after the Meeker incident of 1879, which resulted in the complete expulsion of the northern bands from the Colorado and White River valleys.  Because of difficult relations with miners and settlers, Utes seeking to move north probably switched their access routes away from the Rio Grande Valley and instead moved north of Hesperus and up the La Plata River to Indian Trail Ridge or the Highline Trail which begins near Kennebec Pass and goes north for miles.

AREA MILITARY HISTORY

The role of the United States Army is an often-neglected but important part of the San Juan region’s development.  As the number of farmers and ranchers, prospectors, and entrepreneurs began to grow east of the Continental Divide in the 1840s, the Army had established forts in New Mexico and in what soon became Colorado Territory.  The principal function of most of these forts was the control and punishment of recalcitrant Native Americans, beginning in the early 1850s.  As reservations were created, another function was control of white intruders on Indian reservations.  At the time when newcomers began entering the San Juan region, the nearest fort in Colorado was Fort Garland in the San Luis Valley, although a small post, Fort Plummer, also existed at Tierra Amarilla on New Mexico’s Chama River.  Personnel at the posts included both infantry and cavalry units, with cavalry being better adapted to duty in the far-flung region.

After the Brunot Agreement in 1873 opened mining on the Ute Indian Reservation in the San Juans, tension arose because of intrusions by miners and resentments of Native Americans.  Also, in the area around Pagosa Springs, the presence of squatters was a source of contention.  Cavalry patrols from Fort Garland were frequent, but without a short, easy route to the San Juans, they were not very effective.  Typically, troops had to travel southwest across the San Luis Valley, thence to New Mexico’s Chama River, and finally northwest into the area around Pagosa Springs, the Animas River, and so on.

Beginning in 1876, some of the companies at Fort Garland consisted of black cavalrymen, popularly called “buffalo soldiers.”  One well-known company was Company D, Ninth Regiment, which served under Captain F. S. Dodge, a much-admired white officer.  This was a well-disciplined “crack” outfit with high esprit de corps, earning honors in the Battle of Milk Creek at the time of the Meeker Massacre.  (Following the Civil War, “buffalo soldiers” participated in the Indian Wars elsewhere in the West in the segregated Ninth and Tenth Cavalry Regiments and the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Infantry Regiments, always with white officers.  Black soldiers also served in other integrated units at Fort Garland and elsewhere, but the races of troopers were not officially recorded.  Neither the Tenth Cavalry nor either of the two all-black infantry regiments served at Fort Garland or in the San Juans.)

In 1876 the Ninth’s Company D and other units were sent to patrol the San Juan region.  In October of 1878 a camp was established at Pagosa Springs on an elevation on the north side of the hot springs and occupied what now is the commercial core of the town site.  Buildings were constructed of logs, as the local pine forest made this material plentiful.  The original garrison consisted of Company D of the Ninth Regiment and three other companies.  With land purchased from the Ute Indians, the military reservation of six square miles encompassed a one square mile town site centered around the hot springs.  Originally called Camp Lewis, the name was changed to Fort Lewis on December 30, 1878.  Regardless of size, a military installation normally brought jobs for civilians, adding to the local population.  These civilian employees might include a storekeeper, wagon master and teamsters, herder, cook, blacksmith, wheelwright, and saddler.  At Fort Lewis, a blacksmith was one of the first to be hired.

When the Meeker Massacre of 1879 in northwestern Colorado led to removal of all Ute Indians in Colorado to reservations in 1881, Fort Lewis was moved to a new location on the La Plata River, six miles south of Hesperus and midway across the Southern Ute Indian Reservation, which at the time was a long, narrow strip extending west of Utah.  Some military personnel remained at Pagosa Springs until 1882.  Black companies of buffalo soldiers were not assigned to the new fort, and, in fact, none served in Colorado after 1886.  A few soldiers, black and white, remained as civilians after they mustered out, however, and they became part of the San Juan’s life.

Meanwhile, from its new location on the La Plata, Fort Lewis’s troops were sent to locations in southwestern Colorado when settlers were being threatened by Indians or vice versa, rustlers were stealing livestock, and various other incidents were causing alarm.  After the military fort closed in 1891, under an Act of Congress sponsored by Sen. Henry M. Teller in 1911, the property became an Indian boarding school, bearing the name of Fort Lewis.

The Fort Lewis Indian School served Ute children and a few Navajos, with the highest enrollment being about 400.  Like others, the school was not popular with Native American pupils and several died while there.  Emphasis was on agricultural and domestic training.  The boarding school evolved into a public high school, then into a junior college under the auspices of the Colorado State Board of Agriculture, and finally into a four-year college in 1964 offering free tuition for federally enrolled Native American and Native Alaskan students.  This is the college’s sacred trust to American Indians.

A military wagon road, called Soldiers’ Road, across Ellwood Pass (also spelled Elwood) was constructed by personnel from Fort Garland to Fort Lewis at Pagosa Springs in 1878-1879.  It was in an area surveyed by Hayden’s men in 1873. Early wagon traffic into the San Juan region had come from the south, by way of the Chama River, while mule or burro trains across the mountains used trails established by game and Indians, such as  Summit Pass.  Summit Pass became known as Ellwood Pass after the creation of a town called Ellwood, named for prospector T. L. Woodvale (L-wood) in 1879 on the west side of Ellwood Pass.  (An Ellwood post office, established in 1882, is said to have been the first in what later became Archuleta County in 1885.)  Construction of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad to Durango in 1881 and the removal of Fort Lewis from Pagosa Springs to the La Plata River, soon made the military road nearly obsolete, although hardy travelers still used it.

An area on the east side, near the summit where the military camped, was known then and now as Government Park.  Nearby Schinzel Flats was the wildflower-bedecked site where A. J. Flynn was inspired to write “Where the Columbines Grow,” Colorado’s state song.  Because of  boggy areas on the east side near the Divide and because of the twenty-five-degree grade on the west side, this location was not chosen for the automobile highway that was constructed instead at Wolf Creek Pass in 1913-1917.  Also, a major flood in 1911 washed out parts of the Ellwood Pass road and most of Ellwood town, although the road is traveled by intrepid travelers with four-wheel-drive vehicles.

The following description of the military road’s construction is from The Denver Daily Tribune, December 10, 1878.  It describes the difficulties of road building in the mountains, even with a small federal appropriation and the military’s resources.

Congress at its last session appropriated $5,000 “for the construction of a military wagon road from Ojo Caliente, New Mexico, to Fort Wingate, New Mexico, and from a point on the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad [in 1878 at Alamosa, Colorado] to Parrott City, Colorado.” This sum was assigned to Lt. Earnest [sic] H. Ruffner, Corps of Engineers, Chief Engineer of the Department of Missouri. A plan for its expenditure was submitted, approved by Department Commander, General John Pope, and work began September 1.

The line chosen was one running in a nearly due west direction from Alamosa to Pagosa Springs, where the new road would intersect the wagon road leading from Tierra Amarilla to the Animas River and west. . . . In passing up the Alamosa [River], a natural and easy water grade was followed with at no place very heavy work, but a considerable expenditure of time and patience. Open parks alternate with bits of wood, and occasional bluffs requiring some grading, and points and cliffs where blasting was necessary or a timber crib work to pass the obstructions. At Clifford’s cabin, nineteen miles from the new saw mill and at an elevation of ten thousand feet, began the ascent of the pass. The grade up the mountain side and through the woods is everywhere easy and gradual, and when the passage of the peat bogs on the summit is secured by corduroying in the spring, the ascent of the 1,550 feet to the Divide [Ellwood Pass, 11,775'] in five miles will be found easy for heavy freight. The grading from the summit for a mile to the west has been completed, and at this point and for some four miles beyond, uncompleted work will probably mark the season’s close and the exhaustion of the appropriation. The road is not completed at any point, but wagons can be driven over the newly opened road, for about thirty miles, twenty-four to the summit and six beyond.

Throughout the distance much remains to be done to make it safe, easy and wide to travel. Grading, clearing and retification [reticulation?] of the line, besides corduroying are still required. There remains on the Western Slope and down the East Fork of the San Juan some twenty-three miles of road to open. At the junction of the Forks is met a practicable wagon road down which twelve miles distant are found the Springs [Pagosa Springs]. The road leading down the East Fork of the San Juan will require more work than was met on the Alamosa, and will be steeper. This will not be objectionable, the heavier traffic passing west probably for some time to come. The establishment of a cantonment at Pagosa Springs, and the probability that there will, before long, be a permanent post in that vicinity, will make a change in the prospects. Easy communication across the mountains to Alamosa, only ninety miles distant; security against the Indians and natural advantages of the place will undoubtedly before long draw a large population to this vicinity.

 

B.    Durango, Parrott City and Fort Lewis Toll Road

When Fort Lewis moved from Pagosa Springs to the La Plata River in 1881, Otto Mears quickly incorporated and built the Durango, Parrott City and Fort Lewis Toll Road during the winter of 1881-1882.  The route lay on an old road that Mears purchased for his toll road.  It has been said that Mears even selected the site for the new fort, and such a theory might be in keeping with his other activities elsewhere.  Mears’s road to Fort Lewis charged tolls from the U.S. Army as well as from civilians.  Consequently, most traffic adopted a different route that circumvented the toll gate, and Mears’s Durango, Parrott City and Fort Lewis Toll Road failed in 1882.

The Durango, Parrott City and Fort Lewis Toll Road was the third road incorporated by Mears and partners in the San Juans in 1881, following rapidly on the heels of Ute removal.  The first two were the Dallas and San Miguel Toll Road, and the second was the San Miguel and Rico Toll Road.  His plan was to link the Animas Valley and the Uncompahgre Valley.  In 1879 he also had incorporated a proposed road from San Miguel to Dolores.  In 1890 his grand plan was achieved with the building of the Rio Grande Southern Railroad. Black buffalo soldiers stationed at Fort Lewis south of Hesperus patrolled the area on horseback and sought to minimize disputes between Indians and settlers.  At least one cavalryman, John Taylor, stayed in the area, and he married into a Southern Ute family.

SOUTHWESTERN MINING

By the mid-1700s, or even earlier, Spanish explorers were aware of precious minerals in the San Juan Mountains.  A catalyst for Juan María Antonio Rivera’s expedition in 1765 appears to have been a piece of silver, brought to Abiquiú by a Ute to trade. The journal of Rivera’s first expedition has an entry, dated August 5, 1765, with a reference to an old “Yuta” {Ute} woman in the area of the La Plata River who knew about silver outcroppings.  The Escalante journal, eleven years later, includes the name of the La Plata River (plata, sp.: silver).  In the 1840s United States Army personnel, including Colorado Territory’s future Governor William Gilpin who was stationed at Abiquiú, was publicizing the San Juan’s riches.  In the mid-1850s California’s forty-niners also were returning on this route and  exploring for minerals as they went.  One such party was led by “Captain” John Moss in 1856.  Soon a wave of prospectors and miners flooded the Rockies in the Pikes Peak or Bust gold excitement, heading for Cherry Creek (at Denver) in 1859 and  into the mountains west of Denver in 1860.  It would only be a matter of time, depending in large part on resolution of  Indian occupation in the San Juan Mountains, before mining west of the Continental Divide would transform the San Juans from a wilderness into hive of human activity. 

In addition to threats from unfriendly Indians, legal title to mining claims could not be obtained on Indian lands.  The latter obstacle was removed with the signing of the Brunot Agreement of 1873, which excluded mining areas in the San Juan Mountains from the Ute Indian Reservation.  The delineation of the mining region provided boundaries that were not always respected by either faction, however.  New opportunities arose rapidly after the summer of 1881, when Ute Indians were confined to smaller reservations in southwestern Colorado and northeastern Utah, following the Meeker Massacre in northwestern Colorado of 1879.  The expanded mining region and transportation routes serving it occupied land that later became part of several counties and three national forests.  Within this area were hundreds of silver veins, gold lodes, and placers.  The silver belt, which accounted for the fame of the “silvery San Juans,” was estimated to be about twenty to forty miles wide and about eighty miles long, although the value of gold production actually exceeded that of silver in the long run.   With dogged persistence and ingenuity, Otto Mears opened much of the area with his toll roads and narrow-gauge railroads, but the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, which preceded Mears, played the decisive role in the region’s development.                                                                                     

A.  Baker Expedition (1860-1861)
In July 1860 “Captain” Charles Baker organized an expedition to “Sierra La Plata,” in land occupied by Ute Indians but not yet designated as a reservation.  He and associates organized the Abiquiú, Pagosa, and Baker City Road Company that year. In October, twenty-one fellow prospectors  traveled to the Dolores, Mancos, and Animas Rivers. Several other parties also were on their way to the San Juan Mountains by October, and Baker reported that there were “from three to five hundred men” present at “Anamos City,” which was established as a supply center.  That winter two of his companions, Thomas Pollock and B. H. Eaton, a future governor of Colorado, were quoted in the Rocky Mountain News as saying that “the main field was in Baker’s Park [Silverton] and its environs, where eleven districts, each containing two hundred claims, were organized.” Perhaps these figures were exaggerated.  Nevertheless, in response to Baker’s promotion, an optimistic expedition, including women and children, left Denver on December 14, 1860, for the San Juans despite winter’s snow and reports that Ute Indians were unfriendly to prospectors.  This party, led by Thomas Pollock, seems to have varied in size from 100 to 300, as people joined or left it along the way.  With eleven wagons loaded with provisions, most of the party traveled from Denver to the San Luis Valley, south to the Chama River, where many San Juan promoters and prospectors assembled, thence northeast to the Animas River.  From there, Baker and company  proceeded north, crossing the Animas River at Baker’s Bridge, thence past the Hermosa Cliffs and Cascade Creek, Coal Hill and Molas Passes into the basin called Baker’s Park.

Dissatisfied with their mineral discoveries, running short of supplies, splintered by interpersonal conflict, and threatened by Ute Indians, the expedition broke up in the spring of 1861.  One group took with them four Navajo captive children, who had been traded to them by Utes.  Some departed across the mountains via Cinnamon and Stony Passes.  At Wagon Wheel Gap, it was said, the latter contingent left a broken wagon wheel, although travel at the time was so arduous that any traveler might have left a broken wheel.  Disappointed by the results of their adventure and resentful of Baker, some members of the expedition publicly criticized him for promoting what they called a humbug, as had Denver’s newspaper all along.  Disillusionment contributed to the departure of almost all prospecting in the San Juans during the remainder of the 1860s, and the outbreak of the Civil War and a wave of excitement in Idaho’s mining country also played a role in cooling ardor for southwestern Colorado Territory for a few years.   

B.   Parrott City
On August 9, 1776, the Domínguez-Escalante expedition ascended from the Animas River (El Río de las Ánimas) to the La Plata River (El Río de San Joaquín—de la Plata), “in which there are said to be veins and outcroppings of metallic ore.  However, although years ago certain individuals from New Mexico came to inspect them by order of the governor, who at the time was Don Tomás Vález Cachupín, and carried back metal-bearing ore, it was not ascertained for sure what kind of metal they consisted of.  The opinion which some formed previously, from the accounts of various Indians and from some citizens of the kingdom, that they were silver ore, furnished the sierra with this name.”

The Treaty of 1868 supposedly ensured that Ute Indians could claim Colorado Territory west of the Continental Divide as their reservation, but a few miners prospected and worked mines in the San Juans illegally.  A notable exception was a mining venture that began near the mouth of La Plata Canyon when “Captain” John Moss made a private agreement with Ute Chief Ouray in 1873 to allow placers in a district occupying thirty-six square miles.  Its first settlement was the town of Parrott City, which became the county seat of La Plata County from 1874 to 1881.  (Described by Clarence Jackson, as “courtly,”  “witty,” and “well-educated,” Moss had a manner with which Ouray would have been familiar, for he already was experienced in dealing with government officials, politicians, and promoters.)  The source of Parrott City’s name and Ouray’s reward were Moss’s investors, Parrott and Company in San Francisco, which donated 100 horses and blankets to the cause.  Moss’s boomlet faded within a few years, as did many later mining efforts in the La Plata Mountains, although Parrott City continued to have a post office until 1896, after coal mining had replaced placer mining as the principal activity southeast of the La Platas along Lightner Creek.  Some gold mining did revive near the town of Mayday, just south of Parrott City, and at another community, called La Plata, as late as the 1960s, however.

C.  Silverton area
Baker’s Park, the six-mile-long basin where Silverton came into existence, was not entirely forgotten during the decade after the Baker party’s disappointments in 1860-1861.  Interest in the area revived after the Civil War.  At the time, the economy of the United States was still primarily agricultural, which left few choices for adventurous young men other than to settle down as farmers, store clerks, teachers, or preachers back in Iowa or Illinois.  At first sight in the early 1860s, some had been smitten with the wild, scenic San Juans, the unfettered life of the wilderness, the dream of striking it rich, and they returned. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, most trespassers on the Utes’ reservation were active in the area of Baker’s Park.

Several prospectors in 1870 and 1871 head-quartered around Howardsville, at the foot of Cunningham Gulch.  This gulch was the western end of the infamous Stony Pass (el. 12,594') an extremely steep, rough route. Stony Pass was just north of  Cunningham Pass, also called Rio Grande Pass.   Like other trails across the Continental Divide, these too had been originally used by game which left traces, followed in turn by Indians. Cunningham Pass became a  heavily-used pack trail, declining in importance after Stony Pass boasted a rudimentary wagon road in 1872.  Whichever  pass was used, the route from the east followed the Rio Grande to its headwaters, passing Wagon Wheel Gap and Antelope Springs before climbing to the Continental Divide and then descending steeply toward Howardsville.

When the San Juan Division of the Hayden Survey were in this area in 1874, Franklin Rhoda gave this description of the old Cunningham pack trail his party took from Howardsville, although Rhoda erred in calling the route Stony Pass: 

[A] well-marked trail leads over to the Rio Grande. After passing the main bend, which is about two miles east of Howardsville, the side-slopes become steeper and steeper, and finally end altogether in becoming nearly vertical bluffs. . . .A number of mines are located high up the slopes wherever they are not too steep to be ascended. . . . Near the head of the gulch,  the trail is very muddy and badly cut up. . . .  It now leaves the creek and ascends the east slope. The grade may be appreciated by calling to mind the fact that from the bed of the stream to the pass the rise is about one thousand feet in one-and-a-half miles.  The incessant travel over this trail by miners with their horses, mules and burros keeps it in a bad condition.  The really bad part is only a small part of the whole distance.  On the summit the ground is gently rolling. . . . The elevation of the pass above the sea, as determined by a single reading of  the mercurial barometer, is 12,090 feet.

As conflicts between Indians and miners in the San Juan country increased, efforts had begun in 1872 to exclude mining lands from the reservation in the San Juan Mountains. After much wrangling, the Brunot Agreement, also called the San Juan Cession, was signed in September 1873, and mining claims thereafter had legal titles, and the race had begun in earnest.

By 1874, activity had increased not only around Howardsville and, soon, Silverton too, but also at other important mining centers.  When prospectors found mines on the east side of the Divide at Summitville several miles to the south of Stony Pass and fairly close to Ellwood Pass, a thriving supply and freighting center sprang up at Del Norte on the Rio Grande in 1871.  This town was founded by a few of Howardsville’s former prospectors.  A member of the Baker expedition, Thomas Pollock, also became a resident.  Del Norte would soon become a center for wagon traffic en route to the Silverton area via Stony Pass.  When a separate State of San Juan was promoted by optimists in southern Colorado, whose designs included the San Juan mines, Del Norte aspired in vain to be its capital.

Other centers of activity were at Lake City and Ouray.  Otto Mears had previously built a toll road from his hometown of Saguache to the first Los Pinos Indian Agency.  When this agency was moved to the Uncompahgre Valley, Mears provided another road to the new agency, and when the Brunot Agreement was signed, with Mears’s assistance, he promoted the new town of Lake City, reached by his Saguache and San Juan Toll Road.  The location of Lake City and its neighboring mines also benefited from access along the Lake Fork of the Gunnison River to and from the Gunnison Valley, where D&RG rails arrived in 1880.  In the meantime, Mears built the Antelope Park and Lake City Toll Road to connect Del Norte and Lake City, despite competition it gave to his base at Saguache.  This route later was taken over by Barlow & Sanderson’s stage line.  With the establishment of the town of Lake City, trails from Lake City came over the Continental Divide by way of Engineer and Cinnamon Passes to tap into the headwaters of the Animas River and the Silverton area.  Nevertheless, when Franklin Rhoda examined these passes in August 1874 for the Hayden Survey, he declared that he could not understand how the Saguache people (meaning Mears) ever hoped to bring a wagon road over them.  Besides difficulty of terrain, the season for such travel was limited to mid-May until mid-October, although some hardy souls carried mail and supplies during winter on ten- or twelve-foot-long Norwegian skidors, called “snowshoes.”  Toll roads were built over Engineer and Cinnamon Passes, and a stage line operated over the latter.  Mears contracted to deliver mail and supplies to Silverton and Ouray, in addition.  Travelers also entered the area from the south, by way of Animas City.  The map accompanying Crofutt’s Grip-Sack Guide of Colorado, 1885 shows the routes of roads in the 1880s.

The competition from other passes did not significantly reduce traffic on the Stony Pass route between Baker’s Park and Del Norte (90 miles from Del Norte to Silverton).  Stony Pass was the principal route from 1872 until 1882 into the San Juan mining country.  As early as 1872, before the San Juan Cession was consummated, an attempt had been made to build a wagon road over Stony Pass and traffic over the pass had increased after the Cession.  Attempts were made to improve sections of the road, with construction taking place as late as 1879.  Most surprising about Stony Pass’s popularity is the fact that the topography was so difficult that wagons and stages often ran only to various stations and ranches on the east side, where freight and passengers were transferred to smaller conveyances or pack animals for the remainder of the journey.  Gilmer & Salisbury; Greene, Juhle & Company; and the Brewster Stage Line operated freight or transportation services at various times.

The western side dropped a thousand feet per mile, requiring ropes to hold back wagons that were heavily laden with machinery and supplies, and wagons or pack trains going upgrade from the mines also had a severe task.  Oxen sometimes were used to pull wagons on this route.  Meanwhile, many travelers on foot or with burro trains continued to use nearby Cunningham Pass, which is about 500 feet lower than Stony Pass. By 1882, after the D&RG’s railroad arrived at Silverton, Stony Pass’s heyday ended.  Nevertheless, in the 1880s mail still was being carried to Howardsville over Stony Pass three times a week as well as to and from Animas Forks, eight miles north, twice a week.  A frequent complaint was the irregularity of mail service, which understandably was delayed by weather.  One mail carrier died from hypothermia during a winter-time transit, and other travelers suffered severe frostbite. It is said that a woman gave birth atop the pass. 

Mining camps and towns that sprang up shortly before and after the San Juan Cession were occupied by individualists who lived in tents or small log cabins during the summer with maybe a store and a saloon for bodily comforts, while they devoted their energies to striking it rich, hopefully very soon.  The majority were American-born, single men, descended from emigrants from the British Isles and Northern European countries, while women (respectable and otherwise), even children, soon were living in the camps, too.  Because of cold, snow, and the threat of snow slides, many prospectors left during the winter, to return again for the following short season when mudslides and rockslides took their turns at making life hazardous.

As small mining towns with rough-hewn amenities like hotels and saloons grew up, the first was  Howardsville.  Though never large, Howardsville became the first seat of San Juan County, when it was carved from La Plata County in 1874, and a log courthouse was built.  The cluster of log cabins at Howardsville had a post office, “suburbs” called Bullion City and Niegoldstown, and by 1876 a school. 

Mines clung to mountainsides hundreds of feet above Cunningham and Arrastra Gulches.  As at other locations, trams with ore buckets soon were conveying ore down precipitous slopes, and miners also rode the buckets.  The Highland Mary Mine was a noteworthy operation at the head of Cunningham Gulch. Staked out in 1874, its owners were spiritualists, with a medium guiding prospectors toward an underground lake of gold in King Solomon Mountain.  The lake of gold never appeared, although the miners cut through much silver before they went bankrupt.  Later the Highland Mary became one of the most valuable silver mines in the region, under different owners and guidance.

About four miles northeast of Howardsville was Eureka on the Animas River.  There, the Sunnyside Mine was located in 1873.  This great mine would yield gold until 1991, with some interruptions when it was shut down.  Besides mining, milling provided jobs, and Eureka’s population grew to about 250, while the D&RG’s Silverton Northern Railroad (1895-1942) to Eureka helped the Sunnyside to prosper.  The Sunnyside also had a tramway nearly three miles long.  Mining was on several levels, with a zigzagging burro trail connecting the levels.  

Another five miles up the Animas River lay Animas Forks, with mines scattered around this cluster of buildings.  Despite its altitude, hard winters, and the vicissitudes of mining, Animas Forks became a town with several commercial buildings and homes that were occupied until World War II.  (Reports that Thomas Walsh once lived here are incorrect.)  Animas Forks was a hub for several good mines in its neighborhood and also provided solace to passengers who dared to ride stages across the Continental Divide to and from Lake City by way of Cinnamon Pass, above 12,000 feet in elevation. 

Beyond Animas Forks were numerous camps scattered around Mineral Point.  A burro trail  headed from there down Mineral Creek and the Uncompahgre to Ouray, with mail being carried three times a week.  “This is a villainous trail,” commented George Crofutt.”  From Animas Forks, a trail over Engineer Pass, nearly 13,000 feet elevation, headed across the Divide to American Flats and Lake City on the Lake Fork of the Gunnison. Cinnamon Pass also connected this area to Lake City with a stage line.  The carriers sometimes were delayed for two or three weeks by weather.  Popular as these routes have become for four-wheel-drive fans, they offered only arduous travel for prospectors, freighters, and other hardy souls.  The good news was that from Animas Forks, the trip was downhill all the way along the Animas River to Silverton on Otto Mears’s Silverton and Animas Forks Toll Road. 

Competition existed among the camps, where stores, saloons, and dance halls vied for business.  Silverton had a unique advantage in its location at the junctions of the Animas River, Cement Creek, and Mineral Creek and made good use of ample flat land for construction.  As Silverton’s name implies, precious metals in this area were mainly silver originally, but gold production eventually surpassed silver in value, keeping many mines open.  Silverton soon dominated all the nearby camps and stole not only business but also, literally, the county’s records away from Howardsville to become the new seat of San Juan County.  The Greene Smelter was constructed with machinery and even bricks being delivered by burro train.  Smelting tipped the scale in Silverton’s favor, as milling and refining of ores was a major hurdle for the scattered mines of the region.  Howardsville also had had an early smelter, but the area’s silver ores proved difficult to process.  For the first years, most ores, and then only the best, ores had to be hauled over the Continental Divide to reduction works at Lake City, Denver, or Pueblo. 

Silverton became a real town, with streets for frame commercial buildings and houses, thanks to the presence of a sawmill. Silverton had many of the social amenities of a real community, even with church services being held from time to time, depending on the visit of a clergyman.  The first services were held in the original schoolhouse, and in 1881 the Congregational Church was built, with H. P. Roberts as its pastor.  Catholic priests in the 1870s traveled all the way to Silverton from the San Luis Valley, where the San Juan Parish had a circuit covering part of that Valley and the San Juan Mountains, too.  George Darley, a  Presyterian preacher based at Lake City, and other Protestants visited mining camps from time to time.

Silverton also became the principal center for communication between far-flung camps and towns, maintaining regular schedules for mail in all directions.  Until railroad tracks reached mines at Ophir and Telluride, some of their mail was carried from Silverton twice a week on Crofutt’s “horrid trail.”  After Otto Mears succeeded in chiseling a toll road (his “Rainbow Route” that is popularly called the Million Dollar Highway) south from Ouray by way of the Uncompahgre Gorge in 1884, Silverton had a better, if terrifying, link to the north.

[An additional note about the Million Dollar Highway and Ouray:  "In the early 1880s Otto Mears constructed a toll road over Red Mountain Pass in order to get the ore out of the valley.  The road was a major contributor to the efficiency of the mining industry in the Ouray-Silverton-Telluride District.  Today, US 550 traces much of that route from Ouray to Silverton and is known as the Million Dollar Highway.  The highway was so named for one of three reasons.  The first and most entertaining possibility is the road was paved with gravel that contained gold, the value of which was not discovered until the road was complete.  Second, the road was so steep and unstable that an early traveler stated “You couldn’t pay me a million dollars to go back over that pass.”  Third, the road cost roughly one million dollars to pave in the mid-20th century.  The early Million Dollar Highway was extremely treacherous.  There were few places that two vehicles could pass each other, so sometimes it was necessary to back up for half a mile to let another wagon or buggy through.

The original settlement of Ouray was actually called Uncompahgre, and was established in 1875 after valuable ores, such as gold and silver, were discovered in the surrounding mountains. The name of the town was soon changed to Ouray, in honor of the Southern Ute Chief Ouray..."

Source: <http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6163968805> on 3/18/05. 
Duane Smith adds, "Mears did not do it all, Ouray County built some of it."]

What the town needed most, though, was a railroad, and it had arrived in 1882 when the D&RG built north through Animas Canyon from Durango.  Silverton’s population rose to 1,500, and in 1885 a new schoolhouse was needed.  With or without a railroad, the rustic towns, camps, and mines needed large quantities of such ordinary things as hay and oats for horses and burros, so the business of freighting by wagons also would be assured for years to come.  With the need for vast amounts of timbers for mines, lumber for buildings, railroad ties, and firewood, timber-cutters would continue to denude the forests, not only around Silverton but also wherever a camp sprang up.

Silverton was able to survive the devaluation of silver in 1893, which devastated silver camps, because of the presence of gold in this area, and its population peaked at about 3,000 in the early 1900s.  A large brewery kept a supply of liquid refreshment flowing.  By the time of World II, Silverton had declined, however, until in 1959 a shrine, which stands above Silverton and honors “Christ of the Mines,” was dedicated as a votive offering, seeking God’s aid in the town’s economic revival.  Parishioners of St. Patrick’s Church (built in 1905) and other townspeople put two years’ work into building the shrine, which features a statue of Christ carved from Carrara marble, and the mining economy soon improved, for a while.

Northwest nine miles from Silverton was Chattanooga, with a population of about sixty and a post office serving several mines. Chattanooga’s prospects brightened when Otto Mears built the Silverton Railroad up Mineral Creek in 1887.  Until 1924, this railroad would connect mines at Red Mountain and other major mining areas, including the great Yankee Girl Mine in Red Mountain Park, to Silverton.  The grade of the Silverton Railroad followed the bed of Mears’s already-existing Silverton and Ouray Toll Road, which had crossed Red Mountain Pass at great expenditure of effort and money. By then, Otto Mears had long since earned the moniker, “Pathfinder of the San Juans.”

Meanwhile, the Gold King Mine up Cement Creek at Gladstone provided ample justification for the third railroad out of Silverton, the Silverton, Gladstone, and Northern.  This short line managed to keep running until 1915 when Otto Mears shut it down.

During the late 1800s mining changed in the San Juans.  The Panic of 1893 struck a blow to silver production around Silverton just as it did at Creede east of the Continental Divide and at Leadville, far away in the Mosquito Range.  Many mines in the San Juans survived and even thrived because of gold production, though.  Miners themselves had changed meanwhile.  No longer being prospectors who lived in isolated cabins, they had become wage earners in the 1880s, working for distant company owners.  Many miners were living in boarding houses, and nearly half of them now were immigrants coming from eastern Europe and Italy.  Unions were organized.  Among the mine workers, Hispanic people seem to have been a minority.

D.  Rico
Military officers first discovered gold in 1868 on Telescope Mountain, then called “Nigger Baby Hill,” according to George Crofutt. In The R.G.S. Story, 5: 69, Nigger Baby Hill is said to have received its name because of an abundance of black oxide of manganese, which caused miners to look like coal miners when they emerged from work. Sidney Jocknick wrote that this hill was later salted with so many claims “to catch ‘tenderfeet’ that its bed would have stood tests as relics of Sodom 200 years later.”  Frank Hall in History of the State of Colorado, 4:19, relates a piece of mining lore, which appears to have been missed in other historical records.  It represents a prospecting venture by trespassers on the Ute reservation and is repeated here:

[In early 1872] R. C. Darling, having completed his contract with the government to survey the boundaries of the Ute and Navajo Reservations, and to run the lines between Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico¸ he concluded to return to the Dolores. Interesting several officers of the U.S. Army, and some capitalists in Washington, D.C., he outfitted a large party, mostly Mexicans [sic] in Santa Fé, and started for the mining district in southern Colorado. They reached their destination on the 4th of July, 1872, and celebrated that event by killing an enormous cinnamon bear, on the very spot now [1885] occupied by the Rico Electric Light buildings.  They packed a few short boards the entire distance from Santa Fé, with which they made moulds for shaping adobe brick, and proceeded to construct a Mexican adobe furnace, near where the school house  now stands, a short distance from the Glasgow Avenue bridge across Silver Creek.  They extracted ore from the Atlantic Cable, Aztec, and Yellow Jacket mines, fired up and charged    their furnace, and actually produced three small bars of base bullion, but their adobes contained  too much lime, and when heated the furnace collapsed. After one or two unsuccessful trials the Mexicans became discouraged, and as their blow-pipe assay tests, the only assaying method  they had, did not prove as rich as they had hoped, and as winter was approaching, they retraced  their steps to Santa Fé.

Another incident not found elsewhere pertains to the scare throughout Colorado after the Meeker Massacre in 1879.  Believing that they were in danger of being attacked by Ute Indians, the women at Rico were “corralled” in a new log cabin and dropped into the interior from the roof, since the structure still had neither doors nor windows, while most men took refuge in Frank Raymond’s store and others were posted as guards.  “The only casualty was one burro killed by an excited guard, who mistook it for a bloodthirsty Ute.”

Mining had begun in earnest in 1878. Rico was linked to the Animas River area by the Rockwood and Rico Wagon Road, and to the north by Dave Wood’s freight service, as well as Meserole and Black’s stage line.  But Rico did not have practicable transportation until, thanks to Otto Mears, the town was connected in 1891 with the Rio Grande Southern Railroad.  The RGS line ran over Lizard Head Pass, at a relatively mild 10,000-plus feet, and Mears’s celebrated Ophir Loop to the Telluride and Ouray mining regions and thence north and east or west on the D&RG’s rails; after a southwesterly swing down-river to Dolores and Mancos, Rico was connected also to the D&RG at Durango and points east.   Despite these seeming advantages, Rico’s prospects remained limited by its isolation and distance.  Rico had quickly become a cornerstone in the San Juan mining region with amenities, as the county seat of Dolores County with two newspapers, two banks, hotels, electricity, school, the Grand View Smelter, and a population of more than 1,000.  Although the area boasted the presence of gold and silver (often in the same mine), zinc, coal, iron, lime, lead, salt, timber, sawmills, fire clay, soda springs, game, and trout, Rico was handicapped because most supplies and ores had to be packed in and out by “burro punchers” until the arrival of the RGS in 1891.  An assortment of methods were employed to process silver-bearing ores from the mines until railroad connections enabled access to Durango and other facilities along Colorado’s Front Range.  Then, all too soon, depreciation of the prices of silver in 1893 spelled the fate of Rico.

E.  Durango
The most significant boost for mining and mining towns came in 1881 with the arrival of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad and the creation of its new town, Durango, just south of old Animas City.  The D&RG’s San Juan Extension from the San Luis Valley and points east brought faster, more efficient transportation by way of Cumbres Pass.  No longer were the San Juans a land apart from the rest of the State of Colorado.  In anticipation of the D&RG’s construction, Durango was laid out in 1880.  By 1881 Durango already was the most important freighting and supply center in southwestern Colorado, with numerous stores, banks, newspapers, churches, and the offices of La Plata County, which previously had been located at Parrott City.   In 1883 a water works was provided.  The construction of the Strater Hotel in 1887 testified to the social  ambitions of what had started out as a rough-and-tumble town.  In the same year, the first of Otto Mears’ railroads began to connect far-flung mines and towns to the D&RG’s web.

When the D&RG arrived at Durango in 1881, so did a smelter, the San Juan and New York Smelter.  To be successful, smelters required scientific expertise and large influxes of capital, which came from the East, and Durango’s works brought an end to the need for most of the small, inefficient mills and smelters that were scattered among the mines. Together with locomotives, smelter chimneys blackened the air over the city.  The need for coal, coke, and charcoal spurred coal mining nearby as well as the timber industry. Coal mines became more important than La Plata County’s precious metals.  Coal cars were pulled by mules to railroad tracks. Single coal miners lived in the companies’ boarding houses.  The smelters used large quantities of coke, and lime was available north of Durango for flux.  During the economic downturn of the 1890s, the San Juan and New York Smelting Refining Company passed into the hands of the Omaha and Grant Smelting and Refining Company, and within a half decade this operation was taken over by the huge American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO), which in following years dominated the economy of Durango.

Durango drew laborers, including immigrants and American-born Hispanic people who were shut out of employment at mines, not only in this area but also at places like Creede and Leadville.  This segment of the labor force was able to get jobs at smelters and at Durango’s coke ovens.  Smelter work was even more dangerous than mining, so this type of employment, which paid lower wages, welcomed immigrants and Hispaños.  The major influx of Spanish-speaking people at Durango occurred about 1900, as a result of labor troubles with the Western Federation of Miners at that time.  The new segment of population resulted in the beginning of Catholic services in South Durango, also called “the flats.” Both Hispanic and Italian people became part of Sacred Heart Parish.   Discrimination in employment opportunities was not so prevalent with the D&RG as it was in other sectors of life, and Hispanic workers often found work, even as engineers.  Workers in local railroad shops and section gangs or at smelters lived nearby in barrios, but many trainmen on the D&RG lived at Antonito or Alamosa in the San Luis Valley.                                                                                                                                                                                                 

F.  Tales of lost treasures
The presence of precious metals enflamed an unquenchable thirst for striking it rich by means of a lucky discovery of silver or gold, and this dream, in turn, spawned tales about lost mines and treasures.  Whether based on fact or fancy, these stories became part of the lore of mining.  Generally, in whatever part of the West they occur, they share certain common elements.  After a rich outcrop or float is found, by accident more often than not, an emergency arises — a snowstorm, illness, or hostile Indians — forcing the discoverer to leave.  He may cache some gold if he has sufficient time.  He may leave a blaze on a tree or a pile of rocks to mark the spot, sometimes even draws a map, but neither he nor later treasure seekers are ever able to relocate the exact site.  Perhaps the tree has been burned or a rockslide has changed the scene.  Not surprisingly, the rugged San Juan Mountain region is the setting for several of these events.

Sheepherders helped perpetuate treasure tales.  With solitary weeks spent in the high country, herders had opportunities to repeat stories around their campfires, to dream of riches, and to investigate rumors they had heard.  Although not the most common method of searching for treasure, one technique was somewhat like water witching, with two partners holding needles toward each other in hopes that the needles would move, indicating the location of the treasure.

1.    Ute Creek, Old Ute Mine or Bear Creek treasure, a.k.a. La Mina Perdida de La Ventana   (click here or on each photos for a larger view)

Drs. Andrew Gulliford and Alfred Koumans approaching La Ventana, "The Window," on horseback in July of 2003.	View across the opening.  (Photo by Andrew Gulliford, July 2003.)	"The Window."   (Photo by Andrew Gulliford, July 2003.)	Fragment of the rock, downhill to the east.  (Photo by Andrew Gulliford, July 2003.)

This well-known treasure tale pertains to Spaniards, not Utes, but the setting is called the Old Ute Mine because it is near Ute Creek.  The site is a short distance east of the Continental Divide, northwest of Pagosa Springs, in the area of  La Ventana [name of an arch in Saguache County; Twin Mountains USGS map; elevation 8,927'] near Rio Grande Pyramid [13,756' summit in Hinsdale County, Colorado].  La Ventana, “the window,” is a notch on the Continental Divide that would indicate that searchers were close to the treasure.  In about 1750 or 1780, Spanish-speaking miners from Taos, who were working a mine, were attacked by Indians.  The miners were killed and their skeletons were left at the entrance to the mine.  In the late 1800s a French prospector began searching for the mine, and when he died in the 1930s he left a map which he had drawn.  According to the stories of two Hispanic men, they stumbled upon the cache in 1919.  Another story is that Candido Archuleta found the location in 1912 while he was herding sheep in El Rincon La Vaca, but he had lost a paper with the address of the person whom he should notify to assure him of  the cache’s exact site.  Yet another version is that two Hispanic sheepherders said they found a site with bones, but they found no cache of gold.  From time to time prospectors and sheepherders came into Durango with bags of ore, which they said came from Bear Creek, not far from Ute Creek.  While attempting to return to this site, others inevitably became lost. 

2.  Treasure Mountain
Best known among the San Juan Mountains’ tales of lost gold is Treasure Mountain, a peak located south of Wolf Creek Pass (Wolf Creek Pass USGS map; elevation 11, 758').  A large party of French explorers is said to have come there while investigating the mineral wealth of Louisiana Territory in 1791.  According to one story, they found ore at Summitville, on the eastern side of the Continental Divide.  That winter they went to Taos in Spain’s New Mexico, but they kept their discovery a secret.  When they left the next year, they cached gold worth millions of dollars, but, returning later for it, they were attacked by Indians.  The gold was reburied, and a map of the cache was made. Resorting to cannibalism, five escaped and returned to France.  One of the survivors, a Le Blanc (sometimes called Le Breau), made two copies of the map, one of which was given to the French government and the other of which remained with his family who returned to Taos.  There, a Bernardo Sanchez was hired to guide a large party to the site, but he returned to Taos alone, leaving the end of this story a mystery as to whether the Frenchmen might have returned home with the gold, were murdered, or met some other fate.  (Le Blanc family members and copies of a map still are found in the San Luis Valley.)

Another version of the Treasure Mountain story, placing the site almost on the Continental Divide, relates that Bernardo Sanchez was hired by Don Archuleta, a pioneer of Archuleta County, to guide him to Treasure Mountain.  Although Archuleta invested considerable money in  this venture, no treasure is known to have been found.  Other attempts followed in vain. Treasure Falls on Treasure Creek, at the western foot of Wolf Creek Pass, reminds passersby of the Treasure Mountain legend. 

3.  Lieutenant Stewart’s placer, also known as Kit Carson’s mine
During one of his journeys to California, Kit Carson is said to have traveled with a contingent of the U.S. Army in 1847.  Lore has it that they traveled up the Rio Blanco and the San Juan River to avoid Indians and followed Turkey Creek to Four Mile Creek.  While washing pots and pans, Lieutenant Stewart discovered flecks of gold in the stream and made a note of the location so that he could return after the trip to California, but he lost his notebook and, thus, the location.   

Another story finds a Lieutenant Jim Stewart carrying mail to California in 1852, but Indians caused his party to take a detour up the Piedra River.  Lore has it that Indians later destroyed landmarks so that the placer could not be found again.

4.  Timber Hill
After stealing some gold bars from a smelter at Ophir, two smelter workers departed on a circuitous route to Silverton and over Stony Pass.  When a burro “played out” near the eastern foot of Stony Pass, the thieves decided to bury four bars and to take one with them with the intention of returning in spring for the others.  They left a blaze on a tree to identify the spot. One man was shot in a bar and the other was too busy to return until, years later, when the site was covered by a reservoir.

5.     Lost Trail
Ore being freighted in three ore wagons over Stony Pass became part of legend.  Near the Lost Trail junction, at the west end of Rio Grande Reservoir, bandits were detected.  Sacks of ore from two of the wagons were hidden in a nearby marshy area before the robbers fell upon the teamsters, killed them, and made off with the third wagon.  Supposedly, the robbers took this wagon to Silverton and sold the ore, and they never returned for the remainder.

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In the ensuing decades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, major resource extraction industries within the San Juan Mountains included mining, logging, and grazing both for sheep at high altitudes and for cattle at lower elevations.  Often accesses in and out of the forest represented an overlay of historic trail use with newcomers using existing trail systems which, prior to the access of railroads and forest roads, may have become toll roads.  These same trails, once used by Ute hunters, then miners and loggers, and then sheepherders and cattlemen, now have recreational value for hikers and hunters who access forest land.

Grazing on the forest has dramatically declined since World War II, specifically with precipitous change in markets for sheep, lambs, and wool.  Cattle numbers have also been cut, in part for re-vegetation to occur in valleys and meadows deeply eroded because of overgrazing.  Trail use continues, however, by hikers, backpackers and hunters.  Recreational use may be one of the prime functions for these historic trails throughout the 21^st century.  For that reason, select trails in the San Juan National Forest need to be considered as traditional cultural properties, not linked to one particular ethnic group, but rather closely associated with continued use of the area by local inhabitants and visitors such as hikers who travel segments of the Colorado Trail.  Such continuity over time and intimate familiarity with the local landscape is an essential part of historic preservation.  Much more work needs to be done identifying, documenting, preserving and protecting historic corridors into and out of the San Juan Mountains, especially those corridors of original length and width that have not been converted into roads.  These trails deserve Section 106 historic analysis and designation to the National Register of Historic Places.  Contemporary hiking clubs may be stabilizing and modifying historic trails without adequate knowledge or awareness of associated historic resources.

The 1880s saw permanent mining in the San Juans with 30 years of successful mining between 1880 and 1910 after the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad moved north from Durango to haul ores down to the New York and San Juan Smelter.  Silverton grew and prospered between 1880-1912 and all major stone and brick buildings and all formal clubs and organizations date from that era.  In a single lifetime the Silverton mines boomed and declined.  A young man arriving in Silverton at twenty-years-old in 1880 would have seen the town thrive, prosper, and decline by the time he reached fifty.  In their heyday the mines brought to southern Colorado, Italians, Austrians from Tyrolia, English, Cornish, Welsh, German and Silesian miners as well as Chinese and Navajo railroad laborers.

Related roughly to the historic contexts developed for this portion of the state in 1984 by the Colorado Historical Society, mining in this region could be divided into at least two time frames.  The earliest mining and its contribution to the settlement and urbanization of the area falls within the exploration period of the 1860s, and extends up to 1890. Individual prospectors and pioneer lode miners primarily characterized early mining.  Unlike placer mining, lode mining in the San Juans required the import of various materials and equipment, forging the way for the development of transportation corridors and support communities.  By 1890, many of the railroad lines and the town sites had been initiated, opening the region to larger scale corporate mining.  The second time frame in mining covers the period after 1890 when large non-resident corporations ran the mines, and minerals were produced for an ever-broadening international market. In addition to precious metals, the mines in the San Juans produced zinc, lead, carnotite (which is processed into uranium and vanadium) and coal.  Descendants of miners return to the San Juan country quite often to trace and commemorate their ancestors’ lives, and to visit their graves.   The “old timers” of Silverton and Rico would be rich resources to interview for stories of who returns and how those visits are commemorated. Mining references are listed in the bibliography.  Cemetery research, particularly the in depth work of Freda Peterson at the Silverton Cemetery, is also an important research source.

Suggested Traditional Cultural Properties In These Categories:

1.  Mining and its contribution to urbanization, 1861-1891

2.  Modern mining and its national-international implications, 1882-1952

The Europeans soon became assimilated and their children learned English rapidly.  In the quest for following veins of silver and gold, traditional native campsites would have been used by miners who may also have destroyed rock cairns and other Indians sites.  At one time five narrow gauge railroads came in and out of Silverton and each railroad grade, following the path of least resistance, may also have impacted traditional native sites in the San Juans.

TRANSPORTATION: TRAILS AND WAGON ROADS

Many cultural groups used the same travel routes through the San Juan Mountains at different periods in time.  Early footpaths led the way for hunters and gatherers, and may have been used later in time by the Utes.  In 1859, Colonel John Macomb described worn trails from all directions converging on the Pagosa hot springs.  An “Indian” trail traversed Coal Bank pass and down into the Animas Canyon, as reported by early miners and explorers.

In 1776, The Dominguez and Escalante expedition forged a route that became the basis for the Spanish Trail.  Rumors of gold and silver in the San Juans furthered trail development as the potential prospectors followed routes known to trappers.  Stony Pass was an ancient travel route, later used by the Utes and then by early miners.  The Santa Fe, Pagosa Springs, Animas City, Silverton road lead miners to Baker’s Park (later Silverton) in the early 1860s.  Various connecting routes departed from this road.  A route connecting Animas City with Parrott City and Hesperus crossed the base of Animas Mountain at about the location of Miller Middle School and extended west to connect with Fort Lewis and Parrott City.  The town of Rockwood was a connecting point on the Animas City-Silverton road for the wagon road to Rico.  The early roads in the La Plata Mountains are not well documented and should be researched.

Agricultural transportation routes still have a place in the agricultural community, although they are slowly being displaced by modern conveniences.  Stock drives now cross highways where there used to only be open country.  One stock route still in use travels up East Animas Road (CR 250) in La Plata County, follows part of the former route of State Highway 160, and crosses over the modern highway north of the Needles store.  The route continues to Durango Mountain Resort and up to the valley on the north side of the ski area.  Some of this route roughly parallels the old Rockwood-Rico toll road.  In many cases the highways we travel today follow established historic routes.  The backcountry jeep roads all evolved from early travel ways between mines.

The material culture associated with the historic transportation routes hold great potential as TCPs.  Post offices and tollbooths built along stagecoach and wagon roads should be anticipated in any cultural resource survey of these routes. Animal pens, arborglyphs and traditional camps should be expected along stock drives.  Early electricity “line men” who traveled the routes of the power lines on skis and snowshoes had small shelters constructed to protect them when they were caught in the horrendous winter storms in the San Juan Mountains.  These shelters could easily be confused with miners’ shelters and should be considered in relationship to the route of early electricity transmission lines.  Some of the oldest former employees of the Western Colorado Power Company may be able to provide stories of these structures and the people associated with them.

RAILROADS

Following the removal of Ute Indians to reservations in 1881, the San Juan Mountains became an important location for mining, smelting, logging, commerce, and urban services, but the economic success of these enterprises depended on the development of rail transportation.

Equipment, supplies, merchandise, whiskey, and passengers were carried into the mountains, and ore, lumber, coal, livestock, and passengers were carried out.  Because of the rugged terrain of the San Juan Mountains, the railroads built in this area usually required innovative engineering.  All were narrow-gauge lines, commonly with steep gradients and tight curves.  Although in some instances grades could follow, in part, the valleys carved by streams, round-about routes were required when a more direct line was impossible. I n addition to railroad corporations, some  mines also operated tramways, and rails with freight cars connected to railroads. 

Toll roads and railroads were essential to the survival of the isolated mining towns.  Entrepreneur Otto Mears built so many of the transportation routes in southwestern Colorado that he is known as the “Pathfinder of the San Juans.”  Mears is responsible for many routes, including:

• Silverton to Ouray toll road (Million Dollar Highway)
• Dallas-San Miguel-Rico toll road (partly the Dallas divide road)
• Silverton-Animas Forks-Mineral Point toll road
• Rio Grande Southern Railroad
• Silverton Railroad
• Silverton, Gladstone and Northerly Railroad
• Silverton Northern Railroad

Mears’ roads, and his spectacular engineering feats shaped Southwest Colorado.  His work, alone, should be considered as a Multiple Property Listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

Even as toll roads were developed in the 1870s, the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad contemplated the best route to connect to the mineral rich San Juans.  By 1881 the railroad had extended west from Alamosa to Durango, and was on its way to Silverton.  The Rio Grande Southern was built to connect the western San Juans’ mining wealth to the existing Denver and Rio Grande Railroads at Ridgway and Durango.  Since the RGS covered some of the most remote and rugged country in Colorado, the railroad also served as the only means for mail delivery and passenger travel.  People in Rico boarded the train, for instance, to travel to their dentist, with plans to return the same day.  Much of the highway that replaced the route of the RGS was not paved until the 1960s.  The Rio Grande Southern reached Durango in 1893, and the route came from the west --Mancos.

The railroads had great impacts on the establishment and physical development of communities in the region.  The town of Big Bend was located a few miles away from the proposed route of the Rio Grande Southern railroad; it was abandoned in favor of a new town along the route of the railroad named Dolores.  Pagosa Springs suffered from a poor quality railroad spur connection to the main line of the Denver and Rio Grande, and never fully benefited from the railroad.  Animas City soon faced obscurity as the Denver and Rio Grande built its own town of Durango located just a few miles to the south.  It appears with the passage of time that Silverton ultimately won the location battle with the railroad.  The depot is now in a deserted section of town and the train actually passes the depot to load and unload passengers in central Silverton.

The railroads also eased the development of a broader based economy, beyond the booms and busts of precious metal mining.  Farmers and ranchers could capitalize on railroad freight rates to ship their produce and livestock.  The railroads also brought goods and other elements of civilized society, such as teachers and clergy people.  Communities with access to the railroad thrived, while the more isolated mining towns slowly withered.

The mountain climate created hazardous conditions, with long, cold winters bringing heavy snow and snowslides that frequently blocked routes, while the short summers might bring heavy rains and flash floods that brought mudslides and washouts.  Railroad workers required unusual stamina.  They were hard workers, or else they were fired or quit.  They represented a variety of nationalities and races, including some Navajo construction workers.  Hispanic men were in the majority among construction crews and gandy dancers (section crews). Yard workers came from various backgrounds, as did crews on trains, consisting of a hierarchy of conductors, engineers, brakemen, and firemen.  Managers lived in nearby rail centers like Durango and Silverton, while owners lived in distant cities, with the exception of an individual like Otto Mears and lumber company men.

Many railroad rights-of-way have disappeared, but not the original Denver and Rio Grande.  By an act of Congress, the Denver and Rio Grande Railway Corporation received its right-of-way as well as lands needed for depots, yards, shops, and other necessary facilities for the railroad’s operation.  Because many of these railroads, their facilities, and associated towns occupied lands owned by or promoted by the railroads themselves, few of these properties are on public lands today, exceptions being small railroads that were abandoned, especially those serving lumber camps. 

I.  Railroads associated with mining and smelting of metals

A.    Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad (1881-1968)
As the San Juan Extension was being constructed around the southern end of the San Juan Mountains in 1881 from Antonito, Colorado, the railroad each month was bringing hundreds of laborers  to work on grading crews.  As John B. Norwood has described labor problems, “Apparently most of the recruits deserted to the mines, returned home or continued to other parts.”   The contractor said, “Our expense in this line clearly demonstrated that the class of labor secured was the least desirable. Any number of worthless fellows were anxious to get a free ride to Colorado.”  Norwood continued, “Out of this problem of recruiting labor grew an important decision: The Rio Grande began recruiting local help, which meant the brown, lean and ever-enduring Nuevo Mejicano.  Indeed as the Rio Grande headed toward Santa Fe and the San Juan, it was advancing into the heart of the New Mexican country and culture.  From that time forward, the Nuevo Mejicano would assume a dominant role in the building of, and later, the maintenance of the roadway and tracks of the narrow gauge.”

In 1881, the San Juan Extension of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad reached the railroad’s own new town of Durango, just short of the existing town of Animas City, and quickly became the main shipping point and commercial center in the San Juan Basin.  The railroad had a station, shops, roundhouse, yards, and other facilities that brought a large number of railroad employees to the area, many being Hispanic.  Service on the San Juan Extension through Durango continued south to Farmington, New Mexico, on its Farmington Branch until 1968.  The Silverton Branch [see below] continued as an excursion line.

The D&RG’s Silverton Branch, built in 1882 through Animas Canyon to Baker’s Park, where Silverton became the center for rail operations served silver and gold mines and smelters in the area.  Construction of this branch required cutting a roadbed along a sheer rock cliff, called the High Line, above the Animas River where the gorge was too narrow to accommodate it.  Frequent avalanches in the valley caused a snow shed to be built four miles south of Silverton.  Three other narrow-gauge lines, owned by other companies, became feeders into the Silverton Branch at Silverton.  After World War II Colorado and, with it, the San Juan region, changed rapidly, as population and tourism increased.  When the D&RGW proposed to abandon its San Juan Extension in the 1950s, public clamor led to the ICC’s denial of the abandonment request.  The D&RGW continued to operate the line, mostly for tourists, while pursuing abandonment of the line from Durango east to Antonito.  The D&RGW succeeded in their efforts and made its last run between Durango and Antonito in 1968.  The states of Colorado and New Mexico joined in the purchase of the Chama to Antonito route and developed the line as a tourist ride.   Meanwhile the D&RGW had purchased a number of the buildings located around the Durango Depot with initial plans to develop the area as a tourist destination.  The project broke down, the railroad leveled a number of the historic buildings it had purchased, and eventually the railroad sold the property to an out of town developer.  The Durango-Silverton route was sold to Charles Bradshaw in 1981.  Mr. Bradshaw succeeded, in 1988, in having the popular excursion route exempted from the oversight of the ICC, by successfully arguing that the train no longer carried any valuable freight other than tourists.  The line was sold to another operator in the 1990s and continues to be a popular tourist attraction.  It continues to provide the only mechanized access point, at Needleton Tank, for hikers visiting the remote Needles and Grenadier Mountains.

B.   Rio Grande Southern Railroad (1890-1960)
A narrow-gauge line built by Otto Mears and investors in Denver, the Rio Grande Southern Railroad served the western area of the San Juans, with its circuitous route passing through Telluride, Ophir, Lizard Head Pass, Rico, Dolores, and Hesperus.  This route was necessitated by the rugged terrain of the mountains and Uncompahgre Gorge, and it advantageously served important mining areas, lumber operations, and a coal mine.  Its operation was dependent on connections with the D&RG on the north at Ridgway and on the south at Durango.  It reached Rico in 1891, thereby eliminating most traffic on the former Rockwood and Rico Wagon Road, and it reached Durango from the west in 1893.  The line was abandoned in 1951.  Its trains carried freight and passengers, usually with a mixed train.  Between 1931 and abandonment, the line’s seven Galloping Geese provided passenger and mail service with cars built with automobile engines and rail wheels.  Treasured by nostalgic rail fans today, they were important to the way of life of local people and businesses along the line during the Depression and World War II.  Galloping Goose No. 5, restored and operational, is kept at Dolores, while five others still exist elsewhere.  Several short lines connected lumber camps and mines to the Rio Grande Southern.  A spur of the RGS operated at Parrott (Mayday) from 1906 to 1926. The spur began west of Hesperus.

C.    Silverton Railroad (1887-1924), also called the Red Mountain and Silverton Railroad
Otto Mears built the twelve-mile-long Silverton Railroad north from Silverton to Albany (near Ironton) by way of  Mineral Creek, Chattanooga, and Red Mountain with some short spurs.  The original hope of investors was to connect Silverton and Ouray, but beyond Albany, located in Red Mountain Park, there remained an impassable gap of  six miles to Ouray which forced the indefatigable Mears to construct the circuitous Rio Grande Southern Railroad.

D.    Silverton, Gladstone, and Northern [sometimes Northerly] Railroad (1899-c.1915)
This railroad along Cement Creek connected the Gladstone Mine to Silverton. It had a never--achieved goal of reaching Lake City, too. Built by owners of the Gladstone Mine, Otto Mears leased this railroad from 1910 until he bought it in 1915 and then abandoned operations soon after the purchase.                           

E.     Silverton Northern Railroad ( 1895-1942)
The Silverton Northern Railroad was built by Otto Mears from Silverton to Eureka, nine miles, in 1896 with an additional Green Mountain Branch, 1.3 miles, built in 1905. Mears also added a short spur into Cunningham Gulch.  The Green Mountain Branch was removed in 1920, while the rest of the line closed in 1939.  Such extensions and removals reflected the current economics of mining. 

II.  Railroads associated with coal mining

A.    Perins Peak Railway (1901-1926)
The five-mile, winding Perins Peak Railway was built in 1901 by the Boston Coal and Fuel Company up Lightner Creek to connect the Boston Coal Mine at Perins Peak to the Rio Grande Southern Railroad at Franklin Junction, two miles west of Durango.  The railroad was sold to a subsidiary of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad.  The D&RG leased the railroad to the RGS.  The line was abandoned in 1926. 
 

III.  Railroads associated with lumber operations
While railroads were being constructed, timber was cut and milled along the grades until the supply dwindled and spurs were built by lumber companies to access stands of trees.  Wood was used for railroad ties and for mine timbers, as well as for construction of buildings and for fuel. In many places, logs were skidded down to sawmills and rails.  Names of some of these operations changed from time to time, as did locations.  Rails, mills, boilers, saws, and shacks were moved from one location to another when an area became denuded and new camps were set up in another part of the forest, leaving behind little more than a pile of sawdust.  After the San Juan Forest Reserve (1903) and, next, the San Juan National Forest (1905) were created, the lumber industry dropped off drastically, and the common practice ended of setting up new camps served by spurs.  Grades of many of these railroads have vanished from sight.

A.  Rio Grande, Pagosa and Northern Railway (1899-1936)
Among several rail branches and spurs built north and south of the Denver and Rio Grande, was the Rio Grande, Pagosa and Northern Railway, built northward from Pagosa Junction to Pagosa Springs in 1899-1900.  The line was built by the Pagosa Lumber Company under an agreement with the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad to eventually turn the line over to the D&RG.  It carried lumber and sometimes other freight, sheep, mail, and passenger trains to and from Pagosa Springs.  In 1906 the line became the D&RG Pagosa Springs Branch of the D&RG Railroad, which operated the line until the Depression hit.  During its peak, three branches continued northward from Pagosa Springs. 

B.    Pagosa Lumber Company Railroad (1906-1916)
The Pagosa Lumber Company operated this subsidiary, running south along the San Juan River from a point west of Pagosa Springs. It had more than fifty miles of lumber spurs.

C.  Dolores area lumber company railroads
This area had several lumber operations with railroads operated by lumber companies.  Two were operated by the Montezuma Lumber Company in the area around Dolores and east of Norwood.  One of these went to Haycamp Mesa with several miles of spurs.  It connected to the Rio Grande Southern Railroad at Glencoe.  The second Montezuma Lumber Company operation succeeded the Colorado and Southwestern Railroad until about World War I.  The Colorado and Southwestern Railroad Company had taken over the Dolores, Paradox and Grand Junction Railroad Company grade, which operated three lines north from Dolores between 1913 and 1925, with the Horse Camp (or Horse Creek Camp) being the center of its operations.  It had more than fifty miles of track, including a line between McPhee and Dolores until 1948.  The Rust’s Logging Railroad also served lumber companies between 1902 and 1906.

The material culture associated with the railroads is numerous and varied.  The Fort Lewis College Office of Community Services has documented the remaining structures on the route of the Rio Grande Southern as part of the planning efforts for the San Juan Skyway.  The Denver and Rio Grande route between Durango and Silverton now operates as a tourist ride, but the rolling stock is original (except for the diesel engines that are used in times of extremely high fire danger).  The Durango-Silverton railroad, route and rolling stock are a national historic landmark (listed 1961).  The Red Mountain Task Force has undertaken extensive cultural resource surveys in the mining district of the same name.  The surveys have identified material culture related to both mining and the railroads.  This survey work should be an important research resource.  Volumes of material have been written about the railroads of the region and provide a good starting point in researching the railroads.  The Center of Southwest Studies and the Animas Museum have oral histories of former railroad employees.

Automobiles and tourism have shaped many of the communities in the San Juan National Forest.  Historic gas stations, auto courts and hotels are still to be found in most of these towns.  Automobile travel brought more tourism, and affected the character of many communities with the introduction of automobile garages, gas stations, motels and restaurants that catered to travelers rather than to locals.  Easier, more individualized transportation led to a recreation boom after World War II, resulting in new recreational facilities such as ski areas and additional campgrounds.

The less expensive transport afforded by truck travel led to demise of the railroads, but many communities still maintain ties to the railroad days.  Dolores, for example, has resurrected the Galloping Goose, and built a replica of the old depot, while Mancos has built a visitor’s center in the style of its old depot.

Suggested Traditional Cultural Properties in this Category:

HISPANIC CULTURE

Settlement by Europeans and people of mixed ancestry is relatively recent in the San Juan region.  Ute Indians, and to a lesser extent Navajo Indians, were present in southwestern Colorado by A.D. 1300, approximately three centuries prior to the arrival of Spaniards in New Mexico and five and a half centuries before the United States took possession of what became southern Colorado in 1849.  Spanish-speaking people did not settle in southern Colorado and the San Juan area after these regions were part of the United States. Spanish-speaking people had, however, been in the lower Chama River Valley since the mid-1700s, and only gradually did they move northward into the upper valley, where Indian raids still were discouraging newcomers as late as 1860.  Nevertheless, by then, Tierra Amarilla was a permanent settlement.  These families farmed and pastured sheep and goats on nearby land.  As Hispaños subsequently moved into the San Juan Basin and the San Juan Mountains, the majority arrived from the south, either traveling by way of the Chama River or moving from previous homes in the Chama River Valley.  In the 1870s Hispanics also were moving westward from the San Luis Valley, which had been settled in the 1850s by people from New Mexico.

When the mining excitement began about 1860, most prospectors entered the San Juan region by way of the Chama River.  In 1859 U.S. Topographical Engineers under J. N. Macomb traveled up the Chama River to Pagosa Springs, and within weeks the Abiquiú, Pagosa, and Baker City Toll Road was organized on paper by Abiquiú’s Indian agent Albert H. Pfeiffer, Charles Baker, and others. With high hopes for profiting from the mining excitement, they also proposed moving the Indian agency to Pagosa Springs, and Pfeiffer even claimed ownership of the hot springs, although documents to prove such a claim are lost or nonexistent.  The springs had long attracted many Indians to the healing waters, and a number of shelters had been built by the native people on the rocks. (See also, Pfeiffer-Navajo duel in the TCP Case Studies.)  Establishment of Camp Plummer, later called Fort Lowell, at Tierra Amarilla in the 1860s provided increased safety for settlers and travelers in the Chama River Valley and north toward the San Juan Basin, in the area of the border between Colorado and New Mexico Territories.  Following the Brunot Agreement signed in1874, freighting into the San Juan mines and settling of land in southwestern Colorado increased rapidly.

Before Fort Lewis was established in 1878, several Anglo people had settled at Pagosa Springs, one even claiming a mineral right that would be litigated for years.  A few cabins were built, but most people camped there only in summer months while seeking cures for various ailments, and one such group, including a woman and boy leading a blind man, came in 1873 from Del Norte by way of the old Indian trail over Wolf Creek Pass.  The arrival of Fort Lewis changed the economy and settlement of the area greatly as large quantities of corn, beef, hay, logs, shingles, and boards were required by the new post, although the Army post moved to the La Plata River within only three to four years.

While the post existed on the north side of the hot springs, a cluster of buildings and bathhouses was growing on the southeast side of the San Juan River and later occupied the fort’s site.  The pine forests around Pagosa Springs and north of it attracted logging, and meadows became cattle pastures.  Southwest of Pagosa Springs, the land was better suited to agriculture, with hay becoming an important crop.  When Archuleta County was created in 1885, Pagosa Springs became its county seat.

 I.  Hispanic Settlement in Archuleta County
Published history about Pagosa Springs conveys the impression that few if any Hispanic people lived in the area, but the name alone of Archuleta County corrects this picture.  The Archuleta family came from the Chama River Valley to Conejos County (in the portion that became Archuleta County).  J. M. Archuleta, Sr., was elected state senator from that county in 1876, but county officers were primarily Anglo-surnamed, then and later, when Archuleta County was created from the western part of Conejos County in 1885.  The Archuleta family grazed livestock on the west side of the Continental Divide, on Archuleta Mesa.  Trouble arose because Pagosa Springs’ Anglos felt that they were taxed too much and the Archuletas were taxed too little while they were being given preferential treatment by Ute Indians to use their range land for grazing and to farm on shares.  An indication of ethnocentric attitudes is found in Los Pobladores, which reports that when the school board at Pagosa Springs was elected in 1886 (or 1885), Anglos “won out over the Mexican gang 15 to 1,” according to the schoolteacher.  Increasing numbers of Hispanic people were settling along the Colorado-New Mexico border, while Anglos who attempted to settle in the eastern end of the Southern Ute Indian Reservation were evicted until allotment of the reservation in 1887.  Regardless of existing ethnic tensions, the county and Pagosa Springs were very dependent on business with Hispanic sheep owners, herders, and the region’s wool brokers, as sheep raising was a major industry.

Settlers also included individuals who were married to Spanish-speaking women.  One such couple was Christian Stollsteimer and his wife Maria Amanda Barada, adopted daughter of famed fur trader Antoine Roubidoux.  Beginning in about 1880, they ranched near the junction of the Piedra River and Stollsteimer Creek, at what became known as Francé. Stollsteimer was a partner with Albert Pfeiffer and others in grazing livestock.  When Ute Indians protested that their cattle were trespassing on Indian land, Pfeiffer was able to get permission by identifying himself as part-owner of the livestock.  Their original herd is said to have been brought to the Piedra River from the Rio Grande drainage, where both Pfeiffer and Stollsteimer had homes between Del Norte and South Fork; but the route used for moving the cattle across the Continental Divide is unknown.  (The Wolf Creek Pass trail is said to be too precipitous on the west side for trailing cattle.)  The Archuleta and Stollsteimer families were compatible, as is evidenced by the marriage of one of Christian’s daughters to an Archuleta.

In time, several families from the Conejos, Colorado, area moved west, joining other Hispanic people from the Chama Valley who lived in along the Piedra River and on or near the Southern Ute Reservation.  Marriage between Ute Indians and Hispaños occurred.  Stores in the area were owned by Chama River entrepreneurs.  Besides farming and ranching, Hispanics worked at lumber mills, holding jobs especially on freight wagons, and at railroad facilities.  Archuleta County’s Hispanic people occupied scattered farms or clustered settlements, not plazas built on a grid.  Although there were Hispanic homes in La Plata County’s towns, like Ignacio and Bayfield, they were not numerous in Pagosa Springs. Homes and sheds were constructed with the materials that were present locally—normally adobe or logs.

II.   Religion
Generally speaking, most Hispanic settlers in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico were Roman Catholic.  In rural areas, the absence of resident priests caused the people to practice their religion without close supervision, guidance, or Church sacraments - except when a priest visited, as was the case during the early years of settlement in southwestern Colorado.  The absence of established churches belies the presence of Hispanic, Catholic settlers.         

Without priests, the devout people frequently had small shrines with sacred objects in their homes or even built oratorios where families and neighbors could gather for prayer.  La Cofradia de Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno (also called La Hermandad de Nuestro Padre Jesus) was a brotherhood of men (often called Penitentes) who took care of many of the spiritual and social needs of the people.  Meeting in a morada, a meetinghouse, they were assisted by women, who were called auxiliadores.  One can assume that many men in the San Juan region were Penitentes, meeting at their moradas.  Although Lenten and Holy Week rites have captured the attention of  many gossips and writers, the Penitentes also were attending to important daily needs of their neighbors, such as performing wakes and burials, providing for widows, and even serving justice.  Because the brotherhood was being suppressed by the Catholic Church in the latter part of the 1800s and the first half of the 1900s, secrecy became the norm.

Nonetheless, the brotherhood was very strong among rural residents in the area round Abiquiú, New Mexico, so it is reasonable to assume that the first Hispaños who moved up the Chama River Valley into the San Juan Basin were Penitentes.  The same can be said about rural people who moved into the San Juan region from the San Luis Valley, where the brotherhood had numerous moradas until quite recently.  Historian Virginia Simmons learned from a Penitente that there “used to be Penitentes around Pagosa Springs,” for instance, but it is unknown whether there are any now.  A descendant of a family, many of whose members were Penitentes, says there were quite a few moradas but declined to reveal their location even to a relative.  It seems unlikely that moradas would be very active today, since the numbers of brothers have decreased in the past few decades, even in the San Luis Valley, although some remain.

At least one Catholic chapel, built by local residents, did exist.  For example, at Francé, a small Catholic church was built by the Stollsteimer family at their ranch on the Piedra River, southwest of Pagosa Springs, for services conducted by visiting priests and for private prayer.  This adobe structure is still standing and is used on occasion.  

Reflecting the Catholic Church’s inactivity rather than Hispanic numbers in southwestern Colorado, parishes were not organized in this region until the turn of the century.  Rico was an exception with a small Catholic church built by about 1890, because Italians may have increased the need.  Silverton’s Catholic church was built in 1905.  In 1906 Sacred Heart Parish was established in South Durango for Hispanic and Italian Catholics, at first using an old schoolhouse that was purchased for its first church. Durango’s parish priests traveled  to outlying missions at Ignacio, Allison, Hesperus, La Posta, Tiffany and Marvel.  In 1940 a church was built at Ignacio, primarily for Hispanic people with a few Ute Indians as well, and its priest took charge of the missions to the east. Durango had Saint Columba Church and School established by an order of the Sisters of Mercy in 1881-1882.  Although the ethnic orientation of Saint Columba’s parish was Irish, the Catholic Church was a very prominent early element of the community.  Pagosa Springs had Saint Edwards Catholic Church, which was built in 1894 and burned in the 1950s.  The Catholic Churches were all under the Bishop of Pueblo until the establishment of the Theatine Order in Durango, operating out of Sacred Heart Church in Durango.  Pagosa Springs’ second Catholic Church, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, was built in 1948 and established its own parish in 1952.

III.  Farming
Agriculture in southern Archuleta County was predominantly devoted to livestock, chiefly sheep, with smaller numbers of cattle and horses.  Farms were mixed operations, raising some livestock and some cash crops, mostly hay with lesser amounts of corn.  Flood irrigation was provided from small ditches.  Families also raised kitchen gardens for home consumption and some vegetable crops such as potatoes to sell to the mining camps.  Allotment of the Southern Ute Reservation attracted new landowners to establish 160-acre farms along the Piedra, Los Pinos, and Florida Rivers, but lands in the headwaters proved better suited to livestock and hay than to tilling.  Farther west, Anglo farmers, including Mormon settlers, were producing hay, grain, and cattle in the La Plata River area. In Montezuma County agriculture became dominated by farmland which produced pinto beans and by range land, grazed by cattle, some belonging to very large outfits like the Carlisle Cattle Company.

IV.  Sheep grazing
Valleys in the headwaters of the San Juan River and its larger tributaries, such as the Piedra River, offered excellent grazing land, with stock numbering in the thousands. When Ernest Ingersoll visited Pagosa Springs in 1882, he observed:

The vicinity of the springs is destined to yield large crops under irrigation, though at present there is little settlement there. Mexicans pasture their sheep as thickly as the fields will hold them; and try to give their flocks a few days in the basin at least once each season, believing that the drinking of the waters is of great benefit to the animals. . . . [The] upper part of the San Juan is unlikely to prove very profitable as agricultural land.

By 1890, according to Archuleta County’s assessment roll, there were 3,509 head of cattle, 17,840 sheep, and about 1,000 horses. By way of comparison, the number of sheep in all of Colorado in 1886 was two million.  The economic downturn of the 1890s, due to both drought and depressed silver mining, seriously impacted all industries in Colorado, including sheep raising, and their market plunged.  Following a recovery, by 1903 there were estimated to be in the San Juans 86,100 sheep which were owned in New Mexico and about 182,000 which were owned in Colorado, totaling 268,100.  A report on the proposed San Juan Forest Reserve in 1903 listed the industries of the area as farming, sheep and cattle raising, lumbering, and mining, in that order of importance. In southwestern Colorado sheep outnumbered cattle by about three to one.

As available land and forage at lower elevations became insufficient year-round for large numbers of livestock, grazing practice had shifted in the 1880s from free roaming in valleys, mesas, and foothills to herding on mountain pastures in summer.  Sheep thrived on alpine grasses and could negotiate rocky terrain but were destructive of ground cover and trails in lower areas where cattle could graze, with consequent quarrels between owners of sheep and cattle.  By 1900 contention about preferred pastures, as well as ethnic conflict, frequently resulted in injury, murder, and killing of livestock.  In western Colorado, hostility was especially virulent north of and along the Gunnison River, worse than in the San Juan area, although it existed there as well.

Generalizations that Anglos were cattlemen while Hispaños were sheep men do not always hold true, nor does information that one county or another was grazed solely or even primarily by cattle or sheep.  Incorrect, too, are, the preconceptions that Hispanics did not own their own bands of sheep and that hired sheepherders always were Hispanic.  As examples, the Archuleta family grazed large numbers of sheep on Archuleta Mesa, near the confluence of the Navajo and San Juan Rivers.  The Stollsteimer family, part Hispanic, also owned large numbers of sheep, which they sold to Sargent at Chama. Some of the San Luis Valley’s major sheepmen also were Hispanic.  And some of the herders were Ute or Navajo Indians.

Another outstanding example, Luis Montoya of Del Norte, refutes the ideas that Rio Grande County was used only by cattlemen during the grazing wars and that Hispaños did not own their own sheep.  After operating a thriving freighting business between Del Norte and Summitville, he turned to ranching and raising sheep, the occupation his father and his brother also pursued. Some of Luis Montoya’s sheep were herded at Alberto Park, which Montoya named for his friend Albert Pfeiffer.  This basin and Alberto Peak on the Continental Divide are at the Wolf Creek Ski Area, with spelling changed to “Alberta.”  Another of Montoya’s friends was Ute Chief Ouray, who owned large numbers of sheep.  Luis Montoya managed Ouray’s flocks.  Montoya was the leading sheepman in southern Colorado with 10,000 sheep in the 1890s.  As was customary, each of Luis’s sons was given a farm and a flock of sheep when he married.

Luis Montoya’s great granddaughter, Sarah Martinez, has described the high-country meadows where her family lived in a log cabin in the 1920s.  The grass was about three feet tall, high enough that she recalls being able to hide in it when she was about six years old.  Her father pastured sheep nearby, but no cattle, although the family had some milk cows.

The story of the José Adolpho White family of the San Luis Valley and the La Garita Stock Driveway have been described by his grandson, Frank White. When José first arrived in the Valley from New Mexico, he worked for early settlers, Espinosas and Trujillos, who had come in 1858 with sheep, goats, horses, and necessities for starting their ranch which was located at Carnero (now called La Garita).  They gave White a few sheep and some land at La Garita Canyon, and he was able to buy the Espinosa property in 1894.  He prospered as a sheepman.  After the U.S. Forest Service came into being, sheep men in this area used the La Garita Stock Driveway.  From La Garita Canyon, this driveway followed a trail that once had been used by Indians between the San Luis Valley and the Uncompaghre county and the San Juan Mountains.

When Forest Reserves and National Forests were created before and after 1900, grazing quotas and a permit system were established. Several stock driveways gave access to sheep, cattle, and horse pastures.  Livestock, heading to allotments on forest land, were counted in pens at the entrance to driveways, and permit holders were assessed fees by animal units per month (AUMs). Originally, the allotments were for sheep, cattle, or horses.  As horses that were used for transportation declined in numbers, horse allotments were eliminated, and some allotments became designated for “cattle and horses,” as some still are. Rangers checked allotments during the grazing season and often found livestock missing or on the wrong allotment.  Despite many documented disputes involving cattlemen versus sheepmen, contention also occurred when sheep trespassed on an allotment that was leased to a different sheep permittee. Cattlemen were unhappy  because fees per unit for cattle were about five times as high as for sheep.  Despite resentment about fees and governmental interference, the advent of federal control helped reduce conflict and violence between people grazing cattle and sheep on public lands.  In 1934 the Taylor Grazing Act introduced grazing regulations to other public lands that had not been covered previously by the national forests or reserved for other purposes.

In the San Luis Valley it was common for farming and sheep growing to go hand in hand.  In early years of settlement, sheep came in handy for threshing grain, and in the first part of the 1900s farmers in the San Luis Valley who were growing large quantities of green peas and field peas put sheep on the cropland in winter, effectively cleaning up the fields and fertilizing them simultaneously.  The sheep were moved to summer pastures on allotments in the Rio Grande National Forest.

V.  Partido system
Many owners of sheep “rented” bands to individuals who hoped to build up their own flocks.  With this system, called partido, an individual contracted with a sheep owner to herd a band with the understanding that a certain percentage of the increase would become his.  The herder risked going into debt to the owner if the flock decreased while in his care, but by means of the partido, system, many Hispanic herders were able to accumulate their own flocks.  A notable example was Luis Rivera, who started by herding for others and eventually acquired his own large flocks.  He is well remembered as a rico, a prosperous patron of the Catholic Church at Capulin and a banker in La Jara in the San Luis Valley.

A variation of the partido system was a contract used by Frank Bond of Española, who had mercantile stores and wool warehouses in the Chama River Valley and southwestern Colorado.  Ed Sargent, who had warehouses in Antonito and Chama, also practiced this variation.  These entrepreneurs used a contract that rented sheep for three to five years in exchange for wool at two pounds per head. This contract also involved risk to the renter, and indebtedness ensued.

VI.  Herders
In the early years of settlement in the San Luis Valley, herders were the young sons of Hispanic settlers or captive Indian boys, who tended the livestock on open land in the Valley, without the necessity of going to high pastures.  As available land decreased, grazing moved up to mountain pastures.  The herders most often were Hispanic boys and men who returned to their homes in the Valley for the remainder of the year.  Native Americans also were hired.

An example of a family operation in the 1900s is that of Frank White. While he was a boy, Frank helped herd his family’s sheep in the San Juan Mountains.  On the way up and down the La Garita Driveway White often found arrowheads and noticed “designs and markings” left by Indians.  He also found tree stumps, which he believed  Frémont’s party had cut during the disastrous expedition of 1848-1849.  It is rumored that his grandfather long before had found the cache left by the Frémont party, and with the money he established his flock of sheep.

At a young age, herders became self-reliant.  They normally camped in tents in the high country. Nights were cold, and rain or snow could make conditions miserable. At night the howling of coyotes and the hooting of owls added fear to the loneliness.  Unless a sheep owner provided “store-bought” delicacies like potted meat and crackers, food usually consisted of beans, jerky, and coffee, supplemented by rabbits, squirrels, fish, and sometimes poached game. In the high country, edible wild greens and berries were scarce, but in sub-alpine country  wild raspberries, wild currants, chokecherries, and rose hips were tasty additions in late summer.  When illness or injuries occurred during the drives or in camp, remedios were at hand.  Lore of folk medicines was well known and the materials for them were gathered—arnica, juniper berries, canaigre, thistle, wild onion, rabbitbrush, sagebrush, dandelion, evening primrose, bee plant, willow,  yarrow, mint, wild tobacco, wild parsley.  Where terrain permitted, some herders enjoyed the comforts of a sheepherder’s wagon with a small stove and a waterproof roof, but work still required a herder to be outdoors, often in inclement weather.

Herders had to keep their bands together and off poisonous weeds such as Loco Weed.  Dogs helped by herding sheep, gathering strays, and protecting bands from predators such as bears and mountain lions but most especially coyotes.  Burros and horses brought supplies from Creede and similar points in the lower county, but otherwise the herders were on their own, often with no company except the dog.  As recently as the mid-1980s, Virginia Simmons, while camping, observed  pack animals carrying supplies and blocks of salt on a trail leading from the La Manga Pass area into the south San Juans.  Another time, a Mexican sheepherder with his dog tended a band of sheep while a short-wave radio played music from Juarez.  In recent years there have been a few Basque, Mexican, and South American herders in the San Juans, as it has become harder to find herders willing to spend summers alone in high pastures.

In earlier years, herders were often men or boys from villages and small farms in the Conejos River area, whose extended families had settled on what was the Conejos Grant at the time.  They had large families, and, as lands were parceled out to sons, the owners no longer were self-supporting so they accepted jobs.  Loss of land to homesteaders or to new purchasers, and loss of water rights were additional causes of change.  Virginia Simmons has personally been told of two incidents, illustrating that land loss was not easily accepted. In one instance, an Hispanic grandfather was shot and killed as a trespasser on land that had once belonged to him in Conejos County.  In the other instance, an Hispanic man killed a cattleman who was trying to get land in Rio Grande County.

An oral interview with Jack Sylvester, who grew up at Center, Colorado, offers much detail about the life of a herder.  He was born during World War I into a sheep-ranching family and grew up helping with sheep at home and herding sheep around the headwaters of the Rio Grande, in the area of Ute Creek.  Following lambing in May and shearing around June 1, a crew of three to five herders would prepare to spend twenty-three days on the trail to the mountain meadows.  Sheep were “counted in” at the corrals on June 20, and they were required to be back by September 15.  He recalled the monotonous diet of mutton and beans, mutton and potatoes in camp, but he also fondly recalled the dogs, which responded faithfully to orders.

Although some ranchers did their own shearing, crews of Hispanic shearers went from ranch to ranch.  While most worked in their own regions, some crews traveled great distances.  Around 1900, J. C. Lobato, sheriff of Costilla County, was contracting to send crews to shear large flocks as far off as Nevada and Montana.  Besides the expert task of shearing, “wool stompers” were hired to pack the wool into large bags, holding three hundred pounds of wool.

VII.  Marketing lambs and wool
In 1882 Ernest Ingersoll provided his observations about the value of sheep in southern Colorado:

[Antonito, which Ingersoll calls by the earlier name “Conejos”] is the headquarters of sheep and cattle men of the San Luis Park [Valley].  In sheep, I learn that although about two hundred  and fifty thousand are sold out of the park annually, fully five hundred thousand are left.  The  large majority of these are of the inferior sort called Mexican sheep, which are worth from one  dollar to one dollar and twenty five cents a head.  The better minority will sell at one dollar and  fifty centers and two dollars a head, and this minority is increasing though a constant effort to  improve the breed by introducing highly bred Merino and Cotswold rams.  The average yield is  two and a half pounds of wool annually, and the product is shipped almost entirely to Philadelphia, for use in making carpets.  Cattle is less an industry here, because the sheep are so  numerous as to consume most of the pasturage.  Something like ten thousand head, however, are able to exist in the park and adjacent foothills, and are sold to great advantage.

Along the San Juan Extension of the D&RG, thousands of head of sheep and cattle were shipped each fall.  Along the line, herders brought their bands to corrals, located at sidings where livestock was loaded into stock cars for their journey east.  Chama and Osier were important shipping points in the mountains, while towns like Antonito, La Jara, and Del Norte in the San Luis Valley were filled with dust and the bleating and bawling of livestock.  Narrow-gauge stock cars for sheep had two levels, into which the sheep were led by a “Judas goat.”  In the San Luis Valley, an informant has said that many of the sheep were shipped under contract to Kansas City, where the contractor paid for freight as well as for animals.  On the west side of the Divide, stations like Arboles and Chama were important.  Later, trucks replaced shipping by rail.  Dipping vats for sheep or cattle were used to kill diseases and ticks.  These were located near points for shipping, whether by train or by truck.  Beside a road in Saguache County, a deep trench, lined with concrete, had been cut in a low rise for use with cattle.  Nearby were a boiler and a corral.  A shallower trench would have been required for sheep.

In the fall, Jack Sylvester reported, his father sorted the lambs and sold about ninety percent, while keeping the rest to breed.  Ewes cleaned up the fields in the winter, and some old ones were sold as mutton to Indians and Mexicans.  Sylvester said that a sheep ranch had only two pay days, one being when wool was sold and the other being when lambs were sold.

After a slump in prices during the 1920s and 1930s, World War II revived the market for sheep and wool.  The military fed mutton, not lamb, to soldiers, who retained a distaste for this kind of meat after the war.  Large quantities of wool went into uniforms.  In 1954 sheep and wool  industry received a major  boost when the National Wool Act provided a subsidy to supplement what growers received for wool and mohair, a goat hair.  The development of synthetic fabrics similar to wool became increasingly available, and the subsidy was lost in 1995.  Many sheep growers went out of the business subsequently, despite a new tariff on lamb imports, which were coming principally from Australia and New Zealand.  Another negative impact on sheep growing in the late 1990s was the outlawing of commercial poisons for coyotes, which proliferated and created a major problem for sheep ranchers.

VIII.  Allotments and stock driveways
The use of allotments and stock driveways reflects not only the policies of the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management but also changes in transportation and economics.  Prior to motorized transportation, each national forest had several stock driveway, crossing well-known passes, such as Bonito, Hunchback, Wolf Creek, Lizard Head, and many others, plus those winding through the forests without crossing the Divide.

On the San Juan National Forest, the Pagosa Ranger District  had three stock driveways.  These now are integrated with recreational use and are not used for livestock.  For several years, stock has been trucked to allotments.  In  this district there are thirty-two allotments, and in 2002 none were being used  by sheep.  Cattlemen using allotments include a Jicarilla Apache and two Hispanic-surnamed permittees.

In the Columbine Ranger District, which includes Bureau of Land Management allotments north of Silverton and on the Continental Divide, there are a total of forty-seven allotments.  Of these 31 are cattle grazing permits and sixteen are sheep, although at present the sheep allotments on the Continental Divide are vacant with the exception of the BLM’s Maggie Gulch permit.  No old driveways are presently being used, although there are four newer ones in existence.  Most of the stock owners are Anglo ranchers from Montrose, an exception being an owner of Basque heritage.  This ranger district also includes the La Plata Mountains, but all the sheep allotments there are vacant.

The Lost Canyon Stock Driveway provided access for sheep as well as lesser numbers of cattle on Haycamp Mesa in the Dolores River area.  This driveway is in the Mancos-Dolores Ranger District. (See appendix #1).

From the San Luis Valley stock was moved into the Rio Grande National Forest on three stock driveways in what is now called the Conejos Peak Ranger District.  Two of these are active in 2002, one starting at La Manga Pass and the other in the Alamosa River area.  The former lies only in the Rio Grande National Forest.  South of La Manga Pass, in winter sheep go to grazing areas in Carson National Forest, so some sheep are almost never on private land. In the Conejos Peak district, all but one of its allotments are presently being used, with sixteen being sheep allotments.  Historically, stock around La Jara used the short driveways west of that town in the Alamosa River area to drive their livestock to allotments in Rio Grande National Forest.  The explanation for the continued high use of these allotments is easy, short access to them.

Farther north in the Rio Grande National Forest, about a half dozen stock driveways entered the San Juan Mountains, with others being in the La Garita Mountains.  Historically, the most heavily used of these driveways was the La Garita Stock Driveway, which crossed the La Garita Mountains and continued into the San Juans in the Creede District.  (The Creede and the Del Norte Ranger Districts have been combined under the name of  the Divide Ranger District.)   In 2002 there were a total of nearly five dozen grazing allotments in the Divide district, twenty-six of them being designated as sheep and goat allotments, but seventeen of these were vacant.  Of those being grazed by sheep, three were in the Stony Pass area, contiguous to the San Juan National Forest; with the sheep being trucked up to the Continental Divide from Silverton.

Because of its historical importance, the La Garita Stock Driveway warrants a description, as written by Frank White:

[From the mouth of La Garita Canyon, it crosses] La Garita Divide to La Mesa de Neaves (near Lake City and Creede.} Then follows the Continental divide to West Ute Creek at the head waters of the Rio Grande also near Silverton. . .   Sheepmen from throughout the San Luis Valley use this trail, some as far south as San Luis, Conejos and Capulin.  In the early years they would spend close to two months as they drove their sheep across the Valley up the La Garita Stock Driveway to their summer ranges above timberline on the Alpine Boles, mesas and meadows of the La Garita Mountains.  At the peak of its use well over one hundred thousand sheep traveled through this driveway both spring and fall.

AGRICULTURE AND SETTLEMENT

Open range grazing was practiced in the area from the 1870s until the passage of the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934.  Ranching within the range of the San Juan National Forest is limited to seasonal activities, because of the elevation and climate of the region.  Regular farming does not normally occur in this area, but the nearby farming activities at lower elevations are dependent on water emanating from the San Juan Mountains.  The Montezuma Valley irrigation project, for instance, diverted water from the Dolores River in 1899, bolstering agriculture and instigating the settlement of Cortez.

Travel routes to specific locations and areas would define some potential TCPs as was addressed in the stock driveways in the Transportation category.  Stock driveways were most strongly affected after WWII, when improved roads in southwest Colorado encouraged trucking livestock over the highways. Livestock, however, are still herded short distances.

Livestock herding has additional potential for TCPs in terms of sheep and cow camps.  These camps are temporary by nature, but the general location of each camp is usually the same from year to year.  The USFS and BLM grazing permit process is a good starting point to identify areas used and long term users.  Oral interviews with the herders would be the best source to identify specific grazing patterns and camps.  Arborglyphs, which are mostly attributed to sheepherders, might provide insight into traditional grazing activities, mostly practiced by Hispanics and Basques.

Year round activities could reflect communal efforts such as water storage and development, and centralized collection and distribution of livestock and produce. The water management issues have very intensive federal involvement and would also fit within a category addressing federal involvement in the region. (Note: see the Public Land Management Category for related topics).

Suggested Traditional Cultural Properties in this Category

Without the lure of a desirable resource, the San Juan area is mostly too high in elevation and too cold to draw many permanent residents.  Free land in the form of homesteading and the precious metals in the high country were the primary draws to the region.  Communities in Southwest Colorado were usually the result of speculative real estate ventures featuring plots of land carved into rectangular grids, with scant recognition of the topographic constraints to development.  Most communities were inspired by one of three opportunities--mining, the railroads, or agriculture. Pagosa Springs is an exception because it was platted by the Federal Government on public land and sold at auction after Fort Lewis moved away.  Railroad towns, usually platted by railroad officials or in a partnership between the railroad and local railroad investors, featured the depot at the center of the town and oriented the grid parallel to the railroad route.  Mining and agriculture towns that developed prior to the railroad usually had the depot and freight yards located at the edge of town, or at least in an area removed from the commercial core.  The original character of these towns continues today, thanks to their basic layout and orientation of uses.

Towns that do not follow the model of railroad, agricultural or mining basis are also important because they represent an unusual development in local history.  Rockwood, for instance, was first settled along the Animas City-Silverton road and became a pivotal point for a brief time as the junction for the Rico Road before the Rio Grande Southern provided reliable transportation to Rico.  Modern Ute settlement was also affected by these three factors, combined with the Federal Government’s intent to prioritize white settlement over native traditional living patterns.

The evolving cultural development of these communities is still evident in the architecture and in some social customs of each surviving town.  Carnegie libraries still survive in Silverton and Durango.  Ethnic enclaves or neighborhoods, reinforced by religious and social affiliations, remain albeit they are diminished from their historic composition.  In Durango, for instance, the Irish Catholics affiliated with St. Columba Church while the Hispanic and Italian Catholics worshipped at Sacred Heart Church.  Navajos working in Rico all lived in the same neighborhood.  Fraternal organizations, such as the Masons, are represented in practically all of the surviving communities by lodges or halls.  Sometimes the historic buildings have been replaced, but the gathering place remains at the same location.  This is the case with the Pagosa Springs Methodist Church, which has been at the same location since the 1880s.

Cemeteries also include information about the ethnic make up of a community.  Cemeteries often suffer as communities grow in unexpected directions, leaving the graveyard in obscurity on the edge of town or even cut through by a road.  Not only do the graves in the cemetery provide some clue as to the backgrounds of the residents, but also the layout of the cemetery often reflected the community values of the times.  The prostitutes usually had a section of their own.  Certain ethnic groups were separated from the main portion of the cemetery.  Ghost towns also have potential to provide insight into their social structures through historic archaeological investigations.

Many of the towns in the study area have completed at least a partial architectural inventory of their community.  Each town hall is an excellent resource for inventory forms and historic plats.  The Colorado Historical Society’s site form inventory also includes inventory forms that were completed in these communities for state or federally funded projects.  The local historical society for each town or county and the local libraries provide additional useful information.  Many long-term social and religious organizations have official and /or unofficial historians who can provide valuable information as to the role of these organizations in modern society.

Some of the least known and documented resources with TCP potential are isolated rural buildings, such as country schoolhouses and former post offices.  Many of these structures were abandoned when they were no longer needed, leaving behind people who cherished the memories of the place but are no longer active in its preservation.  Allen Nossaman’s Many More Mountains, Volume 1, includes a list of early post offices in the San Juan County area that could be consulted in future cultural resource surveys.  Many of the local historical societies have records of rural schoolhouses.  The role of women and ethnic groups are still under represented in research and documentation of community development.  Hispanic families were particularly powerful in Archuleta County economy and should be addressed further.

Suggested Traditional Cultural Properties in this Category

LOGGING AND TIMBER

Logging enjoyed an intense but short-lived prosperity in the area.  Logging companies harvested timber between 1890 and 1945.  By 1896, the New Mexico Lumber Company, under the direction of Edgar Biggs, C.D. McPhee and J.J. McGinnty, reached Colorado and created the towns of Chromo and Edith.  The Pagosa Lumber Company run by Alexander T. Sullenberger soon followed in 1899.  Both logging companies built numerous short railroad lines to transport the timber they harvested.  While these railroads were specifically oriented toward freight, they raised great hopes and expectations in Pagosa Springs about new connections with the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad line and ultimately with the outside world.

Having depleted most of the timber resources in the San Juan River area, Sullenberger closed his operation in 1916 and moved on to other ventures in the Pagosa Springs area.  His Pagosa and Northern Railroad continued under the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad’s ownership to provide a railroad connection (described by many as a bumpy experience at best) between Pagosa Springs and the main Denver and Rio Grande line located about 25 miles to the south in Pagosa Junction.   The New Mexico Lumber Company moved to the Dolores area, building what was Colorado’s largest sawmill in 1924 and establishing a townsite named McPhee. New Mexico Lumber harvested timber until 1933.  Resource depletion and the Depression ended any major lumbering activity in the region, although lumber mills operated sporadically in Pagosa Springs, Durango and the Dolores area until the mid 1970s. Very little material culture remains of the sawmill operations.  A recent headline in a Pagosa Springs real estate guide touted the removal of the ugly eyesores that were the remains of the last major sawmill in Pagosa Springs.  In the Dolores area, anything left of the McPhee townsite is under McPhee Reservoir.

Cultural resource surveys of the old logging railroad rights of ways and abandoned towns would provide new information about lumber operations in Southwest Colorado.  A number of former sawmill employees live in the Pagosa Springs area. Some of the long term USFS employees stationed in the Pagosa Springs or Dolores offices may know of good candidates for interviews about this topic.

Suggested Traditional Cultural Properties in this Category

FEDERAL PUBLIC LAND MANAGEMENT

The establishment of National Forest Reserves in southern Colorado was a part of President Theodore Roosevelt’s administrative policy to actively manage the public holdings in the West.  The San Juan National Forest originally encompassed vast terrain located roughly between Dolores and the San Luis Valley.  It was established in 1905 with a supervisor’s office in Monte Vista. The Forest Service initiated management of grazing on the Federal Government holdings of the area with the first grazing tax in 1906.

A new Rio Grande Forest was carved out of the San Juan Forest in 1908, maintaining the Monte Vista office as the headquarters for the Rio Grande Forest.  A Durango National Forest was split from the San Juan National Forest (SJNF) in 1911.  New offices were set up in Durango for its namesake national forest.  The remaining, now reduced, San Juan National Forest was headquartered in the Pagosa Springs area in 1911.  The first known Pagosa Springs office was the ranger station now known as the Treasure Guard Station located about four miles east of town.  Pagosa Springs remained the headquarters for the SJNF until 1920, when the Durango National Forest consolidated back into the SJNF and the main office was located in Durango.  All of the buildings associated with early years of the National Forest should be considered potential TCPs based on the role they played both locally and nationally.

Other USFS buildings of note include the employee housing and administrative office buildings constructed during the Depression in Durango, Dolores and Pagosa Springs.  All of these structures are designed in a variant of the Pueblo Revival Style and are distinctive structures within their communities.  The Forest Service also owns a number of log cabin style buildings that served as administrative offices, and in some cases as ranger residences.  Examples of these historic structures include the Columbine Guard Station complex (which is now the Adaptive Sports Association) and the Columbine warming hut complex at the bottom of the Durango Mountain Resort, and the Aspen Guard Station located outside of Mancos, which is used by the USFS for their “Artists in Residence” program.

Other public land agencies began to have a presence in the early 1900s.  Mesa Verde Park was established in 1906, ten years before the National Park Service’s creation and Hovenweep was designated in 1923.  The Federal Grazing Act of 1934 extended the federal role in the lives of livestock raisers, and led to the creation of the Bureau of Land Management in 1946 when the Taylor Grazing Service Office was merged with the General Land Office.  The BLM took an active role in managing the resources of public lands including agriculture, grazing, and oil and gas development.

In 1975 President Ford designated the Weminuche Wilderness under the 1964 National Wilderness Act.  The Weminuche designation highlighted the beginning of a major shift in the approach to managing the National Forests, adding recreation to Roosevelt’s initial efforts toward managing the natural resources.  Increased tourism and recreation have added a new dimension to the National Forest. Recreation is clearly evident in the expanded hunting, camping, hiking trails, back roads, and ski areas and in the increasing conflicts between users in search of compatible facilities.  Multiple generations of families return to the same camping, hunting or fishing spots and may be creating traditional cultural properties of the future.

Federal Programs
The Federal Government has an extensive presence in Southwest Colorado. Following the negotiations and agreements with the Utes that were designed to open the area to mineral development in the 1870s, the Federal Government actively pursued ways to encourage farming and settlement by aiding the railroads and making large tracts of land available to homesteading.

Depression-era public works projects proliferated in this region including projects in rural areas and on public lands, as well as public buildings in many communities. The federal devaluation of the dollar in 1934 led to an increase in the value of gold and an upturn in mining the old claims in the San Juans.  Silver also appreciated in 1934 as a result of the Silver Purchase Act of the same year. Federal involvement continued into the Cold War era with the funding of uranium mining and processing through the Atomic Energy Commission.  Many of the paved roads in southwest Colorado resulted from Federal funding after World War II to ease access to mines.  The Rural Electrification Administration encouraged expansion of electrical service, providing for the development of cooperatives to purchase and distribute electricity in rural areas.

Water development, a powerful and omnipresent issue in the semi-arid climate of Southwest Colorado, was (and continues to be) a major Federal activity.  WPA projects and the Bureau of Reclamation funded numerous water projects, including Vallecito Reservoir in 1938. McPhee Reservoir and Lemon Dam were also built using federal funds.  A comprehensive survey of federal water projects within or next to the National Forest has not been undertaken.

Suggested Traditional Cultural Properties in this Category

ELECTRICAL POWER CORRIDORS

Electricity came early to the San Juans, partly due to the first industrial application of alternating current to power the mines at Ames in 1890. The demand for electricity for both the mines and the communities of the area inspired numerous private entrepreneurial developments of hydroelectric plants. Electra Lake and Trout Lake are water storage facilities built for power plants.

The Durango Power and Light Company was operating by 1886, Rico had a hydropower plant located at the Rio Grande Southern depot complex after 1890. The Animas Power Plant near Rockwood was working by 1906, and the Bridal Veil Powerhouse was operating by 1907.  While some of these facilities no longer function, others remain a part of the modern power grid that serves southwestern Colorado.  After closing in 1953, the Bridal Veil Powerhouse sat idle until the 1980s, when a Telluride innovator purchased the building from Idarado Mining and returned the building to its original function.  The Durango Power and Light’s second plant operated until the 1970s and now waits for a new use.

In 1913, the Western Colorado Power Company purchased many of the power plants and provided consolidated power to the San Juans up to the late 1960s.  All of the remaining power buildings and their associated water control features are important elements in the development of electrical power in the region. Records of the Western Colorado Power Company are archived at the Center of Southwest Studies.

Suggested Traditional Cultural Properties in this Category

NATURAL DISASTERS IN THE SAN JUANS

Fires, floods and avalanches characterize natural phenomena in the area.  The Lime Creek Burn, which was the largest wildfire in Colorado history until 2002, covered 26,000 acres of land located between Cascade Creek and Grand Turk Mountain.  Although the area burned in 1879, the sparse timber and scarring is still evident. In 1940, over 27,000 Englemann spruce seedlings were planted, resulting in the linear alignment of timber that is visible today.  At over 10,000 feet in elevation, the sparse landscape has yet to return to its “pre-fire” condition and remains a testament to the devastation of more than 120 years ago.

There has been much speculation over whether this fire was a natural event or a last act of desperation by the Utes in resistance to the white incursion into their country.  Allen Nossaman provides a thorough discussion of the various points of view in Many More Mountains, Volume 2,  pages 258-265, and supports the currently held theory that it is more likely that this fire was a natural event, precipitated by an extremely dry spring.  The timing of this fire prior to the Meeker Massacre caused a reaction in southern Colorado that bolstered funding and troops at Fort Lewis and relocated the fort to the more strategic La Plata drainage location.

In contrast to the parched conditions related to the Lime Creek Burn, the summer and fall of 1911 saw one of the wettest and most disastrous seasons in history.   Heavy rains saturated the grounds until early October when the San Juan, Dolores and Animas River drainages all flooded. Pagosa Springs, Dolores, Rico, Durango, Silverton, Mancos and every other settlement located near a river in Southwestern Colorado suffered massive devastation from flooding that fall.  Every town has its own story of the effects of this flood, which triggered extensive rebuilding.  Information on this flood can be found in the local histories of each community and via local historical societies.  FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and the Army Corps of Engineers, who administer activities within designated floodplains, may also provide additional data.

The rivers beginning in and crossing through the San Juan National Forest have great potential as TCPs.  The rivers are important sources of food and plant materials for textiles.  They provided the first source of  (placer) mining and they provide the water for hydroelectric plants. The river corridors helped defined numerous transportation routes.  The route of the Durango-Silverton railroad through the canyons of the Animas is as famous as the narrow gauge rolling stock.

In the high country that feeds the rivers, the San Juan Country has three key ingredients leading to high avalanche probability.  Climates with broad fluctuations in temperatures, steep slopes, and high winds combine in the San Juans and the La Platas to create potential avalanche hazards.  Modern travelers see the latest attempts to live with avalanches in the snow sheds built on Wolf Creek Pass and Red Mountain Pass.  Early settlers and miners had much less protection, and had to adapt their activities to mother nature as much as they could.  All mining histories of this region are filled with stories of deaths from avalanches.  More research is necessary to determine which of the slide paths hold historical and ethnic cultural meaning, but the Riverside slide path between Silverton and Ouray is a likely TCP candidate.  The slide has killed recent Colorado Department of Transportation snowplow drivers as well as travelers from 100 years ago.

Suggested Traditional Cultural Properties in this Category

 Case Study: Avalanche Paths and “The White Death”

The Utes sensibly stayed out of the high mountains after the first snows of winter, but Anglo explorers coming into the country up Lime Creek and over Stony Pass learned to stay and build cabins despite the deep snows.  By the 1880s as San Juan mining became more feasible with the arrival of the railroad into Silverton, gold and silver mining became a year around proposition.  In the winter getting out of the mines and into town often meant life or death challenges with avalanches.  The history of the San Juans is the history of struggle and survival with the elements, and there are countless tales of death due to winter weather, poor decisions, and accidents on snow-covered slopes.  For both previous and current generations of San Juan residents there are tales of winter survival and ingenious methods of negotiating treacherous avalanche paths.

In his classic book on Southwest Colorado titled One Man’s West, David Lavender writes about working at the Camp Bird Mine and how in the 1930s “In wintertime the continual passage of the mules keeps a narrow ribbon of snow packed hard and firm, but to either side of this path is a soft, almost bottomless white morass.”  He describes winter snows 35 feet deep and packers who placed blazes on trees.  The trail blazes could not be seen at deep snow depths so packers “marked their route by tying rags to the tips of branches which at the time were within arm’s reach.”  Lavender describes the confusion of summer tourists who could not imagine how fluttering bits of colored cloth got so high up on the pine trees.

The San Juans represent some of the highest mountains in the Rocky Mountain cordillera.  Colorado has more 14,000-foot peaks than any other state, and the highest concentration of 13,000 foot peaks are in the San Juan Mountain range.  Navigating through the mountain valleys and gulches in deep snow, especially in late winter and early spring, challenged many a miner. Lavender writes in One Man’s West, “Down the slope we’d just quit pounded the avalanche.  A cloud of powdered snow rose hundreds of feet above it.  Through the reverberations we could hear the air popping like a giant whip as it rushed in to fill the vacuum left by the slides.”  He adds, “A wall of air surged ahead, booming like thunder from cliff to cliff.”

From Cascade Creek to Ouray are more avalanche runs than anywhere else in the United States.  Over 100 runs exist and 60 cross U.S. Highway 550 as it moves north over Coal Bank Pass, Molas Pass, and then Red Mountain.  Named avalanches along that route have claimed miners on foot, travelers in wagons, and even whole towns like Chattanooga.  There are photographs, folk tales, accurate historical accounts, and markers left to commemorate the dead.  A few of these avalanche paths qualify as traditional cultural properties because of the way they have been marked.  The East Riverside avalanche path contains highway monuments for two snowplow drivers and a minister and his daughters who died within the last 25 years.  Earlier deaths are also noted both in books by John Marshall and Jerry Roberts Living and Dying in Avalanche Country, and John W. Jenkins' Colorado Avalanche Disasters.

Jenkins describes an 1898 avalanche that descended 5,000 vertical feet in a run that extended four and a half miles with a wall of snow moving 225 miles per hour.  Because traditional cultural properties link people to place, and because nowhere in the nation are there as many avalanches as in the San Juan Mountains, then the historic and contemporary responses to “the White Death,” represent TCPs erected by ongoing mountain communities.  Most TCPs are specific to ethnic groups like Native Americans, but in the high altitude San Juans avalanches have resulted in specific responses to the landscape such as triangle-shaped stone diversion structures intended to deflect avalanches like those up Arrastra Gulch, and even living diversions such as the thick stands of pine trees planted just to the north of the Christ of the Mines Shrine at Silverton.

The slides have names like Henry Brown, Swamp, King Mine, Peacock, Battleship, the Brooklyn Group, Muleshoe, Telescope, Porcupine and Eagle.  Avalanche runs have been christened Rock Wall, Snowflake, Wagon Box, Blue Point, Slippery Jim and Mother Cline.  Hundreds of miners had to traverse the mountains even when “the avalanches were running on every hand.”  Slides took out boardinghouses, tent houses and men walking to work on trails.  Immediately search crews would begin to look for their friends trapped in the deep snow.  Some were found and dug out immediately, and others were not found until spring, dead, at the bottom of gullies.

A powder cloud traveling at a moderate avalanche speed of 60 miles per hour because of snow crystals would have the same force as a 180 mile per hour wind, and the impact force of the snow can be 30-50 tons per square yard destroying everything in its path.  That’s why avalanche deaths are commemorated, and that’s why avalanche paths sometimes have memorials near them.  Future TCP research in the San Juans should include the human response to avalanche fatalities at specific sites and the commemoration of other winter deaths in the San Juans by markers and monuments.  In New Mexico roadside crosses are considered by the State Historic Preservation Office to be TCPs, and here in southwest Colorado there are also markers near avalanche paths that should be identified, inventoried and protected as cultural resources.

San Juan Forest Area Historical Timeline

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Nineteenth Century

Twentieth Century

III.   Case Studies: Listing of Sites to Research as Possible Traditional Cultural Properties

A.  Native American sites

Beaver Creek Massacre Site (Traditional Weminuche hunting camp)
Located 16 miles north of Dolores and the site of Colorado’s last Indian battle where a hunting party was attacked by local cowboys.  On June 19, 1885, six Utes, three men, two women and a child were killed by Anglo gunmen.  The site is considered sacred by contemporary Ute Mountain Utes. 

Big Water Springs
This possible TCP site is in Dolores County near Bradfield Bridge.  It appears to be both a Ute site and a lumber camp.

Chimney Rock 
This is a very significant Ancestral Puebloan outlier site still in use by Native American groups for summer singing and dancing. The 3,160 acre Chimney Rock Archaeological District on the National Register of Historic Places contains 90 sites and a Pueblo II greathouse of 55 rooms.  The site contains two major clusters including a small house village and a greathouse with two kivas.  The site may have been a base for Native Americans to gather forest resources for the Chacoan system or it may have been a religious colony and astronomical observatory for both solar and lunar observations, because full moons rise near the pinnacles close to the time of winter solstices and a phenomena known as “lunar standstills.”  Anthropologist McKim Malville correlates forty such events that coincide with two tree ring dates of 1076 and 1093 from the Great House.  This would have made the site very  powerful and important during the second half of the eleventh century.  Eleven stone tablets or feather holders were found in which prayer feathers, or paho sticks, may have been inserted indicating the site was a shrine and prehistoric pilgrimage site.  Pueblo tribes today still go on pilgrimages to leave prayer sticks at a variety of shrines.

Each year tribal members from Taos come to bless the site because they believe that one of the Taos clans originated there.  Beginning in 1968, Navajo crews did extensive rock and masonry work and stabilized the site and the kivas and house structures.  The twin rocks of the site, Chimney rock and Companion rock may represent the mythological Twin War Gods, which are essential to Pueblo mythologies and origin stories that focus on the duality of human nature.  Lister argues that the stone monoliths represent “the legendary province of the Twin War Gods” and that perhaps the Twin War Gods are there at Chimney Rock “enshrined in stone.”

East Animas Rock Art Site  
Contains four petroglyphs of animals. Also known as the Watch Crystal site on Bureau  of Land Management lands.

Falls Creek
This is an extremely important Basketmaker II site from AD 1-500 that is actually three sites, two rock shelters and an open hillside or talus slope village. Over 42 individuals were  excavated here and Native Americans believe that those human remains should be returned and re-interred.  Material from the site includes human burials now stored at Mesa Verde National Park, and rare artifacts including baskets, sandals, and a necklace held at the Center of Southwest Studies on the Fort Lewis College campus.

The Department of Agriculture issued a permit for excavation in 1938 and Earl Morris continued it in 1940.  This is probably the most significant prehistoric high elevation site (at almost  8,000 feet) in the two million acre national forest and it is the northeastern most settlement of the Basketmakers ever found.  The Falls Creek site defines the eastern Basketmaker tradition with both a North Shelter and South Shelter and it is the earliest evidence of planting corn.

Rock art from the site dates to 2300 BP, although heaviest occupation of the site was about AD 50.  Listed on the National Register in 1993 as an Archaeological Area, a survey of an adjacent 1,500 acres revealed 51 additional sites including Basketmaker II, Basketmaker III, Pueblo I, and both protohistoric and historic periods, which would include Ute.  Falls Creek qualifies as a TCP not because of the burials or the human habitation sites, but because of the highly specialized rock art and the “scores of small red, green, and black figures.” (Western San Juan Mountains, p. 203).

Piedra Pass in the Weminuche Wilderness
Evidence of Archaic hunters and probably much historic use, too.

Culturally Scarred Trees
Found throughout the Rocky Mountains, ritually scarred or culturally scarred trees are a valuable Native American artifact or cultural resource.  In the San Juan forest 104 sites have been identified with ritual scars on ponderosa pines including at the Williams Creek and Target Tree campgrounds.  As in the Northwest, these scars may have been the result of Indian bands traveling through the forest when food was hard to find and thus using the cambium layer or inner bark either for themselves of as fodder for horses during times of “dietary stress.”  Processed in the spring, the inner bark may have been consumed as a sweet delicacy when the sap was running.  Scarred trees are found alone or in groups and the largest cluster is 21 trees with a total of 188 scarred trees identified on the forest. Removal of the bark, at least among the Kootenai of Montana and Idaho, was a female task.

In comparison with scars or blazes used as trail markers, Native American scarred trees etched to reach the inner bark, have large oval scars often with ax marks at top or bottom and are often found along trails or water courses such as the Silverton to Rico wagon road remnant west of South Mineral Creek.  Scarred ponderosas can also be found in wetlands along the trail to Ice Lakes.  The cambium layer may have had medicinal value for Utes.  In one Colorado study of 40 scarred trees, Martorano dated the trees between 1815 to 1875 when the Utes were being pushed out of their traditional areas by Anglo and EuroAmerican expansion in the state.

A San Juan National Forest campground that has two outstanding examples of culturally scarred trees is the Target Tree Campground just east of the Mancos Hill.  Known as Ivikukuch or target tree, the site represents a place on the forest where Utes used a large ponderosa pine for target practice and where they gathered ponderosa pine sap for a kind of candy and then used the inner cambium bark of the tree for soups, stews and for making an herbal tea.

Interpretive signs bear the seal of the Ute Mountain Ute tribe and list Terry Knight as a consultant.  One text panel reads, “As you explore Colorado you may notice large oval-shaped ‘scars’ on other ponderosa pines.  This is evidence that the area was once Ute land.  If, indeed, only the Utes practiced scarring on ponderosa pines and if those scars represent boundary markers, then perhaps those trees have both cultural and historical significance.

Navajo Sweatlodges
Found on the Dolores District these were built and used by Navajo laborers working for the New Mexico Lumber Company in the 1920s.  One sweatlodge is at Miller Camp.

Pfeiffer -Navajo Indian duel—Highway plaque on U.S. 160
Accompanied by Ute mercenaries, Albert H. Pfeiffer had served in the Navajo Campaign of 1863-1864.  At one time he was an Indian agent in the Chama Valley, and he was well-known as a friend of the Ute Indians of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, who adopted him as a tribal member.  The Utes and Navajos had been traditional enemies for generations, frequently contesting land, respectively, north and south of the San Juan River.  The Pagosa Hot Springs was a site of contention concerning ownership.  To settle this dispute, members of the two tribes finally agreed to engage in a duel between a representative of each tribe.  A plaque, installed in 1965 about eight miles west of downtown Pagosa Springs on the north side of U.S. Highway 160, commemorates a duel in 1866 between Colonel Albert H. Pfeiffer and a Navajo Indian.  If the date of 1866 is accepted, the Navajos would have been individuals who avoided incarceration at Fort Sumner.  Because this plaque is seen by many people traveling on U.S. 160, and because the episode of the duel is sometimes questioned as a fabrication by revisionist historians, this is presented here.

According to Charles O. Elliott, great-grandson of Albert H. Pfeiffer, the story told by Elliott’s grandparents, confirmed by Albert Pfeiffer himself during his lifetime, is that the duel took place in this manner.  Utes and Navajos at the Pagosa Hot Springs were engaged in a fight that began at the Pagosa Hot Springs.  Fighting with bows and arrows, they worked their way westward without victory for either side.  Finally they agreed to a duel to settle their dispute, and a very large Navajo came forward to represent his tribe.  The Utes, being short of stature, were reluctant to fight him, and Pfeiffer volunteered to be their representative, provided that he could choose the weapons, which turned out to be bowie knives, as well as rules for the fight. Because he had once been shot by a Navajo who had hidden a pistol under his blanket (Pfeiffer carried the bullet in his groin to his death), Pfeiffer stipulated that he and the Navajo would strip to the waist and that they would duel with knives.  Pfeiffer stabbed the Navajo in the heart, killing him and thereby guaranteeing possession of the Pagosa Hot Springs for Ute Indians. 

Early pioneers accepted this story as true.  The site of this event was marked with a pile of rocks which later were removed during highway construction and were replaced a few yards away with the historical marker, where picnic tables are located.  The marker was provided in 1965 by the State Historical Society of Colorado and the State Department of Game, Fish, and Parks.

Hesperus Mountain 
This is one of the four sacred mountains in Navajo cosmology and represents the northwest  boundary of the Navajo cultural area.  See the attached detailed case study.